GYROSCOPE AND OCEAN TRAVEL 



however, of applying the powers of the revolving wheel 

 not merely to a single room but to an entire ship. I 

 have personal knowledge of at least one inventor, quite 

 unknown to fame, who believed that he had solved the 

 problem, but who died before he could put his invention 

 to a practical test. It remained for a Cjerman engineer. 

 Dr. Otto Schlick, to put before the world, first as a theory 

 and then as a demonstration, the practical utility of the 

 revolving wheel in preventing a ship from rolling. 



DR. SCHLICK's successful EXPERIMENT 



In the year 1904 Dr. Schlick elaborated his theory 

 before the Society of Naval Architects in London. His 

 paper aroused much interest in technical circles, but 

 most of his hearers believed that it represented a theory 

 that would never be made a tangible reality. Fortu- 

 nately, however. Dr. Schlick was enabled to make a 

 practical test, by constructing a wheel and installing it 

 on a small ship — a torpedo-boat called the Sea-bar, dis- 

 carded from the German navy. The vessel is one 

 hundred and sixteen feet in length and of a little over 

 fifty-six tons* displacement. The device employed con- 

 sists of a fly-wheel one meter in diameter, weighing just 

 over eleven hundred pounds and operated by a turbine 

 mechanism capable of giving it a maximum velocity of 

 sixteen hundred revolutions per minute. This powerful 

 fly-wheel was installed in the hull of the Sea-bar on a 

 vertical axis, whereas the Brennan gyroscope operates 

 on a horizontal axis. So installed, the Schlick gyroscope 

 does not interfere in the least with the steering or with 



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