Discussion of "A History of Some Foundations of Modern Radio-Electronics Technology" Page 1262

plications were filed when, as a civilian, he was working informally with the U. S. Government represented at Gloucester by Captain F. J. Behr, and they were drawn with a view of conserving the personal rights of the inventor without disclosing the engineering details necessary for the construction of a militarily-acceptable installation.

The degree of engineering perfection obtained by the end of the year 1914 is covered by the following¹⁸ public record:

“Lieutenant Decker: . . . On this trip we met Mr. Hammond in Boston. That was the latter part of November, 1914. The Natalia, the boat on which the installation was at that time, was lying at the wharf at the Navy Yard at Boston. . . . From the Navy Yard we got under way, went out of Boston Harbor under the control steering apparatus, and after we rounded the headlands outside of the harbor, we set a course for Gloucester. The boat was allowed to steer itself in order to test out the reliability of the steering mechanism. The steering mechanism performed as nearly perfect as anything could perform. There was not the slightest hitch, and at all times it functioned properly and kept the boat on the predetermined course. I should estimate we ran a distance of something like 15 miles from the entrance to Boston Harbor up to a lighthouse off The Graves, and during that time the boat was not touched, as I remember it, and we did not miss that lighthouse in this 15-mile run more than about a quarter of a mile. . . . As we entered the harbor of Gloucester, the observer on shore saw us. We set the boat for shore control, and the operator on shore made us perform various fancy curves over the harbor and steer around a few spar buoys. During the whole of the test, while I was on the boat, I did not see a single thing go wrong that would in any way have disabled the boat or taken it away from the control of the operator.”

12) Critique. “The man who pioneered, and produced, the automatic pilot, was Elmer A. Sperry.”

Rebuttal. This is in error. Any device which can conceivably be termed an “automatic pilot” must be one which has to do with steering, since without the word “automatic,” a pilot is¹⁹ “the steersman of a ship; that one of a ship’s crew who has charge of the helm and the ship’s course.” Our critic has cited the “aeroplane stabilizer” developed in 1913–1914 to support his statement that Sperry pioneered the “automatic pilot.” But he failed to observe that the Sperry device did not stabilize the course of the aeroplane, but functioned solely to maintain the plane at a suitable small angle with the horizon while the course of the plane was steered by a human pilot.

By attempting to set up Sperry as the pioneer, our critic now concedes that Obry and Whitehead who developed the course stabilizer for naval torpedoes did not thereby pioneer the “automatic pilot,” presumably because the device was neither continuously running nor alterable during the run. Likewise, he concedes that whoever conceived the idea of using a magnetic compass as a course stabilizer was not a pioneer, presumably due to lack of reduction to practice or to lack of practical utility. With these two possibilities thus excluded, the pioneer in the field of automatic pilot systems was not Sperry; it was Hammond. The device of the Natalia developed in 1913–1914 provided for automatic course stabilization between the controls of the stabilized course, and provided for changing the course manually as well as by remote radiant energy signals. It was the true prototype of the automatic pilot system commercialized ten years later by the Sperry Gyroscope Company for the steering of large ships, technically known as the “Gyro-pilot,” but more generally termed the “Metal-Mike.”

Sperry’s unquestionably basic contribution to many fields of application²⁰ was his development of the motor-driven gyroscope. In 1911, he successfully demonstrated his first experimental gyro-compass on the U.S.S. Delaware, leading to the development of an improved gyro-compass used by all Allied Navies in World War I. Also in 1911, he was working upon the problem of reducing the roll of ships, and cooperated with the Navy in producing equipment used experimentally on the U.S.S. Worden. As of 1927, the largest gyroscope installed for ship stabilization purposes was on the Japanese airplane carrier Hosho, reducing the roll by a factor of about eight. In 1913–1914, with his son Lawrence and the Curtiss Company, he developed a special gyroscope system for reduction of roll and for the automatic balancing of aeroplanes. With demonstrations in the summer of 1914 in France, the younger Sperry and “The Sperry Gyroscopic Stabilizer”²¹ won the $10,000 prize in the “Concours pour la Securite en Aeroplanes.” These three Sperry developments of the Gyro-Compass, the Gyroscopic Ship Stabilizer, and the Gyroscopic Aeroplane Stabilizer, were of utmost importance. But they were not automatic pilots, for the simple reason that in all three cases, the course of the craft was held and was changed only by a human pilot.

Hammond’s first business contact with the Sperry Gyroscope Company was in July, 1913, in the same month that Hammond filed applications for the three patents basic to all automatic course stabilization, either by radiant energy or with manual control of the stabilized course. Sperry supplied special gyro-compass type equipment specified in a contract with Hammond dated September 8, 1913; this equipment was successfully installed by Hammond and his staff in the Natalia and operated in an automatic pilot system over a distance run on March 25, 1914. After this pioneer work, followed by the U.S.S. Iowa installation of 1921, the Sperry “Gyro-pilot” began to be manufactured and sold in considerable numbers. In 1925, after an installation on the Leviathan and a patent interference with Hammond, the attorneys of the Sperry Gyroscope Company could cite no prior Sperry art that would dominate the gyro-pilot claims of Hammond in the then-issued patents resulting from the 1913 filings. Presumably since these patents were in effect exclusively optioned to the U. S. Government, the matter was not pressed and the Government received the still-active gyro-pilot rights as an added value in its purchase agreement of 1932.

Except for supplying gyro equipment to Hammond in 1913, Sperry was not seriously involved in automatic piloting until about August 16, 1915, when he filed for a patent 1,446,276 on an electrically-sustained azimuth gyroscope. About a hundred of these devices were sold to the U. S. Navy for naval torpedo work. Sperry’s difficulties with the automatic stabilizer for aeroplanes were such that he did not give early serious thought to the “aerial torpedo” or the “radio-controlled aeroplane” requiring course stabilization. Disturbed by the problems of radio reception in a plane, in which field he had not been concerned, Sperry bought rights under a Dubilier application of July 10, 1916, later patent 1,383,177. As the Chairman of the Committee on Aeronautics of the Naval Consulting Board, Sperry on April 11, 1917²² reported upon “the whole Aerial Torpedo proposition,” and within a few days was ordered to proceed to construct Aerial Torpedoes capable of carrying 1000 pounds of explosives. By act of Congress, two classes of torpedoes were to be developed, the completely automatic type and the wireless-controlled type. About a hundred test shots were made before the Armistice, at which time quantity production had been started.

Despite this intense effort sustained throughout the twenty months of World War I, the information concerning the lessons learned did not, apparently, penetrate down to Army and Navy workers in radio control of aeroplanes in the early post-war period. Early work by the Air Service of the Army was carried out in 1920 under the direct supervision of Lieutenant R. E. Vaughan, and literally started from the ground up. Hammond contributed to this development by supplying²³ security-type equipment “with a view of using it in connection with the control of airplanes by radio, the noninterferable characteristics being especially valuable for this work.” Tests proved the selectivity and secrecy features of the equipment, and that control up to 40 miles was possible from a ground transmitter. It is noteworthy that in their early post-war work, both the Army and the Navy were hopeful of successful aeroplane control either with no special automatic stabilizer, or without the use of a gyroscope.

In this post-war period, patent interferences developed in the field of aeroplane control by radio, mainly between the Sperry application 207,786 filed December 18, 1917 to cover his wartime aerial torpedo work, and two Hammond patents pending based upon applications of 1914 and 1915 resulting in patents 1,568,972 and 1,568,974 issued subsequent to the interference. As a result, Hammond received the priority, and since his Government obligations were solely in

¹⁸ Our previous paper, footnote 6.
¹⁹ The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, N. Y.; 1914.
²⁰ “E. A. Sperry, John Fritz Medalist for 1927,” ASME Meeting, New York, N. Y.; December 7, 1926.
²¹ L. B. Sperry, “The Sperry Gyroscopic Stabilizer,” Flying, pp. 197–220; August, 1914.
²² Deposition of E. A. Sperry, U. S. Patent Office Interferences 47,032 and 47,883, p. 44; May 3, 1923.
²³ Contracts 245 and 358, Engrg. Div., Air Service, McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio.