How To Write Special Feature Articles Part 41

BY PERCEVAL GIBBON

It was November 10, 1909--a day that will surely have its place in history beside that other day, eighty-five years ago, when George Stephenson drove the first railway locomotive between Stockton and Darlington. In the great square of the Brennan torpedo factory at Gillingham, where the fighting-tops of battles.h.i.+ps in the adjacent dockyard poise above the stone coping of the wall, there was a track laid down in a circle of a quarter of a mile. Switches linked it up with other lengths of track, a straight stretch down to a muddy cape of the Medway estuary, and a string of curves and loops coiling among the stone and iron factory sheds. The strange thing about it was that it was single--just one line of rail on sleepers tamped into the unstable "made" ground of the place.

And there was Brennan, his face red with the chill wind sweeping in from the Nore, his voice plaintive and Irish, discoursing, at slow length, of revolutions per minute, of "precession," and the like. The journalists from London, who had come down at his invitation, fidgeted and s.h.i.+vered in the bitter morning air; the affair did not look in the least like an epoch in the history of transportation and civilization, till--

"Now, gentlemen," said Brennan, and led the way across the circle of track.

And then, from its home behind the low, powder-magazine-like sheds, there rode forth a strange car, the like of which was never seen before.

It was painted the businesslike slatyblue gray of the War Department. It was merely a flat platform, ten feet wide by forty feet long, with a steel cab mounted on its forward end, through the windows of which one could see a young engineer in tweeds standing against a blur of moving machine-parts.

It ran on the single rail; its four wheels revolved in a line, one behind another; and it traveled with the level, flexible equilibrium of a s.h.i.+p moving across a dock. It swung over the sharp curves without faltering, crossed the switch, and floated--floated is the only word for the serene and equable quality of its movement--round and round the quarter-mile circle. A workman boarded it as it pa.s.sed him, and sat on the edge with his legs swinging, and its level was unaltered. It was wonderful beyond words to see. It seemed to abolish the very principle of gravitation; it contradicted calmly one's most familiar instincts.

Every one knows the sense one gains at times while watching an ingenious machine at its work--a sense of being in the presence of a living and conscious thing, with more than the industry, the pertinacity, the dexterity, of a man. There was a moment, while watching Brennan's car, when one had to summon an effort of reason to do away with this sense of life; it answered each movement of the men on board and each inequality in the makes.h.i.+ft track with an adjustment of balance irresistibly suggestive of consciousness. It was an ill.u.s.tration of that troublous theorem which advances that consciousness is no more than the co-relation of the parts of the brain, and that a machine adapted to its work is as conscious in its own sphere as a mind is in its sphere.

The car backed round the track, crossed to the straight line, and halted to take us aboard. There were about forty of us, yet it took up our unequally distributed weight without disturbance. The young engineer threw over his lever, and we ran down the line. The movement was as "sweet" and equable as the movement of a powerful automobile running slowly on a smooth road; there was an utter absence of those jars and small lateral shocks that are inseparable from a car running on a double track. We pa.s.sed beyond the sheds and slid along a narrow spit of land thrusting out into the mud-flanked estuary. Men on lighters and a working-party of bluejackets turned to stare at the incredible machine with its load. Then back again, three times round the circle, and in and out among the curves, always with that unchanging stateliness of gait.

As we spun round the circle, she leaned inward like a cyclist against the centrifugal pull. She needs no banking of the track to keep her on the rail. A line of rails to travel on, and ground that will carry her weight--she asks no more. With these and a clear road ahead, she is to abolish distance and revise the world's schedules of time.

"A hundred and twenty miles an hour," I hear Brennan saying, in that sad voice of his; "or maybe two hundred. That's a detail."

In the back of the cab were broad unglazed windows, through which one could watch the tangle of machinery. Dynamos are bolted to the floor, purring under their s.h.i.+elds like comfortable cats; abaft of them a twenty-horse-power Wolseley petrol-engine supplies motive power for everything. And above the dynamos, cased in studded leather, swinging a little in their ordered precession, are the two gyroscopes, the soul of the machine. To them she owes her equilibrium.

Of all machines in the world, the gyroscope is the simplest, for, in its essential form, it is no more than a wheel revolving. But a wheel revolving is the vehicle of many physical principles, and the sum of them is that which is known as gyroscopic action. It is seen in the ordinary spinning top, which stands erect in its capacity of a gyroscope revolving horizontally. The apparatus that holds Brennan's car upright, and promises to revolutionize transportation, is a top adapted to a new purpose. It is a gyroscope revolving in a perpendicular plane, a steel wheel weighing three quarters of a ton and spinning at the rate of three thousand revolutions to the minute.

Now, the effect of gyroscopic action is to resist any impulse that tends to move the revolving wheel out of the plane in which it revolves.

This resistance can be felt in a top; it can be felt much more strongly in the beautiful little gyroscopes of bra.s.s and steel that are sold for the scientific demonstration of the laws governing revolving bodies.

Such a one, only a few inches in size, will develop a surprising resistance. This resistance increases with the weight of the wheel and the speed at which it moves, till, with Brennan's gyroscopes of three quarters of a ton each, whirling in a vacuum at three thousand revolutions per minute, it would need a weight that would crush the car into the ground to throw them from their upright plane.

Readers of MCCLURE'S MAGAZINE were made familiar with the working of Brennan's gyroscope by Mr. Cleveland Moffett's article in the issue of December, 1907. The occasion of that article was the exhibition of Brennan's model mono-rail car before the Royal Society and in the grounds of his residence at Gillingham. For a clear understanding of the first full-sized car, it may be well to recapitulate a few of the characteristics of the gyroscope.

When Brennan made his early models, he found that, while the little cars would remain upright and run along a straight rail, they left the track at the first curve. The gyroscope governed their direction as well as their equilibrium. It was the first check in the evolution of the perfect machine. It was over ten years before he found the answer to the problem--ten years of making experimental machines and sc.r.a.pping them, of filing useless patents, of doubt and persistence. But the answer was found--in the spinning top.

A spinning top set down so that it stands at an angle to the floor will right itself; it will rise till it stands upright on the point of equal friction. Brennan's resource, therefore, was to treat his gyroscope as a top. He enclosed it in a case, through which its axles projected, and at each side of the car he built stout brackets reaching forth a few inches below each end of the axle.

The result is not difficult to deduce. When the car came to a curve, the centrifugal action tended to throw it outward; the side of the car that was on the inside of the curve swung up and the bracket touched the axle of the gyroscope. Forthwith, in the manner of its father, the top, the gyroscope tried to stand upright on the bracket; all the weight of it and all its wonderful force were pressed on that side of the car, holding it down against the tendency to rise and capsize. The thing was done; the spinning top had come to the rescue of its posterity. It only remained to fit a double gyroscope, with the wheels revolving in opposite directions, and, save for engineering details, the mono-rail car was evolved.

Through the window in the back of the cab I was able to watch them at then; work--not the actual gyroscopes, but their cases, quivering with the unimaginable velocity of the great wheels within, turning and tilting accurately to each s.h.i.+fting weight as the men on board moved here and there. Above them were the gla.s.s oilcups, with the opal-green engine-oil flus.h.i.+ng through them to feed the bearings. Lubrication is a vital part of the machine. Let that fail, and the axles, grinding and red-hot, would eat through the white metal of the bearings as a knife goes through b.u.t.ter. It is a thing that has been foreseen by the inventor: to the lubricating apparatus is affixed a danger signal that would instantly warn the engineer.

"But," says Brennan, "if one broke down, the other gyroscope would hold her up--till ye could run her to a siding, anyway."

"But supposing the electric apparatus failed?" suggests a reporter--with visions of headlines, perhaps. "Supposing the motor driving the gyroscopes broke down; what then?"

"They'd run for a couple of days, with the momentum they've got,"

answers the inventor. "And for two or three hours, that 'ud keep her upright by itself."

On the short track at Gillingham there are no gradients to show what the car can do in the way of climbing, but here again the inventor is positive. She will run up a slope as steep as one in six, he says. There is no reason to doubt him; the five-foot model that he used to exhibit could climb much steeper inclines, run along a rope stretched six feet above the ground, or remain at rest upon it while the rope was swung to and fro. It would do all these things while carrying a man; and, for my part, I am willing to take Brennan's word.

Louis Brennan himself was by no means the least interesting feature of the demonstration. He has none of the look of the visionary, this man who has gone to war with time and s.p.a.ce; neither had George Stephenson.

He is short and thick-set, with a full face, a heavy moustache hiding his mouth, and heavy eyebrows. He is troubled a little with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps also accentuates the peculiar plaintive quality of his Irish voice.

There is nothing in his appearance to indicate whether he is thirty-five or fifty-five. As a matter of fact, he is two years over the latter age, but a man ripe in life, with that persistence and belief in his work which is to engineers what pa.s.sion is to a poet.

The technicalities of steel and iron come easily off his tongue; they are his native speech, in which he expresses himself most intimately.

All his life he has been concerned with machines. He is the inventor of the Brennan steerable torpedo, whose adoption by the Admiralty made him rich and rendered possible the long years of study and experiment that went to the making of the mono-rail car. He has a touch of the rich man's complacency; it does not go ill with his kindly good humor and his single-hearted pride in his life work.

It is characteristic, I think, of his honesty of purpose and of the genius that is his driving force that hitherto he has concerned himself with scientific invention somewhat to the exclusion of the commercial aspects of his contrivance. He has had help in money and men from the British Government, which likewise placed the torpedo factory at his disposal; and the governments of India and--of all places--Kashmir have granted him subsidies. Railroad men from all parts of the world have seen his model; but he has not been ardent in the hunt for customers.

Perhaps that will not be necessary; the mono-rail car should be its own salesman; but, in the meantime, it is not amiss that a great inventor should stand aloof from commerce.

But, for all the cheerful matter-of-factness of the man, he, too, has seen visions. There are times when he talks of the future as he hopes it will be, as he means it to be, when "transportation is civilization."

Men are to travel then on a single rail, in great cars like halls, two hundred feet long, thirty to forty feet wide, whirling across continents at two hundred miles an hour--from New York to San Francis...o...b..tween dawn and dawn.

Travel will no longer be uncomfortable. These cars, equipped like a hotel, will sweep along with the motion of an ice-yacht. They will not jolt over uneven places, or strain to mount the track at curves; in each one, the weariless gyroscopes will govern an unchanging equilibrium.

Trustful Kashmir will advance from its remoteness to a place accessible from anywhere. Streetcar lines will no longer be a perplexity to paving authorities and anathema to other traffic; a single rail will be flush with the ground, out of the way of hoofs and tires. Automobiles will run on two wheels like a bicycle. It is to be a mono-rail world, soothed and a.s.sured by the drone of gyroscopes. By that time the patient ingenuity of inventors and engineers will have found the means to run the gyroscopes at a greater speed than is now possible, thus rendering it feasible to use a smaller wheel. It is a dream based on good, solid reasoning, backed by a great inventor's careful calculations; H.G. Wells has given a picture of it in the last of his stories of the future.

Practical railroad men have given to the mono-rail car a sufficiently warm welcome. They have been impressed chiefly by its suitability to the conditions of transportation in the great new countries, as, for instance, on that line of railway that is creeping north from the Zambesi to open up the copper deposits of northwestern Rhodesia, and on through Central Africa to its terminus at Cairo. Just such land as this helped to inspire Brennan. He was a boy when he first saw the endless plains of Australia, and out of that experience grew his first speculations about the future of railway travel. Such lands make positive and clear demands, if ever they are to be exploited for their full value to humanity. They need railways quickly laid and cheaply constructed; lines not too exacting in point of curves and gradients; and, finally, fast travel. It is not difficult to see how valuable the mono-rail would have been in such an emergency as the last Sudan War, when the army dragged a line of railway with it down toward Omdurman.

Petrol-driven cars to replace the expensive steam locomotives, easy rapid transit instead of the laborious crawl through the stifling desert heat--a complete railway installation, swiftly and cheaply called into being, instead of a costly and c.u.mbersome makes.h.i.+ft.

The car went back to her garage, or engine-shed, or stable, or whatever the railway man of the future shall decide to call it. Struts were pulled into position to hold her up, the motors were switched off, and the gyroscopes were left to run themselves down in forty-eight hours or so. When the mono-rail comes into general use, explained Brennan, there will be docks for the cars, with low brick walls built to slide under the platforms and take their weight.

While his guests a.s.sembled in a store-shed to drink champagne and eat sandwiches, he produced a big flat book, sumptuously bound, and told us how his patents were being infringed on in Germany. On that same day there was an exhibition of a mono-rail car on the Brennan principle taking place at the Zoological Gardens in Berlin; the book was its catalogue. It was full of imaginative pictures of trains fifty years hence, and thereto was appended sanguine letter-press. While there sounded in our ears the hum of the gyroscopes from the car housed in the rear, I translated one paragraph for him. It was to the effect that one Brennan, an Englishman, had conducted experiments with gyroscopes ten years ago, but the matter had gone no further.

"There, now," said Brennan.

(_Everybody's Magazine_)

A NEW POLITICAL WEDGE

THE WAY ST. LOUIS WOMEN DROVE A NINE-HOUR DAY INTO THE LAW

BY INIS H. WEED

It was the evening before the state primaries--a sweltering first of August night in the tenement district of St. Louis, where the factory people eat their suppers and have their beds. Men in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves and women with babies sat on the steps for a breath of air, and the streets were a noisy welter of children.

Two of the most enthusiastic girls in the Women's Trade Union League stopped before the group silhouetted in the gaslight at No. 32 and handed the men in the group this card:

REPUBLICAN VOTERS ----------------- It is the Women and Children that are the Victims of Manufacturers and Manufacturers a.s.sociations and it is the WORKING WOMAN AND CHILD that demands your protection at the PRIMARIES, TUESDAY, AUGUST 2nd Scratch ------- E.J. Troy Secretary St. Louis Manufacturers a.s.sociation and run by them on the Republican Ticket for the Legislature in the 1st District Comprising WARDS 10, 11, 2,13, and 24. Precincts 14 of the 15th WARD. Precincts 1, 2, 3 of the 23rd WARD. Precincts 1, 2 of the 15th WARD. Precincts 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13 of the 14th WARD. Precincts 1, 4, 5 of the 9th Ward

"So yez would be afther havin' me scratch Misther Troy?" Mike Ryan ran his fingers through his stubby crop with a puzzled air. "Oi'm always fur plazin' the loidies, but Misther Troy, he's a frind o' mine. Shure, he shmokes a grand cigar, an' he shakes yer hand that hearty."

So Mike belonged to the long, long glad-hand line. Well, _personal_ arguments were necessary in his case then. That was the way the girls sized up Mike Ryan.

"But this ticket has something to do with your oldest girl."

"With Briddie?"

"It sure does, Mr. Ryan. Didn't I hear your wife tellin' what with the hard times an' all, you'd be puttin' Briddie in the mill this winter as soon as ever she's turned fourteen? Wouldn't you rather they worked her nine hours a day instead o' ten--such a soft little kid with such a lot o' growin' to do? There's a lot of us goin' to fight for a Nine-Hour Bill for the women and children this winter, an' do you think a manufacturers' representative, like Troy, is goin' to help us? Look at his record! See how he's fought the employees' interests in the legislature! That's a part of his job! _He_ won't vote for no Nine-Hour Bill!"