Elmer Ambrose Sperry

Elmer Sperry was born in 1860 in Cortland, New York. A prolific inventor in the American engineering tradition — more than 350 patents to his name — he founded Sperry Gyroscope Company in 1910, and between then and 1930 he built the company that dominated the gyroscopic navigation and control business worldwide.

His most consequential invention was the gyrocompass (1908), a rapidly spinning flywheel mechanically constrained by gravity and gimbals to align its axis with true (geographic) north, unaffected by magnetic disturbances from iron hulls or geomagnetic anomalies. The Sperry gyrocompass was first adopted by the US Navy in 1910 and became standard equipment on essentially every large ship during the first half of the twentieth century. He went on to develop gyroscopic autopilots for ships and aircraft, gyroscopic stabilisers for ships against roll, and early inertial guidance systems.

He died in Brooklyn in 1930. The Sperry Corporation he founded went through various mergers and became part of Unisys; its gyroscope division is now part of Honeywell, and the basic gyrocompass and inertial-guidance technology Sperry pioneered is still in use today in submarines, commercial aircraft, and spacecraft.