Elmer Ambrose Sperry

Elmer Ambrose Sperry Sr. (October 12, 1860 – June 16, 1930) was an American inventor and entrepreneur, most famous for construction, two years after Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe, of the gyrocompass and as founder of the Sperry Gyroscope Company. He was known as the "father of modern navigation technology".

Sperry's compasses and stabilizers were adopted by the United States Navy and used in both world wars. He also worked closely with Japanese companies and the Japanese government and was honored after his death with a volume of reminiscences published in Japan.

Sperry was born in Cincinnatus, New York, on October 12, 1860, to Stephen Decatur Sperry and Mary Burst. His mother died the next day, from complications from his birth.

He was of English ancestry. His family had been in what is now the Northeastern United States since the 1600s, and his earliest American ancestor was an English colonist named Richard Sperry (born 1606).

Sperry spent three years at the State Normal School in Cortland, New York, then a year at Cornell University in 1878 and 1879, where he became interested in dynamos. He moved to Chicago, Illinois, early in 1880 and soon after founded the Sperry Electric Company. He married Zula Augusta Goodman (1860-1929) in Chicago, Illinois on June 28, 1887.

In 1887, Sperry created a system to bring electricity into coal mines, heating the copper wires to prevent corrosion. This system allowed him to bring self-designed mining equipment deep below the surface, to greatly increase the production of coal. In 1888 the Sperry Electric Machinery Mining Company was founded.

In 1890, Sperry formed the Sperry Electric Railway Company. Here he used ideas from the electric trains sold by his mining company to create electric trolleys in large, hilly cities in Ohio and Pennsylvania. While working with this company, Sperry designed an electric automobile, which led to Sperry patenting ideas that would be later used in the development of portable lead acid batteries. In 1896, he drove his car in Paris, making it the first American-made car in Paris. In 1894, General Electric bought the railway company and its associated patents.

In 1900 Sperry established an electrochemical laboratory at Washington, D.C., where he and his associate, Clifton P. Townshend, developed a process for making pure caustic soda and discovered a process for recovering tin from scrap metal.

After experiencing seasickness on an Atlantic voyage in 1898, Sperry started to work on incorporating a large gyroscope into a ship to lessen the effect of waves on the ship. His gyroscope-stabilized ship differed from others at the time by having a sensor built in to the system to detect the first signs of a wave that the system would have to work to mitigate. In 1911, Sperry worked with the US Navy to incorporate his gyroscopic stabilizer, which greatly reduced major roll of the ship, into Navy ships. While effective, Sperry's gyrostabilizer never was widely sold because of its expense, both in installation and maintenance.

Sperry found another use for his gyroscopes in 1908. Magnetic compasses on steel battleships at the time had issues with maintaining magnetic north with the variations of the magnetic field they experienced. Working with Hannibal C. Ford, Sperry began work on a gyrocompass to replace the magnetic compass. In 1910 he founded the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn, New York on the basis of this innovation. His first navigational gyroscope was tested that same year in USS Delaware (BB-28). After successful tests, Sperry's gyrocompass was soon being installed on American, British, French, Italian, and Russian naval crafts. During World War I, the importance of the gyrocompass increased as the compass was adapted to control the steering of a ship to automatically hold a steady line.

In 1923, Sperry's son Lawrence died in the English Channel in the crash of an airplane of his own design. In January 1929, Sperry sold his Sperry Gyroscope Company to North American Aviation. The following year his wife died, on March 31, in Havana, Cuba.

Sperry died at St. John Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, on June 16, 1930, from complications following the removal of gallstones six weeks earlier. He was 69 years old.

Sperry was a member of the following groups:

Founder and charter member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers

Founder and charter member of the American Electro-Chemical Society

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers

Aero Club of France (1914) for his airplane stabilizer

Franklin Institute Medal (1914, specific award unknown) for his gyroscopic compass

Collier Trophy (1914) for gyroscopic control

Collier Trophy (1916) for his drift indicator

Elliott Cresson Medal (1929) for gyroscopic navigational and recording instruments

Sperry Electric Mining Machine Company, (1888)

Sperry Rail Service (1911) a rail defect detection company

Sperry Gyroscope Company (1910), founded to manufacture Sperry's development of the gyrocompass, originally invented by Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe in 1908. Sperry's first model was installed on the battleship USS Delaware in 1911

The Elmer A. Sperry Award, which encourages progress in transportation-related engineering, is named for him

USS Sperry (AS-12), a submarine tender, was named for him

The Sperry Center at SUNY Cortland in Cortland, NY is named after him