A NOTABLE INVENTOR

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 25 May 1917, Page 7

A NOTABLE INVENTOR

There is nothing in the least improbable in the American story that Elmer Sperry has invented an antisubmarine device which has amazed the American naval experts. If any American was to have the distinction of destroying the submarine meance, Mr. Elmer Sperry Had a better chance than probably anyone but Edison. He is the inventor of the gyrocompass, the ship stabiliser, the aeroplane stabiliser; he was only twenty years old when he invented the first electric arc light and dynamo, and he was among the earliest designers of electric trams. Last year he was appointed a member, of the American Naval Advisory Board, which has been engaged for several months in considering ways of beating the enemy by new devices. A Board that includes both Edison and Sperry should be able to find out something novel with which to surprise the Hun.

An amazing searchlight is one of this inventor’s many inventions. It is so powerful that thirty miles away newspapers can be read by its light. One election night in America one of these searchlights was used to flash results from New York to Albany, 10 miles away. The rays of its beam are asserted to be as powerful as these of the sun at 8 a.m. or 4 p.m. in the latitude of New York, and to be 22 times more briliant than the beam from the most powerful lighthouse on the coast of the States. It can illumine a vessel until the latter disappears below the horizon. “The heat thrown out by this light,” says a writer in the New York ‘lndependent,’ “is so intense that when focussed sharply it will set paper on fire at a distance or 2r)o feet, while men working in its glare find their skins reddened and peeling, the effects being similar to sunburn, but more powerful.”