The Self-Balancing Monorail: A 1910 Train That Could Balance Without Falling
If monorails have a bad name, The Simpsons may be to blame. In an episode acclaimed for its hilariousness since it first aired 33 years ago, a huckster shows up in Springfield and convinces the town to build just such a transit system, which turns out to be not just suspiciously unnecessary (at least in young Lisa’s judgment) but also dangerously shoddy. I watched it while growing up in the suburbs of Seattle, a city that endured bitterly protracted contention over whether or not to build out its own rudimentary monorail system — a World’s Fair artifact, like the Space Needle — but finally opted not to. Concerns were perpetually raised, rightly or wrongly, about the noise and darkness that could result from extending the wide elevated track on which it ran.
But what if there were another way to build a monorail? Indeed, what if it could run on the ground, like a traditional two-railed train? Such was the idea in the head of the indefatigable Irish-Australian engineer Louis Brennan, who’s remembered today for inventing a wire-guided torpedo back in 1877.
If things had gone differently, maybe he’d be better remembered for inventing the gyro monorail, the subject of the Primal Space video above. In Brennan’s design, which he actually got built and working, the car balances on a single rail with the aid of a pair of spinning powered gyroscopes that prevent it from falling over (and, in the case of power loss, could keep spinning for half an hour to allow a safe evacuation), allowing it to run faster and corner more tightly than the trains the world knew.
Brennan’s gyro monorail made its public debut at the Japan-British Exhibition in London in 1910, giving 50 passengers at a time the opportunity to ride around in a circle at 20 miles per hour. Though the interest it drew inspired a minor boom of gyro-stabilized children’s toys, it never actually translated into a real transit system. Around the same time, a group in Germany also unveiled their own version, and in the decades thereafter, additional abortive efforts were made in Russia. The engineering involved was impressive, as the video explains, but also a bit too complicated and expensive for its time. The development of a new German app-ordered autonomous gyro monorail system was announced just a few years ago. Given the possibility of its entering production as soon as 2032, we could soon be hearing choruses of “Monorail, monorail, monorail” — or rather, “Monocab, Monocab, Monocab” — once again.
Related content:
Paris Had a Moving Sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison Film Captured It in Action
A Subway Ride Through New York City: Watch Vintage Footage from 1905
Why Public Transit Sucks in the United States: Four Videos Tell the Story
A Harrowing Test Drive of Buckminster Fuller’s 1933 Dymaxion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.