Abstract
A LARGE two-wheeled motor-car, constructed from the design of Dr. Schilowsky, a Russian Doctor of Laws, by the Wolseley Tool and Motor Company, Ltd., was given a trial run in London last week. The car is a six-seated car, and it carried six people as it slowly made a circuit of Regent's Park. The gyroscopic mechanism is placed in the cupboard under the middle four seats. This consists of a heavy gyrostat rotating at the moderate speed of 11oo revolutions a minute, and driven by an electric motor of 1½ horse-power. The axis is vertical, and it is mounted in a ring supported on transverse trunnions, so that it may tilt in a fore and aft plane. As the car is necessarily unstable on its two wheels, the gyrostatic ring must also be carried unstably for it to have corrective influence. If, as a ship, the car could have been carried stably, then the gyrostatic ring would also have to be stably mounted. If one is stable and the other unstable then the gyrostat operates in the opposite sense to that intended.
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BOYS, C. The Schilowsky Gyroscopic Two-Wheeled Motor-Car . Nature 93, 251 (1914). https://doi.org/10.1038/093251a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/093251a0