At a meeting of the Society of Naval Architects held
on Friday week, Sir William White read an interesting paper on the results of the experiments made with Dr. Schlick's gyroscopic apparatus for steadying the motion of ships. The apparatus, a rough idea of which may be got from the toy gyroscopic top, consists of a fly-wheel one metre in diameter, oscillating on trunnions and making up to three thousand revolutions per minute, and is placed in a compartment before the boiler. It has been tried on a German first-olass torpedo- boat with most successful results, its practical effect being to extinguish rolling almost immediately, and great advantage is anticipated from its use on cross-Channel and coasting steamers of high speed. The gyroscope, it must be noted, does not abolish sea-sickness, but by minimising the transverse oscillations, it robs a rough passage of some its terrors, and to that extent, as Professor Lambert pointed out, it would drive another nail into the coffin of any Channel Tunnel scheme.
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