The intriguing new Boston history blog, Looking Backward, has a short tidbit on a prospective D.C. to Boston monorail that, obviously, never got built.

“Illustration by Andre Castaigne for article “The Brennan Mono-Rail Car,” McClure’s Magazine, 1910

A proposed elevated line running from Washington to Boston based on the gyroscope-balanced monorail car Irish-Australian inventor, Louis Brennan. His model, introduced in 1909. while successfully demonstrated, never reached mass production.

Amtrak’s Acela tilting trains can reach 150mph. Brennan said his might reach 200mph.

I’d love to look into this more. Why didn’t it work? Who were the interest groups that supported or opposed the work? Did it even get to that stage?

Here’s what I found in a 1960 text, MONORAILS by Hermann Botzow, Jr.:

Date: November 10, 1909.

Builder: Louis Brennan.

Location : London, England.

Purpose: Exhibition and experiment.

Type: Supported on single rail and stabilized by a gyroscope only. Speed: 22 mph. Description: A 40′ ten-ton 40-passenger car ran on 70 Ib. rail by using two 3′-6″, 1,500 Ib. gyroscopic wheels rotating in opposite directions at 3000 rpm. The car operated on gas-driven generators furnishing power for propulsion and for the gyroscope motors.

Comment: 10 years of subsequent experiment were necessary to perfect a superelevation of the car as it rounded curves. Fear of the gyroscope stopping kept this and the Scherl vehicle from being used for public transportation. 125 mph speeds were predicted to be possible.

Were the gyroscope fears well-founded or not? Were there extenuating circumstances (WWI?)?

One of the problems in the historiography of technology is that if the use of something doesn’t become widespread, it rarely gets investigated. There’s a serious bias built into the record based on outmoded ideas about the market (“necessity”) bringing any and all needed and possible technologies into being. With that kind of thinking, if a piece of tech doesn’t exist it’s either impossible or unnecessary. Recent historians like David Nye and Gijs Mom have made that assumption very shaky.

Nonetheless, while a piece of infrastructure like this, which could have changed the functioning of the East Coast corridor, gets no attention, every single word of minor legal documents and minor political philosphers is puzzled over endlessly. Kind of weird, no?

Photo: flickr/j3net