Elmer Ambrose Sperry

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Elmer Ambrose Sperry (October 12, 1860 - June 16, 1930) was an inventor and entrepreneur. Born Cortland, New York, died Brooklyn, New York.

In 1880, he founded the Sperry Electric Company in Chicago, Illinois to manufacture the electric dynamos and arc lamps that he had invented as a teenager. Over the next fifty years, he founded seven more companies to manufacture his own inventions, including:

• Sperry Electric Mining Machine Company (1888);
• Sperry Electric Railway Company (1894);
• Chicago Fuse Wire Company (1900); and
• Sperry Gyroscope Company (1910).

The latter was founded to manufacture Sperry's development of the gyrocompass, originally invented by Herman Anschütz-Kaempfe in 1908. Sperry's first model was installed on the battleship USS Delaware in 1911.

The companies eventually evolved into the Sperry Corporation.

Sperry was also a founding member of the US Naval Consulting Board, 1915.

References

Thomas P. Hughes, Elmer Sperry: Inventor and Engineer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).

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