Gyros, powerful tools in aerospace technology

Abstract

It was a great pleasure for me to accept the invitation to give this lecture on European Pioneer’s Day and at the same time a great honour to be able to revive the memory of Max Schuler, an ingenious engineer and scientist, whose work in a most remarkable way influenced the development of aerospace technology. For many decades Schuler (Fig. 1) was actively working in the fascinating field of gyros and their numerous applications, especially on problems of navigation, stabilisation and attitude control. Schuler’s name is closely associated with the gyro—which the British astronomer Sir John Herschel once described as ‘a philosophical instrument’. But it had a long way to go before it became a useful technical device. I will try to cover this development and say some words on what the method of ‘Schuler-tuning’ means and how it was detected.I am sure you will remember those days and weeks, more than five years ago, when we anxiously waited to hear news of the different Apollo missions to the moon. We were astonished at the scarcely believable precision of these flights and in my opinion technical outsiders were in a much better situation than specialists, for they were under more stress because of their knowledge about the function of the subsystems in the extremely complicated Apollo spaceship.