Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2222

Dictation at Spencer MacCallum’s request concerning the history of a small brass name plate found in a drawer at Roadsend Gardens, Elkridge, Maryland.

July, 1956

This brass name plate showing the word GYRO in large letters was the plate affixed to the five-cylinder, revolving aeronautical motors being developed and manufactured by the Gyro Motor Company of Washington, D. C. This Company was owned entirely by Mr. Emile Berliner, the inventor and patentee of the Berliner telephone transmitter and the flat disk phonograph record. These two inventions had made Mr. Berliner a very rich man, and he was in 1910, ’11 and ’12 adventuring in gasoline engines for aeroplanes.  During that time, I became his personal patent attorney occupied chiefly as an intermediary between him and some half-dozen patent law firms who were prosecuting his patent applications in considerable numbers. It was in late 1910 that I founded the American Propeller Company in Washington and shortly afterward took on with Mr. Berliner on a half-time basis, giving him my afternoons. In this situation, early in 1911, Mr. Berliner made me General Manager and Consulting Engineer of his Gyro Motor Company, for which he built a very fine small building on Columbia Heights and equipped it with the very finest machine tools.

 The Gyro motor was made along lines very similar to the French “Nome” motor that was used by Louis Bleriot in his memorable cross-channel flight in 1909. I continued with Mr. Berliner until early in 1912, at which time we parted, reluctantly on both sides, so I could take my propeller business to a more desirable location in Baltimore, Maryland where I carried on with many vicissitudes from the spring of 1912 and on through World War I, during which time I built a propeller factory occupying a whole city block. After World War I, I developed the first successfully power operated, automatic controllable and reversible pitch pro­peller, through demonstration of which I finally sold in late 1929 all my patents and impending applications, exclu­sive right to use of my name in connection with aeronautics, and became for two years a part of the Bendix Aviation Company organization as a research engineer.