A Brief History of Gyroscopes
Although tops have been around for hund
reds of years,
the gyroscope is a more recent invention.
The first known instrument that was sim
ilar to a
gyroscope was made by John Serson in 1
743. It was
used as a way to locate the horizon in fog
gy conditions
at sea.
The first gyroscope was made by Johann
Bohnenberger in 1817, who called his inv
ention the
“machine.”
It was Léon Foucault who gave the gyros
cope
its name. He used a gyroscope to demons
trate the
rotation of Earth, which is why gyroscop
e’s root
words are the Greek words
skopeein
for “to see” and
gyros
for “rotation.”
With the use of electric motors gyroscope
s were able to spin almost indefinitely. T
his
allowed them to be used in important na
vigational instruments such as heading i
ndicators
and gyro-compasses.
Precession
You saw in the previous experiments that the
gyroscopic effect keeps the spinning gyroscope
from falling over. However, the gyroscope
will react to external forces applied to it by
changing the direction of its axis of rotation.
This change in the orientation of the rotational
axis is called
precession.
Even as the rotor is
spinning around the axis of rotation, the axis
of rotation itself is rotating
around a second axis.
Electronic Gyroscopes
How does your phone know to change its
screen’s orientation when the phone is tu
rned
on its side? How do cameras and video
game controllers detect shaking? They u
se
gyroscopes!
Gyroscopes are used in phones and other
electronic devices to detect movement in t
hree
dimensions. The gyroscopes in smartpho
nes are
much smaller than the gyroscope in this k
it.
These microchip gyroscopes
are small enough to fit on the
phone’s printed circuit board
along with all the other sensors
and electronics. Microchip
gyroscopes are called
MEMS
(micro electro mechanical
systems) gyroscopes.
Axis of
rotation
MEMS
gyroscope
Smartphone circuit board
Precession
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