When Winston Churchill took a ride on the new monorail at the Japan-British exhibition of 1910 he was instantly captivated and insisted on driving it himself. “The invention proved as interesting to the statesman as a new toy would to a child,” reported the Daily Mail. Churchill, who was then British home secretary, was so impressed that the following week – over a long lunch at the Ritz – he persuaded the prime minister and the chancellor of the exchequer to try for themselves this new wonder of the age. Louis Brennan, the monorail’s inventor, had every reason to feel pleased. “Sir, your invention promises to revolutionise the railway systems of the world,” said Churchill. It didn’t. So what went wrong?
IT WAS the world’s first true monorail, a train that ran upright on a single rail. And it was the first tilting train. Most monorails are stable either because they straddle a beam, like saddlebags on either side of a donkey, or they hang from an overhead rail. Louis Brennan’s train was completely different: not only could it balance on a single rail with no visible means of support, it also tilted as it rounded bends like a motorcyclist leaning into a curve – courtesy of a pair of giant gyroscopes.
Brennan had made his name and a fortune from his first invention, a steerable torpedo. Born in Ireland in 1852, at the age of 9 Brennan sailed with his family to Australia, where in 1877 he invented the world’s first guided missile, a torpedo that was steered towards its target by wires controlled from the shore. After years of testing, the British government bought Brennan’s torpedo in 1887 to defend its harbours from naval attack, paying him the huge sum of £110,000 – worth roughly £10 million today. The government also hired Brennan to oversee work at its new torpedo factory close to the naval dockyard at Chatham in Kent. “It is not only your torpedo we want to buy,” said the minister who brokered the deal. “We want to buy your brains as well.”
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Soon, however, Brennan’s mind had turned to other things, and in 1896 he filed his first patent for a monorail. Doubtless with his eye on financial support from the government, he emphasised the invention’s military potential. The track could be laid quickly and easily even in the roughest of country and would be able to transport men and munitions speedily over long distances. The idea also had commercial potential. In rural areas it could provide a cheap alternative to conventional railways. It offered a far smoother ride than ordinary trains, which tended to jolt from side to side, and the stability of the carriages meant they could be wider and more comfortable, and could travel twice as fast as the fastest express train. Brennan was so certain of success he gave up half his salary at the factory in return for time and space to develop the monorail.
There were the inevitable teething troubles. Brennan’s first model had a single gyroscope spinning on a horizontal axle that was parallel to the wheels. It worked fine when the train was stationary or going forward, but as soon as the train reversed it fell over. That was easily fixed by adding a second gyroscope that revolved in the opposite direction. By 1904, Brennan had proved the concept and negotiated a series of grants from the War Office to help him to build and test a scale model.
The new model, this time nearly 2 metres long, was large enough to ride on. With the money from his torpedo, Brennan had bought a large house with extensive gardens close to the torpedo factory. Now the gardens were transformed into a giant train set. The 800-metre track was designed to show how well the monorail could cope with rugged landscapes: there were sharp bends, steep slopes and even a section where the track had been bent sideways to simulate earthquake damage. On another section of track, the train continued over a chasm on just a single steel cable, where a conventional train would have needed a viaduct. Brennan unveiled the model to the press in May 1907 and a week later demonstrated it to the nation’s leading scientists and engineers at the Royal Society.
It caused a sensation. The press promptly dubbed it the “spinning-top railway” because of its gyroscopes or the “Blondin railway” after the famous tightrope walker. What they didn’t know was that the monorail’s future hung in the balance. The War Office had been having second thoughts, because the most brilliant part of the invention, its gyroscopes, were so heavy they restricted the load each carriage could take. Besides, Brennan’s torpedoes were fast becoming obsolete, outclassed by big guns with a longer range. It had no further use for the torpedo factory, so the monorail might as well go too.
By now, though, Brennan had found a powerful new ally in Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary in the newly elected Liberal government. Churchill urged the War Office and other government departments to back Brennan, and without his efforts work on the monorail would have stopped. In March 1907, the War Office partially relented and allowed Brennan to continue using the vacant torpedo works. Churchill had more luck with the India Office, which he bullied into giving the monorail a secret grant of ÂŁ5000. Then the maharajah of Kashmir, convinced the monorail would be the perfect way of getting around the Himalayan foothills, put up another ÂŁ5000.
“The maharajah thought it was perfect for the Himalayan foothills”
Brennan was now able to build two full-size carriages and a test track in the grounds of the torpedo factory. The work was almost complete when in November 1909 he caught wind of a rival German monorail that was about to be unveiled in Berlin. Brennan was not only an ingenious inventor but also a master of public relations. He immediately telegraphed the editors of the London newspapers inviting them to take a ride on his monorail. The next day, the Daily Mirror devoted the whole of its front page to the amazing new train. The reporter from the Daily Chronicle described “the uncanny spectacle of a huge car, weighing 22 tons, approaching at a gentle speed on the single rail, and balancing itself on a row of four wheels with perfect steadiness”.
There was just one nagging question in everyone’s minds. What would happen if the train broke down? Would it keel over at the side of the track and crash? Brennan’s answer was always the same: nothing would happen – it was perfectly safe. Each gyroscope weighed three-quarters of a tonne and revolved in a vacuum. Its momentum was such that it would take an hour to stop spinning, and the train would then settle gently on its chocks.
In May 1910, the Japan-British exhibition opened at White City in the west of London. Although intended as a showcase of Japanese and British ingenuity, it had few home-grown exhibits: King Edward VII had died earlier that month and the nation was in mourning. Even so, the monorail was a huge hit, with people queueing to pay sixpence a go. Mindful of his precarious financial position Brennan now stressed the train’s commercial potential, pointing out that while the basic military model had a top speed of 34 kilometres per hour, a passenger version could be double-decked and reach an unprecedented 300 kilometres per hour.
Churchill continued to champion the monorail. Now home secretary, he hosted a lunch at the Ritz for cabinet ministers and other influential people, hoping to win them over. As soon as they’d polished off the port and finished their cigars, Churchill took the prime minister, Herbert “Squiffy” Asquith, and the chancellor, David Lloyd-George, with other ministerial colleagues and sundry wives and daughters on a jaunt to White City. The next day the front pages were plastered with photographs of Squiffy and his entourage riding the monorail. The triumph was short-lived, however. Significantly, the war minister had declined Churchill’s invitation to lunch. His reason was soon clear: the War Office no longer had any interest in the project. This time there was no lifeline from the India Office, because it needed every penny for the forthcoming Delhi durbar, the extravagant coronation of George V as the emperor of India. That left the maharajah of Kashmir. But he too abandoned Brennan, seduced by an American company that convinced him a ropeway was a better bet. The ropeway was never built.
The exhibition was the end of the line for the monorail. Brennan had been paying the workers in the torpedo factory out of his own pocket since 1907. Now he was forced to sell his home. It would be another 70 years before people could ride on tilting trains, which are today becoming more and more common on high-speed lines. Work on the gyroscopic monorail was abandoned. One of the carriages was scrapped. The other ended up as a park shelter.
