Sperry Corporation

What Doolittle needed was a horizon he could trust when the real one was hidden behind a gray wall of cloud.

He found the foundation for it in the work of Elmer Sperry, whose Sperry Gyroscope Company had been building gyroscopic instruments for ships and aircraft for years.

The principle behind a gyroscope is elegant, spin a mass fast enough, and it resists changes to its orientation in space.

It wants to stay pointed where it started, mount one correctly in an instrument, and it will give you a fixed reference point even as the aircraft pitches and banks around it.

It was a gyroscope-based heading-hold device about the size of a breadbox that could keep the Winnie Mae tracking a course while Post let go of the controls for a few minutes.

The Sperry Gyroscope Company worked with him on it.

For 1933, it was genuinely revolutionary.

Practical autopilot in a small airplane was not something that existed before Wiley Post needed it to exist.

Post turned to technology.

The Sperry Corporation had been developing gyroscopic autopilots for years.

Post acquired one of the production's Sperry units and had it installed in the Winnie Mae.

He spent months with it, learning where it was reliable, learning where it needed a hand, developing the kind of working relationship with a piece of equipment that only comes from genuine time and patience.

But God works in unbelievable ways.

My best client with Unisys at the time, Burroughs changed its name, merged with Sperry, became Unisys.

My best client at the time kept me in beans and rice, by buying various systems.

And then oddly enough, when I left, I'll get to that part of the story.