In the year 1904 Dr. Schlick elaborated his theory before the Society of Naval Architects in London. His paper aroused much interest in technical circles, but most of his hearers believed that it represented a theory that would never be made a tangible reality. Fortunately, however, Dr. Schlick was enabled to make a practical test, by constructing a wheel and installing it on a small ship--a torpedo-boat called the _Sea-bar_, discarded from the German navy. The vessel is one hundred and sixteen feet in length and of a little over fifty-six tons' displacement. The device employed consists of a fly-wheel one meter in diameter, weighing just over eleven hundred pounds and operated by a turbine mechanism capable of giving it a maximum velocity of sixteen hundred revolutions per minute. This powerful fly-wheel was installed in the hull of the _Sea-bar_ on a vertical axis, whereas the Brennan gyroscope operates on a horizontal axis. So installed, the Schlick gyroscope does not interfere in the least with the steering or with the ordinary progression of the ship. Its sole design is to prevent the ship from rolling. The expectations of its inventor were fully realized. On a certain day in July, 1906, with a sea so rough that the ship rolled through an arc of thirty degrees, when the balance-wheel was not in revolution, the arc of rolling was reduced to one degree when the great top was set spinning and its secondary bearings released. In other words, it practically abolished the rolling motion of the craft, causing its decks to remain substantially level, while the ship as a whole heaved up and down with the waves. These remarkable results, with more in kind, were recorded in the paper which Sir William White read before the Institution of Naval Architects in London in April, 1907. He himself had witnessed tests of the Schlick gyroscope, and, in common with his colleagues, he accepted the demonstrations as unequivocal. Fully to understand the action of Dr. Schlick's invention, one must know that it is not a mere wheel on the single pivot, but a wheel adjusted in such a fashion that it can oscillate longitudinally while revolving on its vertical axis. In other words, it is precisely as if one of the two gyroscope-wheels used in the Brennan car (greatly enlarged) were so placed that its main axis was vertical, its secondary axis, or axis of oscillation, being horizontal and at right angles to the ship's length. Thus, while spinning on its vertical axis the body of the top is able to oscillate, pendulum-like, lengthwise of the ship.