The monorail is associated with the names Louis Brennan, August Scherl and Pyotr Shilovsky, who each built full-scale working prototypes during the early part of the twentieth century.

The principal advantage of the monorail cited by Shilovsky is the suppression of hunting oscillation, a speed limitation encountered by conventional railways at the time.

It consisted of ordinary gas piping laid on wooden sleepers, with a 50-foot (15 m) wire rope bridge, sharp corners and slopes up to one in five.

Brennan demonstrated his model in a lecture to the Royal Society in 1907 when it was shown running back and forth "on a taught and slender wire" "under the perfect control of the inventor".

Just as Brennan completed testing his vehicle, August Scherl, a German publisher and philanthropist, announced a public demonstration of the gyro monorail which he had developed in Germany.

Although well received and performing perfectly during its public demonstrations, the car failed to attract significant financial support, and Scherl wrote off his investment in it.

Following the failure of Brennan and Scherl to attract the necessary investment, the practical development of the gyro-monorail after 1910 continued with the work of Pyotr Shilovsky,[9] a Russian aristocrat residing in London.

His balancing system was based on slightly different principles to those of Brennan and Scherl, and permitted the use of a smaller, more slowly spinning gyroscope.

After developing a model gyro monorail in 1911, he designed a gyrocar which was built by Wolseley Motors Limited and tested on the streets of London in 1913.

Since it used a single gyro, rather than the counter-rotating pair favoured by Brennan and Scherl, it exhibited asymmetry in its behaviour, and became unstable during sharp left hand turns.

In 1922, the Soviet government began construction of a Shilovsky monorail between Leningrad and Tsarskoe Selo, but funds ran out shortly after the project was begun.

In October 2022 the Technische Hochschule OWL, the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences, the Fraunhofer-Institut für Optronik, Systemtechnik und Bildauswertung and the Landeseisenbahn Lippe e. V. presented a gyro-stabilized monorail based on Brennan's system on a section of the Extertal railway in Germany.

Forcing the gimbal to rotate causes the wheel to precess resulting in gyroscopic torques about the roll axis, so that the mechanism has the potential to right the vehicle when tilted from the vertical.

Ideally, the mechanism applying control torques to the gimbal ought to be passive (an arrangement of springs, dampers and levers), but the fundamental nature of the problem indicates that this would be impossible.

In fact, the mechanism causes the vehicle to lean into the disturbance, resisting it with a component of weight, with the gyro near its undeflected position.

Brennan and Scherl were aware of this problem, and implemented their balancing systems with pairs of counter rotating gyros, precessing in opposite directions.

With the double gyro system, the instability on bends is eliminated and the vehicle will bank to the correct angle, so that no net side force is experienced on board.

This may be used as an input to a slower loop to shift the centre of gravity laterally, so that the vehicle remains upright in the presence of sustained non-inertial forces.

Shilovsky gave a number of claimed benefits including reduced right-of-way problems because steeper gradients and sharper corners may be negotiated in theory.

In his book, Shilovsky describes a form of on-track braking, which is feasible with a monorail, but would upset the directional stability of a conventional rail vehicle.

This has the potential of much shorter stopping distances compared with conventional wheel on steel, with a corresponding reduction in safe separation between trains.

Gas turbine engines are designed with peripheral speeds as high as 400 metres per second (1,300 ft/s),[13] and have operated reliably on thousands of aircraft over the past 50 years.