In the years following World War II, the scientific debate over the plausibility of building an inertial navigation system (INS) increased. Charles Stark Draper and his supporters believed it was possible. Others, such as physicist George Gamow, disagreed. A member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, Gamow felt that the military was wasting money working on an INS. He was convinced that the "problem of the vertical" could not be solved.

The problem of the vertical came from Albert Einstein's "black box" argument: An observer inside this box would not be able to tell the difference between gravity and linear acceleration. This argument presented problems for Draper and his colleagues working on creating an INS, or black-box navigation. The navigation system on an airplane would need to be able to identify the true vertical. For example, when navigating with two accelerometers, they are oriented "local vertical," meaning horizontally at right angles to the local direction of gravity. When the black box accelerates, a plum bob would not give a correct indication of true vertical. Another problem could arise if direction of travel was unknown. In that case, it would be impossible to know if the gyroscopes were even being held horizontally.

Mathematician Max Schuler believed that an INS was possible in theory and began working on the calculations dealing with the effect of a vessel's acceleration on the onboard gyrocompass. Schuler was trying to find a way to minimize that effect. His work, eventually published in 1923, was central to solving the problem of the vertical. On a ship traveling the surface of the earth, it is impossible to determine the vertical using a plum bob if the ship accelerates.

Schuler's theoretical solution was to increase the length of string holding the plum bob weight so that it puts the mass at the center of the earth. In this case, the string would indicate the vertical, no matter how the ship moved or accelerated. An actual version could not be constructed, but Schuler argued that the effect could be achieved with a gyroscope system. The gyroscope could be set to the same oscillation period, eighty-four minutes, as the earth-radius pendulum.

Scientists working on the problem of the vertical and INS were confident that Schuler's idea would work. The easiest way was to construct an earth radius pendulum using two accelerometers at right angles, stabilized by gyroscopes. Draper and his colleagues thought this was a viable solution to the problem of the vertical.

In the late 1940's, Draper finally put an end to the debate over black-box navigation. He and Gamow were both members of the Scientific Advisory Board; Draper set up a conference for those working on the INS to discuss the status of their research. Though Gamow was invited, he did not attend the meeting. His absence was perceived as admitting that he was wrong about the vertical problem. Within a few years, Draper had successfully created an inertial navigation system.

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