Elmer Sperry was responsible for starting many companies that made significant contributions to the American wartime effort as well as modern-day military and commercial transportation and many other areas of modern life. Several of these companies have evolved into giants in their industry today. Sperry Marine, a division of Litton, Sperry Rand and Sperry Rail have their roots directly linked to Elmer’s original companies.

Elmer Sperry was born in October 1860 in New York. He invented gyroscope-guided automatic pilots for ships and airplanes that have also been applied to missiles and spacecraft.

Sperry Rail Service was established in 1928 by Elmer after he had successfully
developed the world's first non-destructive method of detecting internal life-threatening defects in rail. This new technique was based on an electro-magnetic technique called "Induction".

During 1949 the capabilites of the induction inspection system provided by
Sperry Rail was further enhanced by the addition of an ultrasonic inspection technique using the now industry-standard RSU (Roller Search Unit).

Sperry Rail and the Products and Systems teams are now part of the Rockwood Group forming a large Non Destructive Testing (NDT) company with over 2000 engineers out testing thousands of miles of Oil pipelines and construction materials as well as rail steel.

Sperry engineers use the leading established test systems for defect detection and have innovative development teams in the US and UK to create specialist instruments. All these are backed by international teams of operators, analysts and maintenence personnel to ensure the quality and availability of your product or service.