Chalmers Kearney, though born in Australia, spent most of his life in the United Kingdom. He was educated privately in Australia and the United Kingdom and was an Honorary Technical Advisor to the Agent-General for Victoria, Australia. He was an Engineer and Managing Director of the Kearney High-Speed Tube Railway Company Ltd and the Kearney Railway Construction Company Ltd. Kearney was the inventor of the Kearney High-Speed Railway, a railway motor wheel, a stepless subway station, and he also developed an improved system of tube railways construction that greatly reduced costs. As an advocate of this tube system, he built in 1920 a full-size monorail car and promoted a tube railway to be built on the Kearney system between North and South Shields, United Kingdom. His publications include Rapid Transit in the Future : The Kearney High-Speed Railway (1911) and it was through his science fiction novel, Erone (1943), that he tried to popularise this idea.
