It was in the year 1819 that the Atlantic was for the first time crossed by a steam vessel, the United States ship Savannah, and this revolutionizing event stimulated Ericsson to new endeavors. In the months following he produced a number of important improvements by which smaller and lighter boilers were made possible by increasing the heat, and hence the power, of the fire by forced draught, as well as many other radical improvements in steam-engines and boiler-construction. Of these he claims particularly the credit of the invention of “surface condensation applied to steam navigation.”
The first steam fire-engine—an apparatus which to-day constitutes perhaps the most important feature of a city’s fire department—was invented and built by Ericsson in 1829. Previously, and as a matter of fact for years afterward, hand-operated engines, manned by crews of volunteer firemen, fought the fires which so frequently destroyed vast sections of the wood-constructed cities of those early days. It is not surprising that this valuable invention did not receive immediate recognition, for inventors rarely obtain such recognition from the people whom their inventions benefit. In fact, Ericsson’s portable steam fire-engine was actually condemned as an impracticable contrivance that could serve no useful purpose.
To-day we travel thousands of miles by railroad; a hundred years ago our great-great-grandfathers traveled by horse-drawn coaches. Where we may now speed a mile a minute behind a giant steam locomotive, they were content with what seemed to them the tremendous speed of eleven miles an hour. But all things change. There are always leaders in the world’s progress. Of these leaders was John Ericsson. Travel had been a luxury of the rich; the invention of the steam locomotive made fast and economical travel possible to the poor as well.
In 1829 a prize of two thousand five hundred dollars was offered for the best steam locomotive which could draw a weight of twenty tons at the rate of ten miles an hour. Ericsson had never built a locomotive, but he entered the contest. His greatest competitor was George Stephenson, who for several years had built small locomotives for use in coal mines.
On the great day of the trial thousands of people thronged the track to witness the novel sight. Never in the world’s history had there been a public experiment so momentous, unless we except the journey of the American inventor’s steamship, the Clermont, on her first historic progress up the Hudson River.
The locomotive entered in the contest by Stephenson was named the Rocket, a strong well-built engine that ultimately was awarded the prize. But although he was not the winner in this great competition, to Ericsson belongs great credit, for his locomotive, the Novelty, passed the Rocket at the amazing speed, for those days, of thirty miles an hour, and failed to win the prize only because of certain defects in its construction which caused it to break down before the goal was reached.
Ericsson was twenty-six years old when he built the Novelty. Already he had contributed many useful inventions to the world. But his greatest triumphs were still to come. He had been beaten fairly and squarely by Stephenson, but his was not the spirit that is easily subdued. Ericsson, like the hero of Greek mythology, rose the stronger each time an adversary cast him to the earth.
In 1836 he married a nineteen-year-old English girl, Amelia Byam, granddaughter of Sir Charles Byam, some time British Commissioner for Antigua.
For a short time he devoted himself to the perfection of a hot-air engine, and a sounding device by which ships might ascertain the depth of the water over which they were passing. Then he turned to a new activity. The result was revolutionary. What he had almost accomplished in the field of land-transportation with the Novelty, he now actually achieved in steam-navigation on the sea. To Ericsson should be credited the perfection and application of the screw for the propulsion of steam-driven vessels.
Up to the dawn of the nineteenth century the sailing-ship had ruled the seas. And even until the middle of that century the fast clippers, with their towers of widespread canvas, had held supreme domination over the world’s waterways. But in the year 1835 Ericsson designed a rotary propeller driven by a steam-engine, which marked the beginning of the end of sailing days. The steam-engine, first placed in a ship by Robert Fulton, the American inventor, was no novelty, but it had been used only to propel vessels by means of paddle-wheels attached to each side of the vessels, huge cumbersome contrivances, which were easily damaged by heavy seas and which on ships of war afforded easy targets for the enemy.