John Ericsson and the Engines of Exile

JOHN ERICSSON AND THE ENGINES OF EXILE

Leaving behind financial ruin in their ancestral Swedish village, in 1810 the Ericsson family brought their small children across the country, entering a dynamic project to link Sweden’s two boundary seas with a warship canal. This move launched John Ericsson, 7, and his brother Nils, 8, into futures of great achievement.

John would, in the 1830s, in England, invent the world’s first practical marine propeller and, in the 1860s, in America, invent a whole new kind of warship, the USS Monitor.

Nils’ itinerary to fame lifted him by stages, like locks in the Swedish canals he built, before he was put in charge of creating Sweden’s new railroad network. John’s path, though, traversed far stormy waters of rejection, humiliation, injustice and even imprisonment. But in 1862 John was credited with having saved the Union’s blockade of the rebellious South and became an American hero. Why, then, did John continually pledge fealty to Sweden, where he never again set foot?

Clues to this mystery may be found in his family’s exodus from their village, or in John’s lifelong rivalry with Nils, or in John’s guilty neglect of his illegitimate Swedish son, Hjalmar, whom he had left behind in Nils’ family. All these are events of this book, but it especially focuses on the incursion into John Ericsson’s life in New York City, in 1876, of the Swedish visitor he least wanted to see. Hjalmar Elworth, who had succeeded Nils as a director of the new Swedish railroad system, came to see our Centennial Exhibition and then to cross America on our new Transcontinental Railroad. He also asked, at 52 years of age, to meet his father for the very first time. The meeting that Ericsson first rebuffed and then agreed to might be called the last of John’s great departures. Over the next 11 years, his many letters to his son charted Ericsson’s surprising discoveries not only in Nature, but in his own nature.