1. John Ericsson was active in England and the United States.
33 Facts About John Ericsson
1. 2.
John Ericsson was the younger brother of Nils Ericson, a distinguished canal and railway builder in Sweden.
3.
John Ericsson had lost money in speculation and had to move his family to Forsvik in 1810.
4.
The extraordinary skills of the two John Ericsson brothers were discovered by Baltzar von Platen, the architect of Gota Canal.
5.
At the age of fourteen, John Ericsson was already working independently as a surveyor.
6.
John Ericsson's assistant had to carry a footstool for him to reach the instruments during surveying work.
7.
John Ericsson was sent to northern Sweden to do surveying, and in his spare time he constructed a heat engine which used the fumes from the fire instead of steam as a propellant.
8.
In 1829 he and English engineer John Ericsson Braithwaite built Novelty for the Rainhill Trials arranged by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
9.
Two further engines were built by Braithwaite and John Ericsson, named William IV and Queen Adelaide after the new king and queen.
10.
John Ericsson was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1877.
11.
John Ericsson's only formal education was a basic officer's education and training during his time in the Swedish Army, achieving the military rank of captain.
12.
On March 27,1822, John Ericsson passed a surveyor's examination in the Royal capital city of Stockholm.
13.
John Ericsson then improved ship design with two screw-propellers rotating in opposite directions.
14.
Captain Stockton's plan was for John Ericsson to oversee the development of a new class of naval warship of a larger heavier frigate with Stockton using his considerable political connections to grease the funding authorizations wheels.
15.
The gun had been designed by John Ericsson and used hoop construction to pre-tension the breech, adding to its strength and allowing safe use of a larger charge.
16.
Stockton carefully avoided letting outsiders know that John Ericsson was the primary inventor.
17.
When John Ericsson arrived from England and settled in New York City, he was persuaded by Samuel Risley of Greenwich Village to give his work to the Phoenix Foundry.
18.
The first hot-air invention of Capt John Ericsson was first introduced in the ship John Ericsson, built entirely by DeLamater.
19.
John Ericsson then proceeded to invent independently the caloric, or hot air, engine in the 1820s which used hot air, caloric in the scientific parlance of the day, instead of steam as a working fluid.
20.
John Ericsson's engine was not initially successful due to the differences in combustion temperatures between burning Swedish wood and firing of British coal.
21.
In spite of his setbacks, John Ericsson was later awarded the Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1862 for his invention.
22.
In 1830, John Ericsson patented his second engine, that can work either with steam, air or water.
23.
The caloric ship, powered by the fourth John Ericsson engine was built in 1852.
24.
Apparently in the post Civil War era some time before or around 1882, from the publishing date, a ship was purchased by a Captain Charles L Dingley called the Ericsson with a weight of 1,645 tons that was built by John Ericsson to try out the hot air engine as a motive power in open ocean navigation.
25.
Decades later, in 1883 John Ericsson built a solar air engine of 1 HP.
26.
On September 26,1854, John Ericsson presented Emperor Napoleon III of France with drawings of iron-clad armored battleships with a dome-shaped gun tower, and even though the French emperor praised this particular plan of an invention, he did nothing to bring it to practical application or to obtain and build such a revolutionary vessel for the French Navy.
27.
Later John Ericsson designed other naval vessels and weapons, including a type of torpedo and a destroyer, a torpedo boat that could fire a cannon from an underwater port.
28.
John Ericsson provided some technical support for John Philip Holland in his early submarine experiments.
29.
John Ericsson died on March 8,1889, the anniversary of the Battle of Hampton Roads, in which his Monitor famously played a central role.
30.
John Ericsson's final resting place is at Filipstad in Varmland, Sweden.
31.
The seated figure of John Ericsson has the figures above and behind him of Vision, Labor and Adventure.
32.
Monuments in honor of John Ericsson have been erected at:.
33.
John Ericsson is a major character in Harry Harrison's novels of alternate history, the Stars and Stripes trilogy.