John Ericsson (1803–1899) was a Swedish-American inventor and engineer, famous for the iron-clad monitor. He was not a man of any invention or unknown before that memorable day in March 1862. As a boy in Sweden, he showed a mechanical bent very early—so early that at 12 years of age, he was apprenticed as a draftsman.
From 1820 to 1827, he was in the Swedish army, where his excellent military skills won him a captaincy. Then he obtained leave to travel to London. In partnership with John Braithwaite, he competed for a prize offered for a steam locomotive by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company. Stephenson won the competition instead of Ericsson. But the latter went on with his inventing work and completed various marine inventions.
He built the first kind of naval engine below the water line. He won a £20,000 prize from the British Admiralty for creating a screw propeller. In 1838, he designed the engines and propellers used by the first vessels to cross the Atlantic in regular steamship service.
The United States government became interested in him about this time and ordered an iron vessel at a British shipyard to be fitted with his screws and engines.
John Ericsson followed the boat across the Atlantic and settled in New York in 1839 as a shipbuilder. Despite his long and arduous struggle, his many useful inventions eventually made him wealthy.
His invention of the Monitor—that ironclad cheese box on a raft,’’ with its revolving gun turret—revolutionized naval construction. Later, he became interested in torpedoes and motors driven by solar heat. John Ericsson became a citizen of the United States in 1848. However, when he died on March 8, 1889, his body was, at his request, taken to Sweden on an American warship.
It was buried with many honors. In Stockholm, Sweden, and New York City, monuments have been erected to his memory. In 1889, the anniversary of the Battle of Hampton Roads, in which Ericsson’s Monitor played a prominent role, he is buried in Filipstad, Sweden, in Värmland.
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