Engineering Prowess - American History, 1493-1945

Back to Science, Technology and Industry

Competition between Ericsson’s screw propeller and Steven’s scull

30 March 1845

View John Ericsson to James Bennett defending the merits of the screw propellor

In this calm but impassioned letter to James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, the Swedish inventor John Ericsson defends his engineering prowess against the claims of an influential U.S. Navy captain, Robert Stockton. Complaining that he has been “suffering greatly in reputation by the very unjust statements in the papers”, Ericsson encloses a notice, which he wishes Bennett to place in his newspaper, setting out the superiority of his propeller-based propulsion system for ships over a rival system, "Stevens’ scull", which Stockton favours and has been promoting.

John Ericsson (1803-89) was one of the most influential mechanical engineers of nineteenth-century America. Something of a prodigy – he was working independently as a surveyor at the age of fourteen – he moved to Britain in 1829, where a steam engine he co-designed proved the fastest entrant in the railway competition which brought the Stephensons’ Rocket to prominence. Ericsson then turned his attention to maritime engines, but a rejection by the Royal Navy of his innovative twin-screw propeller led to a move to New York under the wing of Robert Stockton, who invited him to develop a ship for the U.S. Navy incorporating his technology. This was the U.S.S. Princeton, the navy’s first screw-driven steamship and the vessel which, two years after its launch, was being retrofitted at Stockton’s behest with a propulsion system which Ericsson knew to be inferior to the one he had designed for it.

Ericsson, Stockton and the Princeton had a troubled time together. Stockton had clout and an ego but did not have his collaborator’s talents; nevertheless, he gradually sidelined Ericsson during the Princeton’s construction. After the ship’s launch Stockton fitted a second gun of his own design, essentially a copy of Ericsson’s but lacking the Swede’s innovative safety features, of which Stockton was ignorant and without which the gun could not withstand its own blasts. At a ceremonial firing Stockton’s gun exploded, killing the secretary of the Navy and seven others; nevertheless, such was Stockton’s influence that the subsequent enquiry blamed the incident on Ericsson and ‘bad luck’.

Despite this, even if Ericsson’s personal relationship with Stockton was not to recover, his role in the evolution of the U.S. Navy continued. In early 1862, after the outbreak of the Civil War, Ericsson accepted an invitation from Lincoln’s secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles, to design an ironclad warship for the Union. This was the Monitor, completed in 100 days to thwart the threat to Union shipping from the Confederate ironclad Virginia, news of the construction of which was smuggled north by the housekeeper of one of its builders. At the Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862 the Monitor fought the Virginia to a standstill, saving the rest of the Union fleet from devastation. Still later Ericsson was to develop torpedo technology and a "sun engine" powered by air heated by sunlight. Fittingly, after his death his remains were returned to Sweden by U.S.S. Baltimore, flagship of the North Atlantic Squadron of the navy he had done so much to develop.