The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 57, July, 1862

Every one will remember the interest which this caloric-ship excited throughout the country. She made a trip from New York to Alexandria on the Potomac, in very rough weather, in the latter part of February, 1853. On this trip the engines were in operation for seventy-three hours without being stopped for a moment, and without requiring the slightest adjustment, the consumption of fuel being only five tons in twenty-four hours. At Alexandria she was visited by the President and President elect, the heads of the departments, a large number of naval officers, and many members of both Houses of Congress, and subsequently by the foreign ministers in a body, and by the Legislature of Virginia, then in session. Ericsson was invited by a committee of the Legislature to visit Richmond, as the guest of the State. The Secretary of the Navy recommended, in a special communication to Congress, the passage of a resolution authorizing him to contract for the construction of a frigate of two thousand tons to be equipped with caloric-engines, and to appropriate for this purpose five hundred thousand dollars. This recommendation failed in consequence of the pressure of business at the close of the session.

But notwithstanding the surprise and admiration which this achievement excited in the scientific world, the speed attained was not sufficient to meet the practical exigencies of commerce; and the repetition of the engines on this large scale could not be undertaken at the charge of individuals. Ericsson accordingly wisely devoted himself to perfecting the Calorie-Engine on a small scale, and in 1859 he produced it in a form which has since proved a complete success. It is no longer a subject of experiment, but exists as a perfect, practical machine. More than five hundred of these engines, with cylinders varying from a diameter of six inches to one of forty inches, are now in successful operation. It is applied to purposes of pumping, printing, hoisting, grinding, sawing, turning light machinery, working telegraphic instruments and sewing-machines, and propelling boats. No less than forty daily papers (among which we may mention the "National Intelligencer") are printed by means of this engine. In Cuba it is used for grinding sugar-cane, on Southern plantations for ginning cotton; and there is an endless variety of domestic, agricultural, and mechanical uses to which it may be advantageously applied.

The extent of power attainable by this machine, consistently with its application to practical uses, is not yet precisely defined. Within the limit thus far given to it, its power is certain, uniform, and entirely sufficient. It is not attended with the numerous perils that make the steam-engine so uncomfortable a servant, but is absolutely free from danger. It requires no engineering supervision. It consumes a very small amount of fuel (about one-third of the amount required by the steam-engine) and requires no water. These peculiarities not only make it a very desirable substitute for the steam-engine, but render it available for many purposes to which the steam-engine would never be applied.

In addition to his regular professional avocations, Ericsson was industriously occupied in devising new applications of the Calorie-Engine, when the attempted secession of the Southern States plunged the country into the existing war and struck a blow at all the arts of peace. Ills whole heart and mind were given at once to the support of the Union. Liberal in all his ideas, he is warmly attached to republican institutions, and has a hearty abhorrence of intolerance and oppression in all their forms. His early military education and his long study of the appliances of naval warfare increased the interest with which he watched the progress of events. The abandonment of the Norfolk navy-yard to the Rebels struck him as a disgrace that might have been avoided. He foresaw the danger of a formidable antagonist from that quarter in the steamship which we had so obligingly furnished them. The building of gun-boats with steam-machinery above the water-line—where the first shot from an enemy might render it useless—seemed to him, in view of what he had done and was ready to do again, a very unnecessary error. Knowing thoroughly all the improvements made and making in the war-steamers of England and France, and feeling the liability of their interference in our affairs, he could not appreciate the wisdom of building new vessels according to old ideas. The blockade of the Potomac by Rebel batteries, in the very face of our navy, seemed to him an indignity which need not be endured, if the inventive genius of the North could have fair play.

An impregnable iron gun-boat was, in his judgment, the thing that was needed; and he determined that the plan of such a vessel should be his contribution towards the success of the war. The subject was not a new one to him. He had given it much consideration, and his plan, in all its essential features, had been matured long before. Proposals for iron-clad vessels having been invited by the Navy Department, Ericsson promptly submitted his plans and specifications. Knowing the opposition that novelties always encounter, he had no great expectation that his proposal would be accepted. "I have done my part," said he; "I have offered my plan. It is for the Government to say whether I shall be allowed to carry it out." He felt confident, however, that, if the plan should be brought to the notice of the President, his practical wisdom and sound common sense could not fail to decide in its favor. Fortunately for the country, Ericsson's offer was accepted by the Navy Department. He immediately devoted all his energies to the execution of his task, and the result was the construction of the vessel to which he himself gave the name of the "Monitor." What she is and what she has accomplished, we need not here repeat. Whatever may be her future history, we may safely say, in the words of the New York Chamber of Commerce, that "the floating-battery Monitor deserves to be, and will be, forever remembered with gratitude and admiration."

We rejoice to believe that the merits and services of Ericsson are now fully appreciated by the people of the United States. The thanks of the nation have been tendered to him by a resolution of Congress. The Boston Board of Trade and the New York Chamber of Commerce have passed resolutions expressive of their gratitude. The latter body expressed also their desire that the Government of the United States should make to Captain Ericsson "such suitable return for his services as will evince the gratitude of a great nation." Upon hearing this suggestion, Ericsson, with characteristic modesty, remarked,—"All the remuneration I desire for the Monitor I get out of the construction of it. It is all-sufficient." Nevertheless we think the suggestion well worthy of consideration. In the same spirit of manly independence, he discountenanced the movement set on foot among the merchants of New York for the subscription of a sum of money to be presented to him. He asks nothing but fair remuneration for services rendered,—and that, it is to be hoped, the people will take care that he shall receive.

Ericsson is now zealously at work in constructing six new iron gun-boats on the plan of the Monitor. If that remarkable structure can be surpassed, he is the man to accomplish it. His ambition is to render the United States impregnable against the navies of the world. "Give me only the requisite means," he writes, "and in a very short time we can say to those powers now bent on destroying republican institutions, 'Leave the Gulf with your frail craft, or perish!' I have all my life asserted that mechanical science will put an end to the power of England over the seas. The ocean is Nature's highway between the nations. It should be free; and surely Nature's laws, when properly applied, will make it so."

His reputation as an engineer is worldwide. In 1852 he was made a Knight of the Order of Vasa by King Oscar of Sweden. The following extract from a poem "To John Ericsson" we translate from "Svenska Tidningen," the Government journal of Stockholm. It is eloquently expressive of the pride and admiration with which he is regarded in his native country.

"World-wide his fame, so gracefully adorningHis native Sweden with enduring radiance!Not a king's crown could give renown so noble:For his is Thought's great triumph, and the sceptreHe wields is over elements his subjects!"

Although now in his sixtieth year, Ericsson has the appearance of a man of forty. He is in the very maturity of a vigorous manhood, and retains all the fire and enthusiasm of youth. He has a frame of iron, cast in a large and symmetrical mould. His head and face are indicative of intellectual power and a strong will. His presence impresses one, at the first glance, as that of an extraordinary man. His bearing is dignified and courteous, with a touch perhaps of military brusquerie in his mode of address. He has a keen sense of humor, a kindly and generous disposition, and a genial and companionable nature. He is a "good hater" and a firm friend. Like all men of strong character and outspoken opinions, he has some enemies; but his chosen friends he "grapples to his heart with hooks of steel."

He is not a mere mechanician, but has great knowledge of men and of affairs, and an ample fund of information on all subjects. His conversation is engaging and instructive; and when he seeks to enlist coöperation in his mechanical enterprises, few men can withstand the force of his arguments and the power of his personal magnetism.

Although his earnings have sometimes been large, his heavy expenditures in costly experiments have prevented him from acquiring wealth. Money is with him simply a means of working out new ideas for the benefit of mankind; and in this way he does not scruple to spend to the utmost limit of his resources. He lives freely and generously, but is strictly temperate and systematic in all his habits.

The amount of labor which he is capable of undergoing is astonishing. While engaged in carrying out his inventions, it is a common thing for him to pass sixteen hours a day at his table, in the execution of detailed mechanical drawings, which he throws off with a facility and in a style that have probably never been surpassed. He does not seem to need such recreation as other men pine after. He never cares to run down to the seashore, or take a drive into the country, or spend a week at Saratoga or at Newport. Give him his drawing-table, his plans, his models, the noise of machinery, the clatter of the foundry, and he is always contented. Week in and week out, summer and winter, he works on and on,—and the harder he works, the more satisfied he seems to be. He is as untiring as one of his own engines, which never stop so long as the fire burns. Endowed with such a constitution, it is to be hoped that new triumphs and many years of honor and usefulness are yet before him.

* * * * *

MOVING

Man is like an onion. He exists in concentric layers. He is born a bulb and grows by external accretions. The number and character of his involutions certify to his culture and courtesy. Those of the boor are few and coarse. Those of the gentleman are numerous and fine. But strip off the scales from all and you come to the same germ. The core of humanity is barbarism. Every man is a latent savage.

You may be startled and shocked, but I am stating fact, not theory. I announce not an invention, but a discovery. You look around you, and because you do not see tomahawks and tattooing you doubt my assertion. But your observation is superficial. You have not penetrated into the secret place where souls abide. You are staring only at the outside layer of your neighbors; just peel them and see what you will find.

I speak from the highest possible authority,—my own. Representing the gentler half of humanity, of respectable birth, tolerable parts, and good education, as tender-hearted as most women, not unfamiliar with the best society, mingling, to some extent, with those who understand and practise the minor moralities, you would at once infer from my circumstances that I was a very fair specimen of the better class of Americans,—and so I am. For one that stands higher than I in the moral, social, and intellectual scale, you will undoubtedly find ten that stand lower. Yet through all these layers gleam the fiery eyes of my savage. I thought I was a Christian, I have endeavored to do my duty to my day and generation; but of a sudden Christianity and civilization leave me in the lurch, and the "old Adam" within me turns out to be just such a fierce Saxon pirate as hurtled down against the white shores of Britain fifteen hundred years ago.

For we have been moving.

People who live in cities and move regularly every year from one good, finished, right-side-up house to another will think I give a very small reason for a very broad fact; but they do not know what they are talking about. They have fallen into a way of looking upon a house only as an exaggerated trunk, into which they pack themselves annually with as much nonchalance as if it were only their preparation for a summer trip to the seashore. They don't strike root anywhere. They don't have to tear up anything. A man comes with cart and horses. There is a stir in the one house,—they are gone;—there is a stir in the other house,—they are settled,—and everything is wound up and set going to run another year. We do these things differently in the country. We don't build a house by way of experiment and live in it a few years, then tear it down and build another. We live in a house till it cracks, and then we plaster it over; then it totters, and we prop it up; then it rocks, and we rope it down; then it sprawls, and we clamp it; then it crumbles, and we have a new underpinning,—but keep living in it all the time. To know what moving really means, you must move from just such a rickety-rackety old farmhouse, where you have clung and grown like a fungus ever since there was anything to grow,—where your life and luggage have crept into all the crevices and corners, and every wall is festooned with associations thicker than the cobwebs, though the cobwebs are pretty thick,—where the furniture and the pictures and the knick-knacks are so become a part and parcel of the house, so grown with it and into it, that you do not know they are chiefly rubbish till you begin to move them and they fall to pieces, and don't know it then, but persist in packing them up and carrying them away for the sake of auld lang syne, till, set up again in your new abode, you suddenly find that their sacredness is gone, their dignity has degraded into dinginess, and the faded, patched chintz sofa, that was not only comfortable, but respectable, in the old wainscoted sitting-room, has suddenly turned into "an object," when lang syne goes by the board and the heirloom is incontinently set adrift. Undertake to move from this tumble-down old house, strewn thick with the débris of many generations, into a tumble-up, peaky, perky, plastery, shingly, stary new one, that is not half finished, and never will be, and good enough for it, and you will perhaps comprehend how it is that I find a great crack in my life. On the farther side are prosperity, science, literature, philosophy, religion, society, all the refinements, and amenities, and benevolences, and purities of life,—in short, all the arts of peace, and civilization, and Christianity,—and on this side—moving. You will also understand why that one word comprises, to my thinking, all the discomforts short of absolute physical torture that can be condensed into the human lot. Condensed, did I say? If it were a condensed agony, I could endure it. One great, stunning, overpowering blow is undoubtedly terrible, but you rally all your fortitude to meet and resist it, and when it is over it is over and the recuperative forces go to work; but a trouble that worries and baffles and pricks and rasps you, that penetrates into all the ramifications of your life, that fills you with profound disgust, and fires you with irrepressible fury, and makes of you an Ishmaelite indeed, with your hand against every man and every man's hand against you,—ah! that is the experimentum crucis. Such is moving, in the country,—not an act, but a process,—not a volition, but a fermentation.

We will say that the first of September is the time appointed for the transit. The day approaches. It is the twenty-ninth of August. I prepare to take hold of the matter in earnest. I am nipped in the bud by learning that the woman who was to help about the carpets cannot come, because her baby is taken with the croup. I have not a doubt of it. I never knew a baby yet that did not go and have the croup, or the colic, or the cholera infantum, just when it was imperatively necessary that it should not have them. But there is no help for it. I shudder and bravely gird myself for the work. I tug at the heavy, bulky, unwieldy carpets, and am covered with dust and abomination. I think carpets are the most untidy, unwholesome nuisances in the whole world. It is impossible to be clean with them under your feet. You may sweep your carpet twenty times and raise a dust on the twenty-first. I am sure I heard long ago of some new fashion that was to be introduced,—some Italian style, tiles, or mosaic-work, or something of the sort. I should welcome anything that would dispense with these vile rags. I sigh over the good old sanded floors that our grandmothers rejoiced in,—and so, apotheosizing the past and anathematizing the present, I pull away, and the tacks tear my fingers, and the hammer slips and lets me back with a jerk, and the dust fills my hair and nose and eyes and mouth and lungs, and my hands grow red and coarse and ragged and sore and begrimed, and I pull and choke and cough and strangle and pull.

So the carpets all come up and the curtains all come down. The bureaus march out of the chamber-windows and dance on a tight-rope down into the yard below. The chairs are set at "heads and points." The clothes are packed into the trunks. The flour and meal and sugar, all the wholesale edibles, are carted down to the new house and stored. The forks are wrapped up and we eat with our fingers, and have nothing to eat at that. Then we are informed that the new house will not be ready short of two weeks at least. Unavoidable delays. The plasterers were hindered; the painters misunderstood orders; the paperers have defalcated, and the universe generally comes to a pause. It is no matter in what faith I was nurtured, I am now a believer in total depravity. Contractors have no conscience; masons are not men of their word; carpenters are tricky; all manner of cunning workmen are bruised reeds. But there is nothing to do but submit and make the best of it,—a horrible kind of mechanism. We go forthwith into a chrysalis state for two weeks. The only sign of life is an occasional lurch towards the new house, just sufficient to keep up the circulation. One day I dreamily carry down a basket of wine-glasses. At another time I listlessly stuff all my slippers into a huge pitcher and take up the line of march. Again a bucket is filled with tea-cups, or I shoulder the fire-shovel. The two weeks drag themselves away, and the cry is still, "Unfinished!" To prevent petrifying into a fossil remain, or relapsing into primitive barbarism, or degenerating into a dormouse, I rouse my energies and determine to put my own shoulder to the wheel and see if something cannot be accomplished. I rise early in the morning and walk to Dan, to hire a painter who is possessed of "gumption," "faculty." Arrived in Dan, I am told that he is in Beersheba. Nothing daunted, I take a short cut across the fields to Beersheba, bearding manifold dangers from rickety stone-walls, strong enough to keep women in, but not strong enough to keep bears, bulls, and other wild beasts out,—toppling enough to play the mischief with draperies, but not toppling enough to topple over when urgently pressed to do so. But I secure my man, and remember no more my sorrow of bulls and stones for joy at my success. From Beersheba I proceed to Padan-aram to buy seven pounds of flour, thence to Galilee of the Gentiles for a pound of cheese, thence to the land of Uz for a smoked halibut, thence to the ends of the earth for a lemon to make life tolerable,—and the days hobble on.

"The flying gold of the ruined woodlands" drives through the air, the signal is given, and there is no longer "quiet on the Potomac." The unnatural calm gives way to an unearthly din. Once more I bring myself to bear on the furniture and the trumpery, and there is a small household whirlpool. All that went before "pales its ineffectual fires." Now comes the strain upon my temper, and my temper bends, and quivers, and creaks, and cracks. Ithuriel touches me with his spear; all the integuments of my conventional, artificial, and acquired gentleness peel off, and I stand revealed a savage. Everything around me sloughs off its usual habitude and becomes savage. Looking-glasses are shivered by the dozen. A bit is nicked out of the best China sugar-bowl. A pin gets under the matting that is wrapped around the centre-table and jags horrible hieroglyphics over the whole polished surface. The bookcase that we are trying to move tilts, and trembles, and goes over, and the old house through all her frame gives signs of woe. A crash detonate on the stairs brings me up from the depths of the closet where I am burrowing. I remember seeing Petronius disappear a moment ago with my lovely and beloved marble Hebe in his arms. I rush rampant to the upper landing in time to see him couchant on the lower. "I have broken my leg," roars Petronius, as if I cared for his leg. A fractured leg is easily mended; but who shall restore me the nose of my nymph, marred into irremediable deformity and dishonor?

Occasionally a gleam of sunshine shoots athwart the darkness to keep me back from rash deeds. Behind the sideboard I find a little cross of dark, bright hair and gold and pearls, that I lost two years ago and would not be comforted. O happy days woven in with the dark, bright hair! O golden, pearly days, come back to me again! "Never mind your gewgaws," interposes real life; "what is to be done with the things in this drawer?" Lying atop of a heap of old papers in the front-yard, waiting the match that is to glorify them into flame, I find a letter that mysteriously disappeared long since and caused me infinite alarm lest indelicate eyes might see it and indelicate hands make ignoble use of its honest and honorable meaning. I learn also sundry new and interesting facts in mechanics. I become acquainted for the first time with the modus operandi of "roller-cloths." I never understood before how the roller got inside the towel. It was one of those gentle domestic mysteries that repel even while they invite investigation. I shall not give the result of my discovery to the public. If you wish very much to find out, you can move, as I did.

But the rifts of sunshine disappear, the clouds draw together and close in. The savage walks abroad once more, and I go to bed tired of life.

I have scarcely fallen asleep, when I am reluctantly, by short and difficult stages, awakened. A rumbling, grating, strident noise first confuses, then startles me. Is it robbers? Is it an earthquake? Is it the coming of fate? I lie rigid, bathed in a cold perspiration. I hear the tread of banditti on the moaning stairs. I see the flutter of ghostly robes by the uncurtained windows. A chill, uncanny air rushes in and grips at my damp hair. I am nerved by the extremity of my terror. I will die of anything but fright. I jerk off the bedclothes, convulse into an upright posture, and glare into the darkness. Nothing. I rise softly, creep cautiously and swiftly over the floor, that always creaked, but now thunders at every footfall. A light gleams through the open door of the opposite room whence the sound issues. A familiar voice utters an exclamation which I recognize. It is Petronius, the unprincipled scoundrel, who is uncording a bed, dragging remorselessly through innumerable holes the long rope whose doleful wail came near giving me an epilepsy. My savage lets loose the dogs of war. Petronius would fain defend himself by declaring that it is morning. I indignantly deny it. He produces his watch. A fig for his watch! I stake my consciousness against twenty watches, and go to bed again; but Sleep, angry goddess, once repulsed, returns no more. The dawn comes up the sky and confirms the scorned watch. The golden daggers of the morning prick in under my eyelids, and Petronius introduces himself upon the scene once more to announce, that, if I don't wish to be corded up myself, I must abdicate that bed. The threat does not terrify me. Indeed, nothing at the moment seems more inviting than to be corded up and let alone; but duty still binds me to life, and, assuring Petronius that the just law will do that service for him, if he does not mend his ways, I slowly emerge again into the world,—the dreary, chaotic world,—the world that is never at rest.