Episode Details

John Ericsson, born in Sweden in 1803, was a teenage surveyor on the Gota Canal project who carried a footstool to reach his instruments. After building a heat engine that ran on birch wood fumes, he left the Swedish army in 1826 for England, where the engine failed on coal, his locomotive Novelty lost the 1829 Rainhill Trials to George Stephenson's Rocket, and London fire crews rejected the steam fire engine that pumped for five hours at the Argyle Rooms blaze. Mounting debts landed him in debtors' prison.

Naval officer Robert Stockton brought Ericsson to New York in 1839 to build the USS Princeton, with underwater twin screw propellers and a 12-inch gun reinforced with heated iron hoops. Stockton's own thicker cast iron gun burst during an 1844 Potomac cruise, killing the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Navy, and Stockton shifted the blame to Ericsson. Backed by Cornelius Delamater's ironworks, Ericsson prospered with small caloric hot air engines, then reluctantly designed the USS Monitor, built in about 100 days, which fought the CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads on March 9, 1862.

• His hot air engine used a regenerator of wire mesh to capture exhaust heat and preheat incoming air.
• He won the Rumford Prize for his work in thermodynamics.
• The Monitor's low, flat deck was inspired by the lumber rafts he had seen as a child in Sweden.
• In 1883 he built a solar powered air engine using curved mirrors in rectangular troughs.
• He died on March 8, 1889, and after public outcry the Navy sent the cruiser USS Baltimore to carry his remains to Sweden.