propelling boats began in England. A model boat, two feet long, fitted
up with two screws, was launched in a London bath-house, and, supplied
by steam from a boiler placed at the side of the tank, was sent around
at a speed estimated at six miles an hour. Ericsson was so delighted
with it that he built a boat eight feet by forty, armed with two
propellers, in the hope that the British Admiralty might adopt the
invention. This boat went through the water at the rate of ten miles an
hour, or seven miles an hour towing a schooner of one hundred and forty
tons burden. He invited the Admiralty to see the work of his screw.
Steaming up to Somerset House with his little vessel, Ericsson took the
Admiralty barge in tow, to the wonder of the watermen, who could make
nothing of the novel craft with no apparent means of propulsion. The
British Admiralty, however, was not easily convinced. These wiseacres
said nothing, but Ericsson professed to have heard that their verdict
was against him because one of the authorities of the board decided that
"even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel it would be
found altogether useless in practice, because the power, being applied
to the stern, it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel
steer."
This official blindness cost England the services of the inventor. The
United States happened to have as consul in Liverpool at that day (1837)
Mr. Francis B. Ogden, a pioneer in steam navigation on the Ohio River.
Ogden saw Ericsson's invention and introduced him to Captain Robert F.
Stockton, of the United States Navy. With Stockton, seeing was
believing, and when he returned from a trip on Ericsson's boat, he
exclaimed: "I do not want the opinion of your scientific men. What I
have seen to-day satisfies me." Before the vessel had completed her
trip, Ericsson received from Stockton an order for two boats. Upon
Stockton's assurance that the United States would try his propeller upon
a large scale, Ericsson closed up his affairs in England and embarked
for the United States. Through the good offices of Stockton, but after
considerable delay, a vessel called the Princeton was ordered and
completed. She carried a number of radical improvements destined to make
a revolution in naval warfare. The boilers and engines were below the
waterline, out of the way of shot and shell. The smoke-stack was a
telescopic affair, replacing the tall pipe that formed so conspicuous a
target upon the old boats. Centrifugal blowers in the hold, worked by
separate engines, secured increased draught for the furnaces. The
Princeton was a wonder, and everyone was ready to praise the inventive
genius of Ericsson and the daring of Captain Stockton in adopting so
many radical novelties. An entry in the diary of John Quincy Adams,
dated February 28, 1844, tells the sad story of the public exhibition of
the Princeton at Washington:
"I went into the chamber of the Committee of Manufactures and wrote
there till six. Dined with Mr. Grinnell and Mr. Winthrop. While we were
at dinner John Barney burst into the chamber, rushed up to General Scott
and told him, with groans, that the President wished to see him; that
the great gun on board the Princeton had burst and killed the Secretary
of State, Upshur; the Secretary of the Navy, T.W. Gilmer; Captain
Beverly Kennon, Virgil Maxey, a Colonel Gardiner, of New York, a colored
servant of the President, and desperately wounded several of the crew."
So tragic an introduction was not needed to direct public attention to
the Princeton. Ericsson had placed the United States at the head of
naval powers in the application of steam-power to warfare. He had made
the experiment of the Princeton at a great cost to himself, and two
years of concentrated effort had been devoted to the service of the
Government. For his time, labor, and necessary expenditures he rendered
a bill of $15,000, leaving the question of what, if anything, should be
charged for his patent rights entirely to the discretion and generosity
of the Government. The bill was refused payment by the Navy Department
because of its limited discretion. Ericsson went to Congress with it,
but a dozen years passed without the slightest progress toward a
settlement. A court of claims rendered a unanimous decree in his favor,
but Congress, to which the bill was again sent, failed to make an
appropriation, and there the matter has remained, notwithstanding the
brilliant services since rendered to this country by the inventor.
Various nations claim the invention of the screw as applied to boats. At
Trieste and at Vienna stand statues erected to Joseph Ressel, for whom
the Austrians lay claim. Commodore Stevens, of New Jersey, is also said
by Professor Thurston to have built and worked a screw-propeller on the
Hudson in 1812. Whatever may be the final decision as to Ericsson's
claim in this matter, there, can be no doubt as to the value of the
services he rendered in building the Monitor. The suggestion of the
Monitor was first made in a communication from Ericsson to Napoleon
III., dated New York, September, 1854. This paper contained a
description of an iron-clad vessel surmounted by a cupola substantially
as in the Monitor as finally built. The emperor, through General Favre,
acknowledged the communication. Favre wrote: "The emperor has himself
examined with the greatest care the new system of naval attack which you
have communicated to him. His Majesty charges me with the honor of
informing you that he has found your ideas very ingenious and worthy of
the celebrated name of their author." For eight years Ericsson continued
working upon his idea of a revolving cupola or turret upon an iron-clad
raft, but found no opportunity to test the practical value of the
device. His time finally came when, in 1861, the Navy Department
appointed a board to examine plans for iron-clads. The board consisted
of Commodores Joseph Smith, Hiram Paulding, and Charles H. Davis.
Ericsson, having learned to distrust his own powers as a business agent,
engaged the assistance of C. S. Bushnell, a Connecticut man of some
wealth, who went to Washington and presented the designs of the Monitor
to the board.
Colonel W.C. Church, Ericsson's biographer, who has just been honored by
Sweden for his publications upon the life of the inventor, tells an
interesting story of the negotiations concerning the vessel which was to
render such signal services to the country. Bushnell could make no
headway with the board and decided that Ericsson's presence in
Washington was necessary. But the inventor was then, as during his
whole life, averse to any self-advertisement, and preferred his
workshop to any place on earth. But as he possessed a sort of rude
eloquence due to enthusiasm, Bushnell got him to Washington by
subterfuge. He was told that the board approved his plans for an
iron-clad and that it would be necessary for him to go to the capital
and complete the contract. Presenting himself before the board, what was
his astonishment to find that he was not only an unexpected but
apparently an unwelcome visitor. He was not long in doubt as to the
meaning of this reception. To his indignation and astonishment he was
informed that the plan of a vessel submitted by him had already been
rejected. His first impulse was to withdraw at once. Mastering his
anger, however, he inquired the reason for this decision. Commodore
Smith explained that the vessel had not sufficient stability; in other
words, it would be liable to upset. Captain Ericsson was too experienced
a naval designer to have overlooked this point, and in a lucid
explanation put his views before the board, winding up with the
declaration: "Gentlemen, after what I have said, I consider it to be
your duty to the country to give me an order to build the vessel before
I leave this room."
Withdrawing to a corner the board held a consultation and invited the
inventor to call again at one o'clock. When Ericsson returned he brought
with him a diagram illustrating more fully his reasons for considering
his proposed vessel to be perfectly stable. Commodore, afterward
Admiral, Paulding was convinced, and admitted that Ericsson had taught
him much about the stability of vessels. Secretary Welles was informed
that the board reported favorably upon Ericsson's plan, and told the
inventor that he might return to New York and begin work, as the
contract would follow him. When the contract came it was found to be a
singularly one-sided affair. If the Monitor proved vulnerable--in other
words; if it was not a success--the money paid for it by the Navy
Department was to be refunded.
[Illustration: Sectional View of Monitor through Turret and
Pilot-house.]
[Illustration: The Original Monitor.]
It took one hundred days to build the Monitor. During those three months
Ericsson scarcely slept, and even in his dreams he went over the details
of the new-fangled war-engine he was building. He named her Monitor
because, he said, she would warn the nations of the world that a new era
in naval warfare had begun. The story of his untiring activity has been
told almost as often as that of the battle between the Monitor and the
Merrimac. He was at the ship-yard before any of the workmen, and was the
last to leave. In the construction of so novel a craft difficulties of a
puzzling nature came up every day. If Ericsson could not solve them on
the spot, he studied the matter in the quiet of the night, and was ready
with his drawings in the morning. The result of the naval battle in
Hampton Roads, on the 9th of March, 1862, between the little Monitor and
the big Merrimac made Ericsson the hero of the hour. Had no David
appeared to stop the ravages of the Confederate Goliath, it is hard to
say what might not have been the injury inflicted upon the cause of the
Union by the terrible Merrimac. The United States Navy was virtually
panic-stricken when the Monitor, this "Yankee cheese-box on a plank," as
the Southerners called her, came to the rescue.
Notwithstanding the tremendous service rendered the country, Ericsson
declined to receive more compensation for the Monitor than his contract
called for. In reply to a resolution of the New York Chamber of Commerce
calling for "a suitable return for his services as will evince the
gratitude of the nation," Ericsson said: "All the remuneration I desire
for the Monitor I get out of the construction of it. It is
all-sufficient." Our grateful nation took him at his word. But honors of
another and less costly kind were showered upon him. Chief Engineer
Stimers, who was on the Monitor during her battle with the Merrimac,
wrote to Ericsson: "I congratulate you on your great success. Thousands
have this day blessed you. I have heard whole crews cheer you. Every man
feels that you have saved this place to the nation by furnishing us with
the means to whip an iron-clad frigate that was, until our arrival,
having it all her own way with our most powerful vessels."
[Illustration: Fac-simile of a Pencil Sketch by Ericsson, giving a
Transverse Section of his Original Monitor Plan, with a Longitudinal
Section drawn over it.]
[Illustration: Interior of the Destroyer, Looking toward the Bow.]
War vessels upon the plan of the Monitor speedily appeared among the
navies of several nations. England refused at first to admit the value
of the invention and was not converted until the double-turreted
Miantonomoh visited her waters in 1866, when one of the London papers
described her appearance among the British fleet as that of a wolf among
a flock of sheep. The day of the big wooden war-vessels was over. It
was, nevertheless, an Englishman and a naval officer, Captain Cowper
Coles, who sought to deprive Ericsson of the honor of his invention.
Coles declared that he had devised a ship during the Crimean War, in
which a turret or cupola was to protect the guns. Ericsson's letter to
Napoleon III., written in 1854, is sufficient answer to this, besides
which Ericsson's scheme includes more than a stationary shield for the
guns, which is all that Coles claimed. Coles succeeded, however, in
inducing the British Admiralty to build a vessel according to his plans.
This ill-fated craft upset off Cape Finisterre on the night of September
6, 1870, and went to the bottom with Coles and a crew of nearly five
hundred men.
Having devised an apparatus that made wooden war-vessels useless,
Ericsson turned his attention to the destruction of iron-clads, and
devoted ten years of his life to the construction of his famous
torpedo-boat, the Destroyer, upon which he spent about all the money he
amassed by other work. According to his belief, no vessel afloat could
escape annihilation in a battle with his Destroyer. This vessel is
designed to run at sufficient speed to overtake any of the iron-clads.
It offers small surface to the shot of an enemy, and besides being
heavily armored, it can be partly submerged beneath the waves. When
within fighting distance it fires under water, by compressed air, a
projectile containing dynamite sufficient to raise a big war-ship out of
the water. The explosion takes place when the projectile meets with
resistance, such as the sides of a ship. To Ericsson's great
disappointment, the United States Government persistently refused to
purchase the Destroyer or to commission Ericsson to build more vessels
of her type.
[Illustration: Development of the Monitor Idea.]
Of Ericsson's home life there is not much to be told. He was utterly
wrapped up in his work. With his devoted secretary, Mr. Arthur Taylor,
his days knew scarcely any variation. Of social recreation he had none.
In conversation he was abrupt and somewhat peculiar, apparently
regarding all other talk than that relating to mechanics and germane
subjects as a waste of words. His shrewd face, with its blue eyes and
fringe of white hair, was not an unkindly one, however, and the few
workmen he employed in the Beach Street house were devoted to him. No
great man was ever more intensely averse to personal notoriety. Although
often advised to make his Destroyer better known by means of newspaper
articles, he persistently refused to see newspaper men; and the
professional interviewer and lion-hunter were his pet aversions. It was
perhaps to avoid them that he left his house only after nightfall, and
then but for a walk in the neighborhood.
[Illustration: The Room in which Ericsson Worked for More than Twenty
Years.]
His time was divided according to rule. For thirty years he was called
by his servant at seven o'clock in the morning, and took a bath of very
cold water, ice being added to it in summer. After some gymnastic
exercises came breakfast at nine o'clock, always of eggs, tea, and brown
bread. His second and last meal of the day, dinner, never varied from
chops or steak, some vegetables, and tea and brown bread again.
Ice-water was the only luxury that he indulged in. He used tobacco in no
form. During the daytime he was accustomed to work at his desk or
drawing-table for about ten hours. After dinner he resumed work until
ten, when he started out for the stroll of an hour or more, which always
ended his day. The last desk work accomplished every day was to make a
record in his diary, always exactly one page long. This diary is in
Swedish and comprises more than fourteen thousand pages, thus covering a
period of forty years, during which he omitted but twenty days, in
1856, when he had a finger crushed by machinery. He scarcely knew what
sickness was, and just before his death said that he had not missed a
meal for fifteen years. He was a widower and left no children. He died
in the Beach Street house, after a short illness, on March 8, 1889, and
his remains were transferred to Sweden with naval honors.
[Illustration: Cyrus Hall McCormick.]
VIII.
CYRUS HALL McCORMICK.
In the course of an argument before the Commissioner of Patents, in
1859, the late Reverdy Johnson declared that the McCormick reaper was
worth $55,000,000 a year to this country, an estimate that was not
disputed. At about the same time the late William H. Seward said that
"owing to Mr. McCormick's invention the line of civilization moves
westward thirty miles each year." Already the London _Times_, after
ridiculing the McCormick reaper exhibited at the London World's Fair of
1851, as "a cross between an Astley (circus) chariot, a wheel-barrow,
and a flying-machine," confessed, when the reaper had been tested in the
fields, that it was "worth to the farmers of England the whole cost of
this exhibition." Writing of this glorious success, Mr. Seward said: "So
the reaper of 1831, as improved in 1845, achieved for its inventor a
triumph which all then felt and acknowledged was not more a personal one
than it was a national one. It was justly so regarded. No general or
consul, drawn in a chariot through the streets of Rome by order of the
Senate, ever conferred upon mankind benefits so great as he who thus
vindicated the genius of our country at the World's Exhibition of Art
in the metropolis of the British empire in 1851." In 1861, though
declining to extend the patent for the reaper, the Commissioner of
Patents, D.P. Holloway, paid the inventor this remarkable tribute:
"Cyrus H. McCormick is an inventor whose fame, while he is yet living,
has spread through the world. His genius has done honor to his own
country, and has been the admiration of foreign nations, and he will
live in the grateful recollection of mankind as long as the
reaping-machine is employed in gathering the harvest." Nevertheless the
extension of the patent of 1834, which act of justice would have given
the inventor an opportunity to obtain an adequate reward for his work,
was refused upon the extraordinary ground that "the reaper was of too
great value to the public to be controlled by any individual." In other
words, the benefit conferred by McCormick upon the country was too great
to be paid for; therefore no effort should be made to pay for it.
Finally, the French Academy of Sciences, when McCormick was elected to
the Institute of France--an honor paid but to few Americans--mentioned
the election as due to "his having done more for the cause of
agriculture than any other living man."
[Illustration: Farm where Cyrus H. McCormick was Born and Raised.]
It is thus evident that the tremendous service done to the civilized
world by the invention of the McCormick reaper was appreciated years
ago. Yet it is improbable that the whole value of the invention was
fully realized. To-day the McCormick works at Chicago turn out yearly,
and have turned out for several years, more than one hundred thousand
reapers and mowers. At a moderate estimate every McCormick reaper, and
every reaper founded upon it and containing its essential features,
saves the labor of six men during the ten harvest days of the year. The
present number of reapers in operation to-day, all of them based upon
the McCormick patents, is estimated at about two million, so that,
counting a man's labor at $1 a day, here is a yearly saving of more than
$100,000,000. The reaper thus stands beside the steam-engine and the
sewing-machine as one of the most important labor-saving inventions of
our time, relieving millions of men from the most arduous drudgery and
increasing the world's wealth by hundreds of millions of dollars every
year. It is some satisfaction to know that the inventor of the reaper
lived to enjoy the fruits of his work. A remarkable man in every
respect, his ingenuity, perseverance, courage under injustice, and
generosity finally won him not only the material rewards that were his
by right, but the esteem and honor of the civilized world.
Like Fulton and Morse, Cyrus Hall McCormick came of Scotch-Irish blood,
a race marked by fixed purpose, untiring industry in carrying out that
purpose, a strong sense of moral obligation, and an unswerving
determination to do right by the light of conscience though the heavens
fall. He was born on the 15th of February, 1809, at Walnut Grove, in
Rockbridge County, Va., and was the eldest of eight children, six of
whom lived to grow up. His father, Robert McCormick, in addition to
farming, had workshops of considerable importance on his farm, as well
as a saw-mill and grist-mill and smelting furnaces. In these workshops
young Cyrus McCormick probably got his first love for mechanical
devices. Robert McCormick was an inventor of no mean attainment. He
devised and built a thresher, a hemp-breaker, some mill improvements,
and in 1816 he made and tried a mechanical reaper. In those days so much
of the farmer's hard labor was expended in swinging the scythe that it
seems strange we have no record of more attempts to make a machine do
the work. A schoolmaster named Ogle is said to have built a reaper in
1822, but, according to his own admission, it would not work. Bell, a
Scotch minister, also contrived a reaping-machine that was tried in
1828. In the course of the subsequent patent litigation over the reaper
the claims of these early inventors were made the most of by McCormick's
opponents, but the courts of last resort invariably settled the question
in McCormick's favor.
As a farmer boy, young Cyrus McCormick began his day's work in the
fields at five o'clock. In winter he went to the Old Field School.
During his boyhood he would watch his father's experiments and
disappointments. His first attempt in the same direction was the
construction, at the age of fifteen, of a harvesting-cradle by which he
was enabled to keep up with an able-bodied workman. His first patented
invention (1831) was a plough which threw alternate furrows on either
side, being thus either a right-hand or left-hand plough. This was
superseded in 1833 by an improved plough, also by McCormick, called the
self-sharpening plough, which did excellent work. His father having
worked long and unsuccessfully at a mechanical reaper, it was natural
that young McCormick's mind should turn over the same problem from time
to time, and his father's failures did not deter him, although Robert
McCormick had suffered so much in mind and pocket through the
impracticability of his reaper that he warned his son against wasting
more time and money upon the dream. One martyr to mechanical progress
was enough for the McCormick family. But the possibility of making a
machine do the hard, hot work of the harvest-field had a fascination for
the young man, and the more he studied the discarded reaping-machine
made by his father in 1816, the more firmly he became convinced that
while the principle of that device was wrong, the work could be done. In
those days the development of the country really depended upon some
better, cheaper way of harvesting. The land was fertile, and there was
practically no end of it. But labor was scarce.
[Illustration: Exterior of the Blacksmith Shop where the First Reaper
was Built.]
Cyrus McCormick's plough was a success that encouraged him to take hold
of the more difficult problem of the reaper. He found that some device,
such as his father's, would cut grain after a fashion, provided it was
in perfect condition and stood up straight; the moment it became matted
and tangled and beaten down by wind and rain the machine was useless.
Other devices had been arranged whereby a fly-wheel armed with sickles
slashed off the heads of the wheat, leaving the stalks; but here again
such a machine would work only when the field was in prime condition. He
determined that no device was of any value which would not cut grain as
it might happen to stand, stalk and all. After months of labor in his
father's shop, making every part of the machine himself, in both wood
and iron, as he said, he turned out, in 1831, the first reaper that
really cut an average field of wheat satisfactorily. Its three great
essential features were those of the reaper of to-day--a vibrating
cutting-blade, a reel to bring the grain within reach of the blade, a
platform to receive the falling grain, and a divider to separate the
grain to be cut from that to be left standing. This machine, drawn by
horses, was tested in a field of six acres of oats, belonging to John
Steele, within a mile of Walnut Grove. Its work astonished the
neighboring farmers who gathered to witness the test. The problem of
cutting standing grain by machinery had been solved.