ERICSSON

John, engineer, born in Sweden 1803, died in 1889. He served for a time in the Swedish army; removed to London in 1826, and to New York in 1839. He is identified with numerous inventions and improvements in steam machinery and its applications. His chief inventions are his caloric engine, the screw propeller (1836), which has revolutionized navigation, and his turret-ships, the first of which, the Monitor, distinguished itself in the American Civil War, and inaugurated a new era in naval warfare. He afterwards devoted himself to studies of the earth’s motion and the intensity of solar heat.