Freeway - Famous Swedish Inventors

Famous Swedish Inventors

Although Sweden is a quite small country, the Swedes have always produced a lot of big thinkers and inventors. Some of the most important inventions are Swedish. The dynamite, the propeller, and the wrench are all made by Swedes.

Alfred Nobel

Alfred Nobel (1833-96), is the man who invented the dynamite. Nobel was born in Sweden, but he grew up in St Petersburg, Russia. He studied in the USA. When Nobel was 29 years old he made his first important invention. A detonating cap for nitroglycerine. The problem with Nitroglycerine was that it was very sensitive. He failed to introduce the nitroglycerine in the USA, because of all the accidents. In 1866 Nobel by coincidence discovered the dynamite. It was less fragile than nitroglycerine

When he died he left very much money which he left to a fund. Every year money is taken from the fund and given to people who have made something good for humanity. It is called "The Nobel Prize".

John Ericson 1803-1889, was a Swedish inventor and engineer. Not more than 13 years old he began working as a engineer trainee, building "Göta Kanal", the longest canal in Sweden, where he later went working as land surveyor. After he joined the army and advanced to an officer. He had a lot of ideas, but didn’t find space within his job to develop anything, so only twenty-three years old he left the army and became an inventor at full time.

John began working with a hot-air machine, a so-called "Caloric". But a lack of money and ignorance forced him to go abroad, where he might be better understood. He went to England and continued working on the Caloric, which became one of the first long-line produced hot-air machines and about 10’000 were produced.
John also started working on a new kind of locomotive with steam engines, called "Novelty". It was a much smaller machine than the old ones. When finished he accepted a challenge and competed with another locomotive in a famous race. He lost the competition, because of engine problems, to the English engineer Stephenson and his locomotive "The Rocket". The Rocket was much bigger and heavier than Novelty, which made it more expensive. Although John lost the race, Novelty became the raw-model for recent trains.
John had always been fascinated by propellers, and started experimenting with double propellers, but he soon discovered that wasn’t such a good idea. Instead he modified the single propeller and made it much more effective.
The propeller is the most important of John’s inventions. He attached it to the frigate Robert F. Stockton, which was the first boat ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean driven by a propeller. In 1839 he picked up his belongings and moved to USA, never to return to Europe again. In America he started working in the army for the North Side. He mounted a propeller on the warship "Monitor". The major breakthrough came when he raced the steamwheeler the Great Western and won. John’s ideas about armour and a turning guntower made a difference in a great battle against the South Side in 1862 in Hampton Roads in Virginia.

John Ericson was never accepted in the US as a big inventor and wasn’t even invited to a big science gathering in Philadelpha. That made him very bitter and he wrote a book where he described a machine that could convert sunlight into energy by using anew kind of optical cells. At this point he was a hundred years ahead of his time!