No one feature perhaps better differentiates our modern civilization from that of earlier times, four hundred years ago, or even one hundred, than that of intercommunication between man and his fellow. Compare the opportunities for such intercommunication in the present with those in the time of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Isaac Newton, George Washington, or Napoleon I. We now have our steamships, steam and electric railroads, cable, telegraph, and telephone. A few years ago not a single one was known. The modern age is one which demands the utmost in the possibility of communication between man and his kind, and in this respect the wide world is now smaller than the confines of an English county a century ago.
In this field, as we shall see, Ericsson did some of his greatest work, and left perhaps his most permanent record for the future.
Ericsson's life falls most naturally into three periods chronologically or geographically, and likewise into three periods professionally, though the latter mode of subdivision has by no means the same boundaries as the former. The first mode of subdivision gives us the life in Sweden, the life in England, and the life in the United States. The second mode gives us the life of struggle and obscurity, the life of struggle, achievement, and recognition, and the calmer and easier life of declining years with recognition, reward, and the assurance of a life's work well done.
John Ericsson was born in the province of Vermland, Sweden, in 1803. His father was Olof Ericsson, a mine owner and inspector who was well educated after the standard of his times, having graduated at the college in Karlstad, the principal town of the province. His mother was Britta Sophia Yngstrom, a woman of Flemish-Scotch descent, and to whom Ericsson seems to have owed many of his stronger characteristics. Three children were born: Caroline in 1800, Nils in 1802, and John in 1803. Of John's earliest boyhood we have but slight record, but there seems to have been a clear foreshadowing of his future genius. He was considered the wonder of the neighborhood, and busied himself day after day with the machinery of the mines, drawing the form on paper with his rude tools or making models with bits of wood and cord, and endeavoring thus to trace the mystery of its operation.