Part 2

When the plague was over, Girard returned to his business. In February, 1793, France declared war on Great Britain, and immediately British troops and ships seized the French cities in San Domingo. Ships of war and privateers of both countries promptly swarmed over the seas. Decrees were soon published by the nations at war, forbidding neutral vessels to trade with enemy ports. The law of nations was disregarded, and American ships were seized and confiscated. Great Britain particularly ignored the rights of American ship-owners, and thousands of dollars worth of American ships and cargoes were soon in British hands. Two of Girard’s ships, the Kitty and the Sally, were taken. Commerce was demoralized.

In retaliation against the outrages perpetrated by the British and the French, a “non-intercourse bill” provided that after November 1, 1794, “all commercial intercourse between the citizens of the United States and the subjects of the King of Great Britain should cease.” The bill was lost in the Senate, but an embargo which closed all American ports to foreign trade accomplished practically the same end. In all, five ships belonging to Girard were now in enemy hands.

In October, 1801, after eight years of war, peace was concluded between France and Great Britain, and in December the war which the United States had been conducting against France was also ended. With the return of peace came renewed commercial activity. Girard at once availed himself of the opportunity, and soon his ships were engaged in trade with the ports of France and Russia. But this revival of commerce was of short duration, for the unsettled state of Europe soon resulted in new blockades of ports, embargoes, and acts of non-intercourse against the offending countries. Then, to complete the disaster, in 1810 Napoleon annexed Holland to France and issued a decree “by which American ships and cargoes, seized in the ports of Holland, Spain, France, and Naples, to the value of ten million dollars, were condemned and sold.” Five of Girard’s ships which had sailed for northern ports were now seized and held by the Danes, and it was many months before their release could be secured. Trade with Europe was at an end; but despite the heavy losses which Girard had suffered, he did not hesitate or allow himself to be mastered by the situation. If Europe was closed, South America and the Far East were open to him, and now his ships began new commerce with new continents, and in December, 1810, the ship Montesquieu set sail for Valparaiso and Canton.

During these years of commercial activity Girard had become a large investor in real estate, and of his profits from his trading ventures at sea he had in 1812 almost four hundred thousand dollars invested in farm acres and lots and buildings in Philadelphia. In 1812 the United States declared war against Great Britain. Bad feeling had long existed, due primarily to the disregard of the British for the rights of American vessels. For a long time Great Britain persisted in stopping our ships, taking American seamen out of them and forcing them to serve on British vessels. It was more than patriotism could bear, and the nation enthusiastically entered the war with the cry of “Free Trade and Sailor’s Rights.” Forced practically from the sea, Girard turned his great abilities to finance and the service of his country.

Girard was now sixty-two years old, but age did not deter him from a new enterprise. A bank had long been needed in Philadelphia, and to take advantage of the opportunity, Girard established a banking institution with a capital of over a million dollars, which was called Stephen Girard’s Bank. The cost of the war which was being fought with Great Britain was a severe strain on the finances of the United States, and at the close of the year 1812 it became necessary for the Treasury to borrow money or the nation would become bankrupt. Sixteen million dollars was all that was required, but the loan was a failure, and less than four millions was subscribed. In April a new offering of the loan was prepared, but again the effort to float it ended in failure. In all only $5,838,000 was subscribed. More than ten million dollars must still be borrowed.

Now came an opportunity for Girard to repay to the United States the debt of gratitude for all that his citizenship had brought him. To the United States he owed his all, for in this free and fearless country he had been enabled to amass his great fortune. With two other men of means, Girard came forward and offered to subscribe for the entire balance of the loan. The offer was promptly accepted, and a situation of great embarrassment to the country was avoided.

With the defeat of Napoleon at Leipsic in 1813, and his abdication in 1814, Great Britain found herself free to conduct a more strenuous attack on the United States, and for a time matters went badly with the youthful nation. A British raid on the city of Washington resulted in the burning of the Capitol, the President’s house, and other public buildings; and this was followed in September by a raid on Baltimore, which, however, resulted in failure. Great panic was caused by these actions, and for a time banking was demoralized and business practically suspended. But on Christmas Eve, 1814, a treaty of peace was signed at Ghent, and once more Girard promptly resumed his world-wide trading, and once more the Stars and Stripes blew free from halyards.

Girard suffered two severe losses by reason of the war, in the loss of his ship Good Friends and in a ransom of $180,000 which he was required to pay for his ship Montesquieu and cargo, captured while returning from Canton, China. But in spite of this, so greatly had his wealth increased, that he now paid more than a hundredth part of the total taxes of the city of Philadelphia and his commercial capital was sufficient to enable him to sell goods on credit and to carry on a maritime business throughout the world without aid of discount. “All this,” he has stated, “do I owe principally to my close attention to business, and to the resources which this fine country affords to all active or industrious men.”

In the years which followed, Girard found declining profit in European cargoes brought to Philadelphia, and in 1821 he began to trade heavily with the Far East. Two of his ships, the Voltaire and the Montesquieu, were wrecked during this period; but Girard was as good a loser as a gainer, and pocketed his losses with small comment. Out of his fleet only four ships remained. Girard was now an old man, markets were bad owing to the panic in England and on the Continent, and the prospect for continuous profitable trading seemed ominous. It was only natural that he should turn from the sea.

Speculation in land had proved to be as fascinating as his speculations in ships and cargoes. Girard began to buy land, and soon his total holdings amounted in all to 200,370 acres. In March 1830 he purchased for $30,000 certain tracts of Pennsylvania coal lands which have to-day a fabulous value. But the land which chiefly held his interest was those few acres of his farm. “At my age the sole amusement which I enjoy is to be in the country constantly busy in attending to the work of the farm generally.” The peace and happiness of this final episode made a happy ending of Girard’s long, useful, and successful life.

“The accumulation of money interested him but little. He had now entered on his eighty-first year. His will was made and his great wealth dedicated to the good of posterity. He was under no incentive to labor for its increase. Yet in his bank, in his counting-house, on his farm, he continued to toil as of old from the sheer love of work.”

At the time of his death in 1831, Girard had for fifty-five years been a resident of Philadelphia, and for practically his entire mature life a citizen of the United States. His funeral was of “immense extent”; the streets were thronged by people assembled to pay “a last tribute of respect to a great public benefactor.”

The estate left by Girard amounted to almost seven million dollars, an amount which, in consideration of the times, would compare with the greatest fortunes of the present day. By the terms of his will, although there were many large charitable bequests, the bulk of the fortune was bequeathed to the city of Philadelphia, to be used in building and maintaining a school “to provide for such a number of poor male white orphan children ... a better education as well as a more comfortable maintenance than they usually receive from the application of the public funds.”

Certain other provisions have kept alive the memory of the testator’s downrightness and individuality. In a paragraph of the will, Girard enjoined and required that “no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of any sect whatsoever shall ever hold or exercise any station or duty whatever in the said college, nor shall any such person ever be admitted for any purpose, or as a visitor, within the premises appropriated to the purposes of the said college. In making this restriction, I do not mean to cast any reflection upon any sect or person whatever; but as there is such a multitude of sects, and such diversity of opinion among them, I desire to keep the tender minds of the orphans, who are to derive advantage from this bequest, free from the excitements which clashing doctrines and sectarian controversy are apt to produce.”

Under the wise management of the trustees of the estate, the public bequests of Girard can now be reckoned in millions. By the thrift, daring, and vision of a poor French sailor lad a great city of a mighty nation has received incalculable benefit throughout a century past, and will receive increasing benefit for centuries to come. Grasping eagerly the unlimited opportunities of the Republic where all men stand sure-footed in the equal race for the highest rewards that civilization can bestow, he seized for himself the honors of high citizenship, the satisfaction of sincere philanthropy, and the pleasures that the possession of vast wealth profitably employed can bring.

To every boy of foreign birth the United States to-day holds equal promise. Not in mass movements, where progress is measured in the terms of the slowest, is the reward to be achieved. Only by effort honestly and sincerely given, in a land where opportunity is free to all, can the heights be reached. America, oldest of republics, cradle of liberty, extends its welcome to the youth that is and is to come, as its welcome has been extended to the youth of generations past.

II

JOHN ERICSSON

_Born in Nordmark, Sweden, 1803_ _Died in New York City, 1889_

High up in the dark forests of Wermland, an ancient division of Sweden, where deep cold lakes feed the great rivers with clear water and send them down the mountains to the sea, was born, in the year 1803, a baby, John Ericsson, who in the years that followed made for himself a name which brought glory to the United States, the land of his adoption, and undying fame to the country of his birth.

There were few comforts or pleasures waiting to welcome young Ericsson into the world. The little village where he was born rested high in the mountains within six degrees of the Arctic Circle. All around were dark and gloomy forests, filled with strange legends and tales of ancient heroes, handed down from grandfather to father and from father to son. The hard thin soil of the mountains was unfit for cultivation, and it was difficult for the people of the forest villages to live on the poor crops which they produced in the few acres hewn from the forests.

But down beneath the tree-roots, deep-lying in the mountain-sides, were vast deposits of iron ore, renowned throughout the world as the material of the finest cutlery. So the deep iron-mines gave to the inhabitants of these mountain villages a hard-earned living which tempered their own spirits with that same quality which the Swedish iron developed in the blade of steel.

Olaf Ericsson, the father of John, was part owner of a small iron-mine and also superintendent of an iron-works, and so the small boy, with few playmates and none of the school advantages of the American lad of the present day, found his play and early education in the machinery at the mine and foundry. He was an industrious boy, and he was quick to discover the interest and inspiration of the things which surrounded him. All day, with pieces of paper, a pencil, and some drawing-tools which he had made for himself, he studied the principles of the machines and drew clear designs of them to illustrate their construction.

When John was eleven years old, his father left the mining village of Langbanshyttan and took with him his wife and his three children: John, Nils, a year older than John, and a sister, the oldest of the three. For many years the Swedish Government had considered the building of a great ship-canal which would open navigation across the Swedish peninsular, and it was as foreman of this project that Olaf Ericsson settled his family at Forsvik, a hundred miles from the old mountain home.

The mechanical features of this great engineering work filled young Ericsson with wonder and enthusiasm, and in his eagerness to obtain knowledge, in order that he too might participate, he sought information and education from everyone who had the time and inclination to help him. From a boarder in his father’s household John learned to draw maps and plans with skill and accuracy. A friendly professor aided his architectural drawing, and one winter he studied chemistry and learned to make his own inks and colors with a few pennies’ worth of chemicals bought from the town druggist. In these years he also learned the French language, Latin, and grammar; a fine foundation which enabled him in after years to express himself in speech and writing with a clearness and exactness that proved of immeasurable assistance to him.

At the age of twelve the boy had so progressed in his studies that he was commissioned to make some drawings for the canal company; and in the following year he became assistant leveler, and a year later, leveler. In this work he was required to make plans and calculations for the canal, and had a monthly salary, quarters, and traveling expenses. Undoubtedly John possessed unusual ability, but this extraordinary promotion of so young a boy must in large measure have been the result of his conscientious devotion to his studies and his enthusiasm and ambition in his work.

In his leisure hours the boy found pleasure in building small working models of machinery, and among these was a model of a saw-mill which many years later he counted as the first in the long list of celebrated inventions which had brought him fame and prosperity. This model was built entirely of wood, with the exception of the band-saw, which was filed out by hand from a broken watch-spring and was operated by a crank cast from an old tin spoon. A cord served for the driving-band. No detail was omitted, and when water was turned into the miniature waterwheel, the machinery operated perfectly. With similar ingenuity he made for himself draughtsman’s compasses, from birchwood and broken needles; and from the hairs in an old fur garment of his mother’s he laboriously fashioned brushes with which to apply colors, also of his own making, to his drawings.

But now the father’s health broke beneath the weight of his work; the small earnings which supported the family dwindled, and each year that went by gave to the growing boys added responsibilities. In 1820 John realized that the time had come for him to take his own path and begin actively to build for his future. His father had died in the previous year and his mother and sister were supporting themselves by taking as boarders the workers on the canal. It was necessary that he also should contribute to their comfort.

Realizing the physical and moral value of military training, young Ericsson joined the Swedish army. He was now seventeen, a fine powerful fellow with smooth active muscles, a clear eye, and a well-trained brain. When he was eighteen there were few, if any, of his fellows who could match him in feats of strength or agility, and on one occasion he is said to have lifted a cannon weighing over six hundred pounds.

Advancement came rapidly, and he was soon recognized as an expert artillery draughtsman and an expert in the science of artillery, a branch of the service in which he had begun to specialize. It will be interesting to see how this early army experience gave to Ericsson knowledge which in later life brought him his greatest fame and enabled him to turn the tide of history and hold nations attentive before his words.

The stirring mind of the young man now yearned for a wider horizon than the Swedish army afforded, and for a greater opportunity than his own country presented. For several years he had been experimenting with a new type of engine by which he hoped to obtain greater horse-power with economy of fuel. England seemed to offer the opportunity, and in 1826 he left his native land and took up his residence in London.

Ericsson went to England at the opening of an engineering era. The employment of steam as a motive power was in its infancy. Travel by sea was entirely by ships; on land the stage-coach and canal-boat furnished the only means of transportation. The steam-engine was an undeveloped toy of science. Electricity in its industrial application was unknown.

Forming a business partnership with an English machine manufacturer, John Braithwaite, under the firm name of Ericsson and Braithwaite, Ericsson immediately turned his tremendous faculties to various engineering improvements and inventions. First a gas-engine occupied his interest; then he turned to his former conception of a “flame-engine,” in which, by putting the actual fire directly under the piston, the expanding air would supply the motor power. In 1828 he built and put into operation in a tin-mine in Cornwall a water-pump driven by compressed air—an invention on which he later based his claim as inventor of a machine utilizing compressed air for transmitting power.

It was in the year 1819 that the Atlantic was for the first time crossed by a steam vessel, the United States ship Savannah, and this revolutionizing event stimulated Ericsson to new endeavors. In the months following he produced a number of important improvements by which smaller and lighter boilers were made possible by increasing the heat, and hence the power, of the fire by forced draught, as well as many other radical improvements in steam-engines and boiler-construction. Of these he claims particularly the credit of the invention of “surface condensation applied to steam navigation.”

The first steam fire-engine—an apparatus which to-day constitutes perhaps the most important feature of a city’s fire department—was invented and built by Ericsson in 1829. Previously, and as a matter of fact for years afterward, hand-operated engines, manned by crews of volunteer firemen, fought the fires which so frequently destroyed vast sections of the wood-constructed cities of those early days. It is not surprising that this valuable invention did not receive immediate recognition, for inventors rarely obtain such recognition from the people whom their inventions benefit. In fact, Ericsson’s portable steam fire-engine was actually condemned as an impracticable contrivance that could serve no useful purpose.

To-day we travel thousands of miles by railroad; a hundred years ago our great-great-grandfathers traveled by horse-drawn coaches. Where we may now speed a mile a minute behind a giant steam locomotive, they were content with what seemed to them the tremendous speed of eleven miles an hour. But all things change. There are always leaders in the world’s progress. Of these leaders was John Ericsson. Travel had been a luxury of the rich; the invention of the steam locomotive made fast and economical travel possible to the poor as well.

In 1829 a prize of two thousand five hundred dollars was offered for the best steam locomotive which could draw a weight of twenty tons at the rate of ten miles an hour. Ericsson had never built a locomotive, but he entered the contest. His greatest competitor was George Stephenson, who for several years had built small locomotives for use in coal mines.

On the great day of the trial thousands of people thronged the track to witness the novel sight. Never in the world’s history had there been a public experiment so momentous, unless we except the journey of the American inventor’s steamship, the Clermont, on her first historic progress up the Hudson River.

The locomotive entered in the contest by Stephenson was named the Rocket, a strong well-built engine that ultimately was awarded the prize. But although he was not the winner in this great competition, to Ericsson belongs great credit, for his locomotive, the Novelty, passed the Rocket at the amazing speed, for those days, of thirty miles an hour, and failed to win the prize only because of certain defects in its construction which caused it to break down before the goal was reached.

Ericsson was twenty-six years old when he built the Novelty. Already he had contributed many useful inventions to the world. But his greatest triumphs were still to come. He had been beaten fairly and squarely by Stephenson, but his was not the spirit that is easily subdued. Ericsson, like the hero of Greek mythology, rose the stronger each time an adversary cast him to the earth.

In 1836 he married a nineteen-year-old English girl, Amelia Byam, granddaughter of Sir Charles Byam, some time British Commissioner for Antigua.

For a short time he devoted himself to the perfection of a hot-air engine, and a sounding device by which ships might ascertain the depth of the water over which they were passing. Then he turned to a new activity. The result was revolutionary. What he had almost accomplished in the field of land-transportation with the Novelty, he now actually achieved in steam-navigation on the sea. To Ericsson should be credited the perfection and application of the screw for the propulsion of steam-driven vessels.

Up to the dawn of the nineteenth century the sailing-ship had ruled the seas. And even until the middle of that century the fast clippers, with their towers of widespread canvas, had held supreme domination over the world’s waterways. But in the year 1835 Ericsson designed a rotary propeller driven by a steam-engine, which marked the beginning of the end of sailing days. The steam-engine, first placed in a ship by Robert Fulton, the American inventor, was no novelty, but it had been used only to propel vessels by means of paddle-wheels attached to each side of the vessels, huge cumbersome contrivances, which were easily damaged by heavy seas and which on ships of war afforded easy targets for the enemy.

The screw of Ericsson’s was designed to operate underneath the stern of the vessel, under water and just forward of the rudder, exactly as it is placed to-day. To test this new invention Ericsson built a small vessel, the Francis B. Ogden, which was launched in the Thames River in the spring of 1837. The experiment was a great success and a speed of over ten miles an hour was attained, to the wonder of the stolid English boatmen who watched in amazement this strange ship move rapidly through the water with no visible means of propulsion.

Later in the summer Ericsson invited the Lords of the British Admiralty to inspect his steamship, and even conducted them on a trial trip on the Thames; but the amazing performance of the Ogden created but little interest in the minds of the British officials, who dismissed the affair as an “interesting experiment.”