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.”