Ericsson had really built a much faster locomotive than Stephenson's "Rocket;" and although it had been constructed with such celerity that it broke down before the final point was reached, and he thereby lost the prize, yet the superiority of the principle involved in it was universally recognized. John Bourn said: "To most men the production of such an engine would have constituted an adequate claim to celebrity. In the case of Ericsson, it is only a single star of the brilliant galaxy with which his shield is spangled." "We may imagine," writes Mr. Church, "the excitement following the announcement in the _Times_ concerning the performance of the 'Novelty,' for to this engine England's great daily devoted chief attention." Railroad shares leaped at once to a premium, and excited groups gathered on 'change to discuss the wonderful event. The pessimists were silenced, and the art of modern railway travel inaugurated. A grand banquet was given in Liverpool to the directors and officers of the railway and to the competing locomotive builders. Toasts and speeches followed; and if Ericsson did not carry home with him the £500 offered as a prize, he at least made himself known to all England as one of the rising men of his profession. Ericsson's long-cherished plan of a caloric engine was realized in 1833, and was hailed with astonishment by the scientific world of London. Lectures were delivered on it by Dr. Dionysius Lardner and Michael Faraday, and it was much praised by Dr. Alexander Ure and Sir Richard Phillips. In 1836 Ericsson invented and patented the screw propeller, which revolutionized navigation, and in 1837 built a steam vessel having twin screw propellers, which on trial towed the American packet-ship Toronto at the rate of five miles an hour on the river Thames. In 1838 he constructed the iron screw steamer Robert F. Stockton, which crossed the Atlantic under canvas in 1839, and was afterward employed as a tug-boat on the Delaware River for a quarter of a century. Within ten years Ericsson patented thirty inventions considered by him of sufficient importance to claim a place in the list that in 1863 numbered one hundred.