Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/73



UT there was no opening for Emanuel Swedberg in his native country. He had not graduated from a technical school—Sweden had none—nor at that time were there great corporations competing to secure the services of a bright young engineer and inventor. Emanuel had collected his scientific knowledge bit by bit, tracking it down in different countries and collating it laboriously himself, but it was knowledge that had as little official standing as theology in our own day. Yet he could see only too well that his country needed his gifts. After fifteen years of war, bad harvests, famine, pestilence, and never-ceasing conscription of men and materials, Sweden was near a final agony, due to "Iron Head," 1 as the Turks had named Charles XII, and his iron pride which did not permit him 1o retreat.

Emanuel was passionately ambitious to be useful, to do something practical. Where was he to go?

Immediately after his return from abroad he had nowhere to go but home to his father at Brunsbo. There, while the Bishop was willing enough to try to advance his son, the latter met with a wall of incomprehension. The Bishop listened to Emanuel's account of finding the longitude at sea by means of the moon with such indifference that, in a letter to a favorite of the King's, he said his son wanted to build an observatory "in order to find the latitude on the ocean." But Bishop Swedberg knew that in an absolute monarchy one got as close to the King as possible, and this was a letter written to promote Emanuel. He also mentioned that his son was qualified "in the Oriental and European languages," and "especially in poetry and mathematics." 2 Not a letter calculated to interest Charles XII, if he ever saw it.

Worse still, as Emanuel confided in a letter from home to Benzelius, his d:father had mislaid the drawings and the intricate calculations for the machines he had invented. "He thinks they've