# Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic/Chapter 5

CHAPTER FIVE
Discovery of England
H was already in London.
Letters made slow progress and he had probably seized on a sudden chance to sail before Benzelius's letter arrived. Emanuel could scarcely have had a more adventurous journey. First the ship was caught in a fog and nearly grounded on a sand bank, then it was boarded by a French privateer, then it got a broadside from an English warship in pursuit of the privateer, and finally, in the Thames near London, some Swedish friends persuaded young Swedberg to break quarantine and sail with them to town.
But as the English authorities knew that the plague had broken out in Sweden they were morose about Emanuel's impatience, in fact they threatened to hang him, this being the legal penalty. He did escape, with a severe warning, but it must have sunk deep into him that a "health certificate" was a serious thing, for those words were to turn up again in his life's most intense spiritual crisis, puzzling even himself.
For the present a spiritual crisis was far from the handsome youth of twenty-two, independent of family control for the first time in his life, and alone, except for a few Swedish friends, in the world's greatest city.
He had come from the little cathedral town of Upsala, inhabitants about five thousand, to London, whose half million brawled and stank over fifteen square miles. All continentals noticed the smells of London.$^1$ There was indeed a less infected district in the West End, as John Gay had said in his Trivia,$^2$ "Bear me to the paths of fair Pell Mell, Safe are thy pavements, Grateful is thy smell," the London of face-masks, brocaded hoop-skirts, gold-laced uniforms, Ranelagh and Vauxhall, litters, footmen, linkboys, but the young Swede probably had only an outsider's glimpse of these splendors.
He was not in a position to get much else, however good his academic introductions, since his father had given him a sum ​equivalent to about $250, which, as it turned out, had to last him for a year and a half in a town which was by no means cheap. Good lodgings, there being no hotels, came to about $7 or $8 a week (£ 1.10), and even if meals were only a few shillings extra this was too dear.$^3$
Emanuel lived in working London, rough, noisy, combative, and highly individualistic, especially in the disposal of what should have been sewage but instead was thrown out of doors and windows to land, if the passersby were lucky, in open gutters. Showers made these overflow and diffuse what Gay called "ungrateful odours," joining the symphony of smells that was orchestrated by the boiling caldrons of the chandlers, open butcher shops, whale oil, piles of antique cheese, fish "long absent from the sea," not to mention the age-old open deposits of "night soil."
The man who was later to describe the stinks of "hell" in such plain detail had plenty of olfactory memories on which to draw for comparison.
In that plebeian London, John Gay warned, "if clothed in black you tread the busy town," you must avoid barbershops where powdered periwigs would shed clouds on you, and the baker and miller likewise. If you were "in youthful colors," look out for the chimney sweep, the dustman's cart, the tallow spots from the chandler's basket, and don't run into the "surly butcher's greasy tray," and, whatever you do, cling to the wall! Hold the hands of "waggish boys that play the stunted besom" on the pavement, watch out for the rotten eggs aimed at the fellow in the pillory, be careful of pickpockets at night, and above all be wary of the "ladies of Drury Lane."
They were as common as the smells, and by no means confined to Drury Lane. Gay speaks of one of those man-catchers with "her livid eyes," whose "hollow cheeks with artful blushes glow." "Beneath the lamp her tawdry ribbons glare. She darts from sarsnet ambush wily leers, Twitches the sleeve—or with familiar airs, her fan will pat your cheek."
They, too, like the smells, were to appear realistically in Swedenborg's visions of hell, but they probably played no great part in the London life of Emanuel Swedberg. His release from home had not been from puritan sex restraint into licence—eighteenth-century ​Sweden was no more puritan in that respect than England—it was a release into the freedom of following his chief passion. This was not the passion for women, though he was later to confess it so to his diary in a period of self-deprecation.$^4$ It was ambition, the keen, complex, all-absorbing and forward-striving ambition of the vigorous young intellectual. He had at last come to the headquarters of the knowledge he was thirsting for, measurable knowledge, exact science, a thrilling end in itself, but also the ladder to fame.
To the furthering of ambition Emanuel brought all his zest and energy, making even his disadvantages serve. Was he too poor to take "good" lodgings in the neighborhood of "fair Pell Mell"? Then he lodged from the very beginning with artisans whose trades he wanted to learn for the sake of science, and perhaps he even got the rent reduced in return for his help.$^5$
Besides learning a craft or two that first summer in London, he studied the language and haunted the bookstalls. "I read Newton daily." He went on an orgy of buying scientific instruments, "prisms, various kinds of quadrants, microscopes, artificial scales, a camera obscura," and he hoped to have enough left over to buy an "air pump," an instrument about which he was almost tenderly passionate.
His London life comes to us in his letters to Benzelius $^6$ to whom he said after about five months, "If you were to inquire about myself, dearest brother, I know myself to be alive but not happy; for I long for you and home. If I chance to see a letter from you, it carries me back as it were to my fatherland, for I love and revere you not only more than my brothers, but even as a parent." And he signed himself, "your disciple and lover even to death."
But that was his only expressed homesickness. Paper seems to have been scarce, and his letters were usually so crowded to the margin with his scientific adventures that there was often no space left even for his signature. Having been in London for less than a year, he wrote in his polyglot Swedish, English, Latin, adding Swedish endings to foreign words, "That my Brother encourages me to Mathesien [exact sciences] is a matter I should rather be discouragerad in, since I have an immoderate desire thereto without this and especially to Astronomien and Meclhaniken. I make good use of most of my lodgings that I take here. First I was with a ​watchmaker, then with a cabinet-workman, and am now with an instrument maker in brass, where I steal their trades, which in time will be useful to me."
He did not have long to wait. While the plague lasted Upsala University had been closed and the science professors had used the time to form a "Collegium Curiosorum," the first Swedish learned society. Part of the time they spent in discussing young Swedberg's letters to Benzelius. They wrote to their former student as if to an equal to get information about how things were done in England. Would he go to Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, examine his instruments and find out how they worked at night. Would he find out about the latest celestial globes and try to get the printed paper for them so they could be made up in Sweden. And what did quadrants cost, and were they made "with a screw, after Hooke's method." And much else.
As for the globes, Emanuel answered that "to get the paper for the globes is almost impossible, for they are afraid that they will be copied. On the other hand, those that are made up come quite dear. For this reason I have thought to prick off a couple myself . . . and send the plates over to Sweden . . . I have already so far acquired the art of engraving that I think myself capable of this . . . In addition I have learned from my landlord to make brass instruments so that I have made a large number for my own needs. Were I in Sweden I would not apply to any one to make the meridians for the globes and aught else pertaining thereto."
The young man who, in spite of his stutter, had offered to preside over the debating club at Upsala, had not lost his confidence. He had not only, as he also wrote, daily visited the best mathematicians in the city, he had applied his knowledge in practical mechanics. But he had higher aims. His chief aim was very high; it involved the moon.
In the same letter, writing to Benzelius with the special candor about one's own merits employed only toward a sympathetic member of the family, he confessed: "As regards astronomy I have so far acquired it that I have discovered a great deal which I think will be of use to that studio, though in the beginning I had much brain-racking therewith. Yet, long speculations do not come hard to me now."
​His speculations had an object. The Observatory at Greenwich had specific instructions to work out a better method of finding the longitude at sea, and the English, Dutch, and French had for some time been offering large money rewards for this. Emanuel informed Benzelius, still in the same letter, that he had weighed the plans of all but found they would not serve, and that he had "thought up a method which is infallible, by means of the moon, of which I am sure that it is the best that can be given."
Was it? He continued to work at this, and to believe it the best method, and he quotes Edmund Halley as having agreed with him "orally." At any rate, an astronomer of our own day has studied the question and reported that the method seems entirely correct.$^7$
But when young Swedberg finally presented ten copies of his method for the award, he did not win it. He inferred, probably correctly, that it was because the commissioners were prepared to reject any lunar method in favor of the more practical one made possible by Harrison's chronometer. Still it was a good piece of work for so young a man to have been engaged on. His letters bristle with parallaxes and lunar tables. He had many talks with Flamsteed. Longitude by the moon continued to be his chief interest.
Professor Elfvius of Upsala wanted him to be sure to acquire the art of lensgrinding, as well as to find out what the English learned really thought of Newton's theory of gravitation. It seemed to the Swedish professor "unreasonable" that one planetary body should gravitate toward another—something that smacked of "pure abstraction" rather than physics. Many other tasks he confided to his ex-pupil, finishing with the postscript that he recommended to "Herr Swedberg's admirable curiosity" to search out all that could be of service to science in Sweden.
Emanuel was a tireless scout and careful purchasing agent of books and instruments for his former teachers, and these missions also served to bring him in touch with the great scientists of England. He wanted especially to go to Oxford, but August, 1711, came and he had to write to Benzelius: "I am left here in want of money. I am surprised that my father has not taken more thought of me than to let me live on 200 riksdaler (about $250) for what will soon be sixteen months . . . it is hard to live like the wench in Skaane, without food and drink."
​The reference was to a girl who was supposed to have lived for years without food and drink, and who had been celebrated by Bishop Swedberg as another proof of the Lord's marvelous powers, along with the misbegotten calf of Gotland.
But Emanuel was entitled to some of the income from his mother's iron furnaces, and money came at last. On January 16, 1712, he took coach for Oxford. He was there about six months. He talked with Edmund Halley here about finding the longitude at sea by means of the moon, but the stay does not seem to have been devoted entirely to scientific studies.
This was another England than noisy, smelly London. Oxford shed its peace on him. He said himself to Benzelius that since his speculations had made him not so sociable as was "serviceable and useful" he had taken up stadium poeticum "in order thereby to freshen myself," but also in order to publish something later and thus to become "renowned." But he would not desert science, and if anyone would encourage him he meant to make more discoveries "than anyone in our age," but without encouragement "this were to torment oneself."
It was really a good, chastened frame of mind for being lulled in Oxford, for the freshness of meadows by the Thames and for browsing in the Bodleian, to whose librarian Benzelius had given him an introduction. Even if England showed its customary indifference to his coming greatness as inventor or poet he must have had time and chance at Oxford to consider the values for which England stood, values which were to influence his whole life.
There was the England of free speech. This often took a form that strangers could not help noticing. While he was in London Emanuel had informed his brother-in-law that "almost the whole city is witnessing the internal dissensions between the Anglican church and the Presbyterians, who burn with a mutual hatred that is almost deadly. The torch and trumpet of the disturbance is Doctor Sacheverel, whose name is heard from every lip, in all quarters, and his book is read in every coffee house."
This curious form of religiosity did indeed run high. Before going to Oxford, Emanuel had been showing London to his cousin Andreas Hesselius, there on a visit, and they were probably together in the newly completed St. Paul's when Dr. Sacheverel expressed ​his disquietude about the Presbyterians in words which the astonished Hesselius noted in his diary: $^8$ "So many vipers borne in England's bosom which would sting her to death." After which, the Swede added, the mob broke up the meetings of the Presbyterians and burned their pulpits and books.
But England's bosom is broad and tough. Anglicans and Presbyterians managed to survive in it, together with a lot of other sects. The freedom of speech natural to England, and the freedom of thought due to the new outlook of science, released people into doctrinal diversities as well as into the atheism that was concealed under deistic lip-service to an absentee God, who, having started the machine of the universe running, no longer concerned himself about it.
This state of affairs, which much resembled that of the nineteenth century, had brought into being a group of men later to be known as the Cambridge Platonists. They could not hold with the dry formalism of official religion, nor with the crude combative theology of the ignorant sects, nor with the universe-machine of some intellectuals such as Hobbes. The same conditions that led to the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in the England of the 1880's led to the drawing together of these men, classical scholars, who wanted to reconcile reason with religion, without offending either, and on the highest plane.
They found the reconciliation in the works of Plato as interpreted by Plotinus. Very briefly, the core of their faith was that reason craved a unified universe, all mind or all matter, all God or no God. Current religion offered a universe split into two. The mysticism of Plato-Plotinus, like the mysticism of the Hindu Upanishads, taught that the world was all God, having emanated or radiated from that unknowable, uncreated source, matter being simply the radiation farthest from the center. The Christian platonists were able to explain the Trinity as different emanations from the same God and thus remain orthodox in theory.
Is it likely that they influenced young Emanuel Swedberg?
He had paid dutiful calls on his father's ecclesiastical friends, he had paid his dues as a member of the Swedish Lutheran congregation in London, and no doubt he went to church on Sunday. He had answered the questions his brother-in-law put to him about ​various theological works, but the main stream of his energy went into "mechaniken," by that he was intoxicated, not by mysticism. Literal wheels within wheels spun in his head, not those of the first chapter of Ezekiel. Moreover, the Platonists had been centered at Cambridge in the seventeenth century, and Emanuel went to Oxford in the beginning of the eighteenth.
But John Norris, "disciple and correspondent" of Henry More, one of the chief Platonists, was a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford; he lived till 1711, and Emanuel had, even before he went to Oxford, read a little book by Norris which interested him a good deal. It was the Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life, and while Emanuel found it "very subtil and ingenious," yet he was puzzled by it, finding himself "in suspens as to what may be his conclusion and as to what he would have."
It was not like Emanuel to remain in suspense for long and, being at Oxford for half a year with the Bodleian Library at hand, he probably continued his reading of Norris and was led by him to look into like-minded works. Perhaps it was only part of the reaching out in all directions of his "admirable curiosity," but one cannot fail to see this little rill as part of the headwaters of the stream that was later to carry him into the ocean of mysticism. The charts he was to use bear too great a resemblance to those of Plotinus for this to be an accident, even though the knowledge he may have acquired at Oxford slept forgotten by his conscious mind.
At Oxford he wrote some poetry. He told Benzelius that he was doing it to acquire fame as well as to recover from his speculations in "mechaniken," but, Emanuel being ardent, handsome, and twenty-four, personal feeling undoubtedly was the real dynamo. It was in Latin. One was translated from English, changing "Chloe" to "Delia." Some Englishwomen had been greatly interested in the Cambridge Platonists, and in any case Latin was part of education and Englishwomen had not yet reached Victorian ignorance.
It was not a remarkable poem as poem.$^9$ Her breast more white than snow made snow melt into tears and slip down her milkwhite limbs, standing "like a string of pearls about her garment's hem."
​But some were addressed to a person who had charmed him by her playing and singing, music-loving as he was and brought up in a household where music was part of daily life.
This is what he said to her: "Tell me why the string which is touched by a beautiful maiden sounds richer in nature and delights! Why she instils her songs with a certain Nymphean nectar? Why the voice sounds sweetly from this more beautiful mouth? Whatever she loves to say flows from the mouth of the saying; and she touches with her lips every little word. When love is the twin in singing, not songs alone, nor the lips, but the voice of one sweetly singing is what is loved."
This poem was entitled, "To a Poetess—Why her Songs give me Pleasure." It might have been impersonal. But then he wrote "To the Same That She may Answer me": and said, "Not alone do I love the fingers, the tongue, the lips, of the eloquent one, on which so oft would I bestow my kisses; but whatever thou movest when thou dost utter thy songs. For it is thy whole moving body I love. Happy shall I be if perchance our love shall bring forth a little muse or a short letter."
These are meager clues to Emanuel's emotional life. He was always reticent about himself. Yet here is the beginning of his attitude toward sex, one that he was to carry from earth to heaven. When the flood of gossip burst in Stockholm in 1759 about Swedenborg's visions, much of the hilarious amazement was due to the misunderstood news of arrangements and rearrangements of marriages in the other world. When he was eighty, he wrote a book of his philosophy of sex, Conjugial Love. In all its impersonality, with heads and subheads, it was his most personal book. "Other-worldly" only in part, much of it was devoted to the problem of sex for young and ardent men who couldn't afford to marry. The problem as he saw it was how "lust" could become "human love." Not that he altogether condemned the young for the lust which was "love of the sex," even if it took the form of "fornication." He laid down as one of his axioms "That with some men the love of the sex cannot without harm be restrained from going forth into fornication. There is no need to recount the injuries which excessive restraint of the love of the sex may cause with those who from superabundance suffer from intense venereal excitement. Hence are the ​origins with them of certain diseases of the body and disorders of the mind, to say nothing of unknown evils not to be named. It is different with those whose love of the sex is so scanty that they are able to resist the urgings of its lust."
But there were degrees of fornication, and as he examines them in dry textbook fashion it is hard not to feel that here is the old man looking with kind detachment at the struggles of his former self, struggles that were to continue into his ripe manhood. The ideal he was clear about. It was "when man recedes from wandering lust and devotes himself to one to whose soul he unites his own soul." When that love found its physical expression in the union of bodies, he called it "conjugial love," and if there were a union of bodies without spiritual union, even if it were "licit" as in marriage, he called it "adultery," in his vivid symbolism, raising the former to be the very pillar of heaven and making the latter the essence of hell.
Some time, somewhere, Emanuel had had experience of union with a kindred spirit, perhaps it was with the girl who sang for him in England. At any rate there is in the two little poems a hint of his creed that soul and body need each other for perfection in love. As the old man wrote of these things, he said in effect that wandering lust expressing itself in fornication might turn to either good or evil.
"Natural love which is toward the sex precedes spiritual love, which is towards one of the sex," and "in fornication conjugial love may lie concealed within, as the spiritual may within the natural; yea the spiritual is in fact actually evolved out of the natural, and when the spiritual has been evolved, then the natural compasses it about as bark does the wood and as the sheath the sword, and also serves the spiritual as protection against violence."
The youth, then, whose true ideal was a union of minds as well as bodies, might, so Swedenborg thought, pass unscathed through a period of fornication, "for the intention is the soul of all action," and a man was not to be blamed overmuch while he was in the process of evolving from natural youthful concupiscence into "conjugial" or spiritual love. Too much wandering or varietism, as he called it, might, however, destroy the man's capacity for feeling the ​love that was "the precious treasure of human life," and therefore Swedenborg excused or at least explained the lesser peril there was to the soul in taking a mistress. It was preferable of course to "reserve the fountain of manhood for a wife," he said, but as in so many countries a man had first to obtain a job and the means to support a family before he could marry, it might be better to live with a mistress than to live in soul-destroying promiscuity. "Pellicacy" (from pellex, a mistress) he termed this way out, but it was not to be taken with another man's wife nor with a virgin. However, a virgin might be taken as a mistress and a man "may indeed cohabit with her and thus initiate her into the friendship of love, but still with the constant intention, if she does not commit whoredom, that she shall be his wife."
Pellicacy, it was to be strictly understood, was a relationship in which the souls of the two kept apart, only conjoining the bodies, "while conjugial love unites the souls, and from the union of souls unites the sensuals of the body also, even so that the two become one flesh." If this kind of love were to develop in the liaison then, so Swedenborg held, "the man cannot by any right withdraw without a violation of conjugial union."
In the century of Casanova this put love on a lofty plane without leaving realism. There is no documentary proof that Swedenborg wrote from personal experience of either the lofty plane or the realism, but his detailed familiarity with both sides of the question, especially as it affected the conduct of the young, might seem to indicate that in some respects at least he had Emanuel Swedberg in mind.
At any rate, perhaps looking backward with the clear memory for things long past of the very old, he aflirmed in Coniugial Love that a youth's interest in sex begins at the time his voice changes and when he starts to think for himself, rearranging the stock on his mental shelves left there by "parents and masters." "Before he only thought from things carried in the memory, meditating upon them and obeying them; afterwards from reasoning upon them; and then, love leading, he disposes the things seated in his memory in a new order and conformably to this order begins his own life, and successively more and more thinks according to his own reason ​and wills from his own freedom. That the love of the sex follows this beginning of his own understanding, and progresses according to the vigor of it, is known . . ."
Again he pleaded that it was wisdom to restrain the fornication that might follow the natural "love of the sex," but that this restraint ought finally to be based on a man's own reasoning power rather than on memorized principles, such as it necessarily was in the young. He had no great trust in those. "For a boy at the age of puberty has no thought that adulteries and debaucheries are other than fornications . . . nor has he reasoned knowledge to withstand the enticements of some of the sex who have carefully studied the arts of the courtesans; but in pellicacy, which is a more regulated and saner fornication, he may learn to see the distinctions."
A little one-sided and masculine, it might be said. The old man finished off with a warning, "But it is better that the torch of love of the sex be first lighted with a wife."
The "love" of which he had spoken as inciting the youth to think for himself was no doubt that which he sometimes referred to as a man's "ruling love" or chief interest, or, it might be said in the Jungian sense, his "libido," the psychic energy available. That interest with the young Emanuel was the direct pursuit of science, and fame through science. The Oxford idyl was over after about six months of it. In spite of Halley's "oral admission" that Swedberg's way of finding the longitude by means of the moon was conceivable, the young Swede had at last become discouraged. Not with his method, indeed—if only there were proper lunar tables, he wrote to Benzelius in August, 1712—no other projected method could be better than his, but there was another trouble. "Since here in England with this politely arrogant people I have not found great encouragement, I have laid it aside for other lands."
Emanuel packed most of his books and instruments and sent them home to Sweden. He begged Benzelius in quaint English (having specialized in mathematics) that he would help persuade his father to send him what would be necessary for a "yourney," and "what wil give me new spirits to make further steps in what my business is." Where to? Regardless of the Bishop's warnings ​against the godless French, "I design within space of three or four months to be in French because I desire the understanding of that fashonable and useful tongue."
About the end of 1712 he left England but he did not go straight to Paris. He stopped in the Netherlands for about five months, undoubtedly still concerned with longitude by the moon. He visited the splendid observatory at Leyden, and in that town he took lodgings with lensgrinders (there were no better men at the craft in Europe), learning the trade and purchasing the necessary tools. It is hardly probable that he remained so long in the Netherlands without looking into the works of that other lensgrinder, Baruch Spinoza, who, like the Cambridge Platonists but in his own austere way, also saw the universe as one Substance, essentially divine, expressing facets of the same Energy in both matter and mind.
What Emanuel wrote home about, however, was his new friend, Baron Palmquist, a Swedish diplomat by trade but a mathematician by preference, "who had me at his house every day; with whom I sat and discoursed on algebra every day." They also talked about founding a Swedish Scientific Society, but on the whole the stay does not seem to have helped the longitude project because in August Emanuel wrote to Benzelius that he had left the Netherlands and gone to Paris in order to study more science and to further his invention.
He was grimly determined. "At this place [that being royal Paris] I avoid the company of Swedes and of all those from whom I have the least discouragement in my studies." He had been in Paris about a year before he went on a sight-seeing tour. "At the end in Paris I made a universel visitation over the whole of Paris in company with some others, in order to see all that could be seen there." He also sat in Versailles in the great park, looked at the gods and goddesses. in marble, and was moved to write Latin verses about them.
He was ill for six weeks when he first came to Paris, he did not say of what, but except for his last illness this seems to have been the only serious one he ever had. Not only was he remarkably strong, so that even in his old age much younger men couldn't keep up with his pace, but he had no more time to be ill than to go sightseeing in the ordinary sense. He was greedy for learning. Benzelius ​had given him introductions to scientists which led to other acquaintances. He haunted mathematicians and astronomers, met De la Hire, Varignon, Cassini and several kind librarians, but although he cautiously gave hints about his method of finding longitude, the French were not interested. For Cassini, the astronomer, had a method of his own.
In Paris he may have met with the writings of Malebranche, whom he was later to quote with so much approval. Malebranche too was a Platonist, and John Norris, whom Emanuel had read, had based much of his work on that of the Frenchman. One can only guess at this. Emanuel was so busy with tracing the laws of physical events that any excursions he may have made into the realm of ultimate causes were probably with hasty curiosity, a little spiritual sight-seeing on the side.
He left Paris in the early summer of 1714 and returned to the Netherlands where he again saw his friend Baron Palmquist. It was a short stay. Baron Palmquist had a letter for him from his father who urged him to prepare for an academic career. The Bishop had also written personally to the Baron begging him to persuade his son to return. The study trip had already consumed four years.
But Emanuel did not hurry. On the way he stopped in Hanover, hoping to meet Leibnitz, probably the great mathematician more than the great philosopher, but Leibnitz was in Vienna. And, having arrived in Rostock on the Baltic Sea, Emanuel settled down there. Writing to Benzelius he said, "I am right glad to have come to a place where I have peace and time to assemble together all my works and meditata which previously have been without order and scattered here and there on some slips . . . I promised d:father to give out a specimen academicum, for which I will choose some inventions which I have in Mechanicis."
Already, he said, he had a list of mechanical inventions now reduced to order so that they might be published, including all the calculations necessary, and in astronomy too he had things to show.
"Oh how I wish that I could lay the whole before your eyes, dearest brother, and the eyes of Herr Professor Elfvius! But since I cannot do it with the machines themselves, I will yet in a short time ​do it with some drawings of them on which I am working every day."
This list, even without the drawings, was startling enough, even though (as has been pointed out) $^{10}$ the inventions were applications of known mechanical laws to ideas which other people of the time had already had. They still bear witness to his mechanical genius and also tell something more definite about what he had been studying than the letters had revealed.
1. The construction of a ship which, with its one-man crew, could go under the sea, in any desired direction, and could inflict much injury on enemy ships.
2. A novel construction of a siphon, whereby water can be driven from a river to higher places, in great abundance and in a short time.
3. On the lifting of weights by means of water and this portable siphon, more easily than by mechanical forces.
4. On constructions [locks] even in places where there is no flow of water, whereby a whole ship with its cargo can be raised to a given height in one or two hours.
5. A machine vivified by means of fire for throwing out water; and the way of constructing such machines at smelting works where there is no fall of water, but the water is still. The fire and the forge should be able to supply enough water for the wheels.
6. A drawbridge which can be closed and opened from within the gates and walls.
7. New machines for condensing and exhausting air by means of water; and concerning a new air pump worked by water and mercury without any siphon, which works better and easier than the ordinary pump.
I have also other new plans for pumps.
8. A new construction of air guns, a thousand of which can be exploded by means of one siphon and at the same time.
9. A universal musical instrument whereby the most inexperienced player can produce all kinds of melodies, these being found marked on paper and in notes.
10. A universal sciagraphia [art of making shadows as for sundials] or a mechanical method of delineating hours of every kind and on any surface by means of fire.
11. A water clock with water as the indicator which, by its flow, shows all the movable bodies in the heavens, and produces other ingenious effects.
​12. Item. A mechanical carriage which shall contain all kinds of works moved by the going of horses.
Item. A flying carriage, or the possibility of staying in the air and of being carried through it.
14. Item. Concerning new constructions of cords or springs and concerning their properties.
Number 13 on this list was odd, a little arrow pointing in the midst of engineering to Emanuel's future interest. It was: "A method of conjecturing the wills and affections of men's minds by means of analysis."
Except for this and for the wholly hypothetical submarine and airplane, it was a list with practical application to the Sweden of his day. The proper utilization of Sweden's water power was important, and various engines of war were calculated to appeal to the hard-beset Swedes. The Russians were threatening to attack the country; King Charles XII, after having failed spectacularly against Russia and having been an obstreperous prisoner of the Turks, was on his way home, on horseback, with only two companions. But he was still King, an absolute monarch, an undaunted commander-in-chief, and war seemed likely to be the main business of Sweden for some time to come.
Soon after he sent the list of inventions home, Emanuel moved from Rostock to Greifswalde in Pomerania, which was a Swedish province. Charles, still on horseback, arrived in the nearby town of Stralsund in November and prepared to defend it against Danes, Hanoverians, and Prussians. Emanuel wrote a Latin ode to the "Phoenix of the ancient Gothic race," but he took ship home before the siege of Stralsund began, arriving in Sweden at the end of June, 1715. He had been thinking for himself now, for over five years, and his great desire was to encourage the growth of science in Sweden and thereby help the impoverished country. As he had written before he left Greifswalde, if only a Scientific Society could be established in Sweden as in other countries for the study of physics and mechanics, perhaps in time their usefulness to mining works and manufactures might become known and the government might then take an interest.
Emanuel Swedberg meant to be useful. He wanted to be a new broom.