"To See How Things Were Done in a Big Way": Swedish Naval Architects in the United States, 1890-1915

The few Swedish emigrants who achieved significant success in America have attracted some attention from scholars. But while focusing on such notables as John Ericsson and Ernst Alexanderson, historians have neglected the many Swedish engineers who worked in the United States for a few years and then returned home. ¹ Their story is worth investigating because these engineers had a great impact on Swedish industry. As the shipbuilder and industrialist Hugo Hammar noted in 1938, “the development of Swedish industrial life since the turn of the century has without doubt been strongly influenced by Swedish-American initiative and go-ahead spirit. Therefore our industry is, to some extent, indebted to American technology. From no other country have we received such valuable impulses.” ² Hammar observed that many engineers who returned to Sweden later in their careers became managers of industrial corporations and that their personal success, as well as the success of their companies, was partly built on ideas they brought back from America.

This article will focus on one branch of Swedish industry, shipbuilding. One might have expected Swedish naval architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to have been more impressed by shipyards in Britain and Germany. Great Britain dominated world shipbuilding at the turn of the century (see table 1), and Sweden had close cultural ties with Germany. ³ Nevertheless, many students who were trained in naval architecture and graduated from the Chalmers Tekniska Institut (Chalmers Institute of Technology) in Gothenburg between 1888 and 1927 went to work in the United States. Many then returned home to play major roles in the creation of a large Swedish shipbuilding industry. Of course, Swedish engineers carefully studied advances in British shipbuilding, and they were deeply influenced by developments in Germany, where shipbuilding was expanding rapidly at the end of the century. Still, American influences in this period were crucial to the expansion of Swedish shipbuilding. This article discusses how and why this unexpected influence manifested itself.

Table 1.

Production of Merchant Ships in Britain and Ireland, the United States, Germany, and Sweden, 1892–1920 (in thousands of gross tons)

Year	Britain & Ireland	United States	Germany	Sweden
1892	1,130	63	65	5
1895	961	85	88	3
1900	1,452	334	205	6
11905	1,634	303	255	5
1910	1,170	331	159	9
1913	1,980	276	465	19
1920	2,259	2,476	—	64

Source—Kent Olsson, “Det varvsindustriella genombrottet i Sverige under mellankrigstiden,” Unda Maris 1975–1982 (Gothenburg, 1983), 65.

Large, internationally competitive shipyards evolved in Sweden in the period between the world wars. The shipyards’ success was due in part to their concentration on diesel-powered oil tankers in a period when the oil economy of the world was rapidly expanding. ⁴ The Götaverken Shipyard in Gothenburg, founded as an engineering company in 1841, was in the vanguard of this process. From 1906 onward, its management transformed the company from a diversified engineering works into a shipyard specializing in the building and repair of merchant vessels. Other shipyards followed Götaverken’s lead in the interwar years and specialized in building diesel-powered ships.

Götaverken’s management was made up of college-educated engineers with foreign experience, acquired mainly in the United States. ⁵ The best known of these engineers was the aforementioned Hugo Hammar (1864–1947), who graduated in naval architecture from the Chalmers Institute of Technology in 1888. He worked at shipyards in England between 1888 and 1890 and in the United States from 1890 to 1896. With his newly acquired foreign experience, Hammar then returned to Sweden to become chief engineer at the Lindholmen Shipyard in Gothenburg (which until World War I was the leading shipyard in the country). In 1906, he and Sven Almqvist, president of Lindholmen, formed a consortium that took over Göteborgs Mekaniska Verkstad, the engineering company that they would transform into the Götaverken Shipyard. Hammar served as president of the company from 1910 until 1938. At his side was Ernst A. Hed...