James Buchanan Eads

Although most widely known today as the builder of the great triple-arch steel Mississippi River bridge that bears his name, James B. Eads’s accomplishments and range of influence were much wider. He was one of the true Renaissance men of his day, a well-respected citizen of the world. Through tenacity, inventiveness, and daring, the self-educated, hands-on engineering genius literally rose from rags to riches to amass a fortune of $500,000 (in 1857 dollars) before he was forty—and become one of the most outstanding and multitalented civil engineers of the nineteenth century.

James Eads was born on May 23, 1820, in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, the third child of Thomas and Ann (Buchanan) Eads. He was named after his mother’s cousin James Buchanan, an imposing Pennsylvania congressman who later became president of the United States. Never long in one spot, Thomas Eads moved his family from town to town trying different business ventures, which regularly failed. Consequently, James and his two older sisters Eliza Ann and Genevieve were in and out of schools on a regular basis, and never developed any lasting childhood friendships.

It wasn’t until September 6, 1833—when the Eads family, with everything they owned with them, steamed into St. Louis, Missouri, aboard the Carrolton—that James was given the opportunity to stay anywhere for long. The occasion, however, started under less than favorable conditions. As the Carrolton approached the St. Louis docks, its chimney flue collapsed, engulfing the ship in flames, and destroying all cargo onboard. Eight people were killed. The Eadses escaped injury but landed with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

This abruptly and permanently ended young Eads’s childhood. In order to help support his destitute family, the thirteen-year-old first sold apples on the street, then ran errands for a dry goods store. Recognizing the teenager’s potential, the storeowner allowed James to spend time reading in his library, which contained a number of good books on technology and machines. Eads quickly developed a taste for mechanics and engineering, and a fondness for experimenting with machinery. He became intrigued with inventors and by the inventions of the day, and was soon tinkering with his own inventions—among them a working, six-foot-long, scale-model steamship.

When James was seventeen, his father decided to move the family once again; this time to remote Le Claire, Iowa. His self-sufficient son, however, refused to go along, electing to stay in St. Louis to embark on making his fortune.

One year later, in 1838, Eads began his life-long involvement with the Mississippi River, taking a position as a clerk on the steamboat Knickerbocker. Riverboat travel on the Mississippi in the nineteenth century was a dangerous and perilous proposition. The river was full of debris (called snags), which frequently caused serious boating accidents and wrecks. On a regular basis, steamships were sunk and their cargos lost—and the Mississippi riverbed was littered with countless rich, cargo-laden ships.

It quickly became obvious to the Knickerbocker’s young clerk that there was a small fortune to be made retrieving sunken steamships and their treasures, and he began mulling over ideas on how to do it. A big consideration was how to deal with the river’s erratic, unpredictable, and often swift lower currents. Eads’s efforts at perfecting practical salvaging schemes intensified on December 11, 1839. The ship he was working on hit a massive snag. With its bottom ripped out, it quickly sank, and with it, a valuable shipment of lead.

It would take Eads another two years of intensive experimentation to work out all the kinks of his first great salvaging invention. In 1842, the twenty-two-year-old finally received a U.S. patent for his invention—a special boat equipped with a unique diving bell that allowed a person to walk on the dangerous river bottom. He called his boat a submarine, even though only the diving bell part was submersible. He convinced two established St. Louis boat builders—Calvin Case and William Nelson—to become his partners, build a couple of boats, and go into the river salvaging business. Once their first boat, Submarine One, was operational, Eads launched full time into traversing the bottom of the Mississippi, locating wrecks and pulling up sunken cargo at an alarmingly rapid rate, and at great profit.

Within two years, Eads—now Captain Eads—was amassing a small fortune, and he started dating on a regular basis. The woman who eventually turned the twenty-four-year-old’s head was Martha Nash Dillon, an intelligent, sultry, and attractive debutant. One year his junior, the lively Martha was from a prominent family among St. Louis’s elite. Her mother died when she was young and her father, Colonel Patrick Dillon, a highly successful St. Louis businessman, remarried a younger woman, Eliza Eads, who was James’s first cousin.

Because of their blood relationship, Eliza occasionally had the dashing Captain Eads as a guest at the Dillon home. From the start, the colonel violently disapproved of his daughter dating Eads, believing she could do much better than match up with a poorly educated salvage boat captain. So James and Martha would meet in secret, frequently at her married sister Sue’s house, and often ride around the outskirts of St. Louis on horseback. After several months of courtship, Eads proposed. Martha accepted on the condition that her father would give his consent and blessing. But her father refused to do so.

Hopeful that her father would soon change his mind, the pair cooled their heels and Eads took an extended bachelor’s trip to see the East Coast—and to check out equipment manufacturers and supplies for a glass making venture he had been thinking about. He visited Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC; in the many descriptive letters he sent home, he wrote of his fascination with the U.S. Patent Office, saying that of all the things he saw in the capital, he found it, with all its models of patented machines, the most absorbing. He said, “I could spend five days at the Patent Office and find something new and interesting every day.”

After Eads returned to St. Louis, he and Martha’s frustration over the colonel’s continued objections to their marriage reached the breaking point. The perturbed couple—now twenty-five and twenty-four years old—decided to marry with or without the colonel’s blessing, and on October 21, 1845, James Eads and Martha Dillon exchanged their vows at the Cathedral Church of St. Louis de France. The action didn’t endear Eads to his new in-laws.

Once married, Eads rethought his life’s work. Although the salvaging business was a good, steady moneymaker, it was treacherous work. Eads decided to retire from it and start the glass-manufacturing factory he had been dreaming about—the first one west of the Ohio River. His first step in getting the St. Louis operation underway was to travel east to purchase needed equipment and materials. Martha, now at odds with her father, agreed to stay with Eads’s parents in their small cottage in Iowa while he was gone.

Establishing a major new business, Eads soon discovered, required his constant attention, so the newlyweds decided he would live in St. Louis, and she in Le Claire, until the glass works was established. What was supposed to be a temporary living arrangement, however, turned into months, then years, and eventually became permanent.

During their many years of separation, the couple exchanged hundreds of tender letters, many of hers imploring Eads to come “home” to Iowa more often. He wrote back explaining how the pressures of business prevented him from doing so. He was home in Iowa, though, when Martha gave birth to their first child, Eliza Ann, in August 1846.

The glass factory never really got off the ground and after three years of struggling with it, Eads closed its doors in the spring of 1848. Overwhelmed with debt because of the venture and his ongoing support of his parents, Eads went back to the lucrative but hazardous business of being a Mississippi River salvager, diving for sunken treasure.

Pressured to pay off his huge bills, Eads plunged full-bore into his second-time-around salvaging enterprise, working around the clock and frequently neglecting his family. Even though his wife was pregnant for the second time, he was away from her for long periods at a time. When Martha gave birth to their first and only son, James Jr., Eads was working at a salvage site unable to make it home. He was rediscovering that salvaging was even more time demanding than his glass business.

To maximize profits and keep up with his escalating river-cargo-recovery empire, Eads built more and more salvage boats, one designed more sophisticatedly than the previous, until his fleet, by 1849, had the ability to raise an entire steamship.

On May 17, 1849, a major disaster struck St. Louis. The steamer White Cloud caught fire while at the city wharf and its flames soon spread, engulfing fifteen downtown blocks and destroying twenty-three steamers. The conflagration was a terrible misfortune for St. Louis, but a boon for Eads, who was hired by the city to salvage the wrecks and sunken cargo. Overwhelmed with work and starting to accumulate a noticeable fortune, Eads finally received his father-in-law’s acceptance. But his newly found prominence was accompanied by personal tragedy. On June 15, his only son, James Jr., who was less than a year old, died.

After spending four days raising the steamship St. Paul in November 1849, Eads wrote to Martha: “I worked night and day at the St. Paul and was only in bed three hours whilst I was on board of her. I was pretty well worn out when I got back.” He collected $4,000 for the job (at a time when the average working man’s annual wage was $500). Martha’s reply was bittersweet, “It seems almost beyond belief that a steamboat of any size could be raised in so brief a space. This will give you an enviable reputation.”

In 1852, when he was 32, Eads’s mother passed away after an extended illness. A fatigued Martha, who had given birth to their third child, another daughter, one year earlier, was near exhaustion from caring for her ailing mother-in-law and single-handedly running the Eads household. She went to Brattleboro, Vermont, for a much-needed rest. But it was too late. On her way home, she died of cholera. The delicate former St. Louis debutante was only thirty-one years old and her death came just as the man her father had forbade her to marry was poised to become one of Missouri’s wealthiest citizens.

After two years of mourning, Eads remarried on May 2, 1854. His second wife, Eunice Hagerman Eads, was the widow of his cousin Elijah Clark Eads. He adopted her three young children—Genevieve, Josephine, and Adelaide—expanding his family of daughters to five. The newlyweds traveled to Europe for an extended honeymoon, the first of many trips he would take overseas.

In 1855, when the U.S. government decided to stop removing snags from the Mississippi, Eads bought five of its snag boats and converted them into salvage boats, further expanding his fleet. In the winter of 1855-1856, he went to Washington and proposed to Congress to clear Western rivers of snags and keep them open year-round if possible. The Eads bill passed the House of Representatives, but was defeated in the Senate. Not easily discouraged, however, Eads formed the Western River Improvement Company—a syndicate of fifty insurance companies—and financed the operation privately.

After being in the river salvaging business for ten years his second time around and becoming tremendously wealthy, the thirty-nine-year-old Eads decided to retire in 1858. Idling away his time with trivial pursuits, however, was a hard thing for him to do.

As the Civil War threatened, Eads anticipated the strategic importance of the Mississippi and that the control of the country’s river systems would be important to both sides. He advanced a radical idea for his day—ironclad gunboats. After Missouri voted to stay in the Union, he proposed that the U.S. Army immediately invest in the development of steam-powered ironclad warships. At first, his idea was coolly received.

Shortly after the Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in April of 1861, however, Eads received a telegram from an old St. Louis friend, Edward Bates, who was now President Abraham Lincoln’s attorney general. It read, “Be not surprised if you are called here suddenly by telegram. If called, come instantly.” He added that Eads’s “thorough knowledge of our Western rivers and the use of steam on them” would be most helpful to the war effort.

Within weeks, Eads was summoned to Washington and, in August, was given the contract to build seven iron-plated gunboats with which the Union forces would conduct their Western campaign and gain control of the Mississippi and its tributaries. Once awarded a contract, Eads rapidly began building the Union’s first ironclad armada, employing up to four thousand men at peak times. In a remarkable feat, Eads turned out his first ironclad forty days after he began production. By November of 1861, he had four gunboats, all equipped with advanced Eads-designed gun turrets, roaming the river.

In February of 1862, his steam-powered gunboats were put to the test: the bombardments of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland River were the first time ironclads were used in a fight in North America. Backed up by the firepower of Eads’s ironclads, both forts were captured. They were the first major Union victories of the war. On July 4, 1863, Eads’s gunboats played a major role in the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, which ended in a decisive Union victory, giving them full control of the Mississippi River.

Eads’s Civil War contributions won him many powerful friends in Washington, among them Union general and future president Ulysses S. Grant. These connections-in-high-places would prove to be great assets for his future activities.

After the war, one of Eads’s main engineering challenges was spanning the Mississippi with a world-class bridge. The powers that be in St Louis were concerned about the city’s status as the gateway to the West because transferring goods, animals, and people between the railway stations in St. Louis and East St. Louis across the river via ferries had become an incredible ordeal. The river crossing was frightening, and impossible when the water was low or the river frozen. Goods were often delayed for weeks. The city needed a bridge of massive proportions, so it petitioned the federal government for approval.

In 1866, one year after Congress authorized the construction of a major bridge across the Mississippi, the St. Louis and Illinois Bridge Company was formed, and Eads was named its chief engineer even though he had never before constructed a bridge. What he ended up doing was quite revolutionary in U.S. bridge-building circles of the day. Instead of using a truss design, which was the conventional form then vogue for railway bridges, he engineered a multiarched structure with three spans in excess of five hundred feet. Rather than wrought iron, which was the typical bridge material then, structural steel was used in the bridge’s construction. Its three arches—the largest of their kind in the world at the time—were supported on four piers (caissons) extending deep into bedrock below the riverbed.

The main members for the arches—eighteen-inch-diameter hollow tubes—were designed using $\mathrm{60,000}\text{-}\mathrm{psi}$ steel supplied by Andrew Carnegie’s steel works. Many times during construction, Eads rejected the steel delivered, returning it to Carnegie to be rerolled—or replaced—because it didn’t meet his standards

On October 25, 1868, one year before the first caisson for the bridge was sunk, Eads’s seventy-four-year-old father, who had been remarried and divorced twice by then, passed away in St. Louis. Although he never lived to see his famous son’s great bridge built, he had seen drawings of the magnificent structure showcased all around the city.

The elder Eads, who had received financial assistance from James for years, basked in the universal respect and esteem his son commanded in the St. Louis community, even from old-time elites like his in-laws, the Dillons. When his granddaughter—James’s oldest daughter Eliza Ann—married Major James F. How, the son of the former mayor of St. Louis, and eight hundred well-heeled people attended the wedding, the elder Eads was completely bowled over.

While the Eads Bridge was being built, the book Great Fortunes and How They Were Made, by James D. McCabe, was published. It devoted a full chapter to Eads, alongside the likes of John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Charles Goodyear, and Samuel Colt.

Amidst all this uplifting activity and excitement, a major crisis surfaced. A federal board, headed by Chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Andrew Humphreys, was convened in September 1872 to hear complaints from steamboat interests about St. Louis’s bridge. The board, with Humphreys as its spokesman, ordered that a canal had to be built around the bridge to appease the shipowners.

Eads immediately rushed to Washington to confer with President Grant about the justification for the canal. He convinced Grant that such a canal was totally unnecessary and the president overruled Humphreys’s order. From that day forward, Humphreys and Eads became bitter adversaries.

When the Eads Bridge was opened to the public on July 4, 1874, the three-hundred-thousand-plus people who turned out to take part in the celebration treated Eads like a national hero. Overlooked were the facts that the great bridge took seven years to construct and that more than a dozen men died, among them James Riley, the first American to die of the bends (caisson disease). The bends, a decompression sickness among divers that is marked by breathing difficulties, neuralgic pains, and paralysis, was a newly encountered ailment for U.S. builders working deep under water. A few years after Riley’s death, Washington Roebling would contract and be severely incapacitated by the disease while he was building the Brooklyn Bridge.

Eads’s structure was a municipal triumph for St. Louis and the harbinger of the town’s future prominence in the transport of cargo between the East and West Coasts. The city’s leaders believed the bridge ensured the city’s future greatness. One local reporter wrote, “No work of man on the globe so thoroughly combines the useful and the beautiful as the grand steel bridge which stretches its graceful line across the Mississippi at St. Louis.” The St. Louis women’s publication Central Magazine claimed, “James B. Eads is the greatest engineer on the American continent and his work, the great St. Louis Bridge, is the greatest structure of the kind in the world.”

In a publicity stunt just days before the opening of the bridge, an elephant was led across its wagon deck. It was widely believed that elephants had uncanny instincts and would never cross an unsafe structure. When the elephant nonchalantly ambled across Eads’s new-fangled bridge, it was proof positive to many in the public that it was, indeed, safe! To further demonstrate the bridge’s strength, fourteen heavy locomotives were continuously driven back and forth over its rail deck days before opening ceremonies.

Little time passed before Eads embarked on his next epic project—creating a workable year-round navigation channel at the mouth of the Mississippi near New Orleans. As the river approaches, spreads out, and gradually slows at the Gulf of Mexico, enormous amounts of sediment were regularly deposited, creating huge sandbars perilous to ship travel. In the 1860s, the sandbars effectively blockaded the port of New Orleans for weeks at a time, leaving food and produce to rot on the docks.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been trying for years to maintain a clear channel through the sandbar area, but its efforts had been less than successful. In 1869, the exasperation of Louisianans was expressed by a New Orleans Picayune reporter who wrote, “It is idle for us to rely upon the Government dredge machine, for experience has proved that the most she can accomplish is to occasionally break her propeller and steam up to the city for another.”

In 1874, under tremendous pressure to once and for all to do something, the head of the Corps, Eads’s old nemesis Andrew Humphreys, proposed building a permanent deep canal from below New Orleans to the Gulf. Based on his years of experience dealing with the Mississippi’s erratic lower currents—and walking on its riverbed—Eads thought the scheme was ludicrous. He suggested instead that jetties, or underwater walls running parallel to the current of the river, be built.

Eads’s jetties plan, which would cost less than the Army’s, would create a narrower channel speeding up the water running between them. The faster water flowed, the more sediment it would carry. Eads claimed the extra force would be enough to carve out the sandbars and carry all the troublesome sediment into the Gulf. To make the offer irresistible, Eads proposed building the jetties without any advance payment; the government would only pay him if the jetties worked.

In January 1875, by a vote of six to one, a board composed of Army and civilian engineers handed Eads a second victory over Humphreys, voting for the construction of jetties rather than a canal. Congress agreed to pay him certain amounts of money as he reached certain depths, so that by the time he reached the final required thirty-foot depth he would be paid $4.25 million.

Once Eads won the contract, Humphreys tried on numerous occasions to sabotage the project. On several occasions, vicious debate between Eads and Humphreys played out in the press, with members of the public taking sides, usually Eads’s. What added to Humphreys’s overall dislike for Eads was the amount of favorable press the informally educated engineer from St. Louis consistently garnered. An 1876 article in Scientific American, as an example, allowed that Eads, with his “commanding talents and remarkable sagacity” was “a man of genius, of industry, and of incorruptible honor,” and it called on him to seek the presidency of the United States.

In the end, Eads proved his point over Humphreys. When the jetties were finally completed in 1879, they created the necessary thirty-foot deep channel to ensure ships could travel unencumbered into and out of the mouth of the Mississippi. New Orleans went from being the ninth largest to the second largest port in the nation, after New York.

The news of Eads’s success at New Orleans raced around the world and sealed his reputation as a master of river engineering, placing him in the foremost rank of hydraulic engineers internationally. He became a much-invited consultant on river control and navigation problems, not only in the United States, but also in South America, Canada, and Europe.

In the spring of 1879, France’s Ferdinand de Lesseps (of Suez Canal fame) enthralled the world at an international congress held in Paris with his plans to build a passage between the seas—a canal across Panama from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific. The scheme would speed travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by eliminating the long, dangerous voyage around South America.

When the strong-minded Eads, no stranger to construction on a massive scale, heard about Lesseps’s plan, he candidly voiced his opinion. The idea of developing a more direct route for ship travel between the two oceans made sense; but building a major canal across Panama, with its unstable soils and mosquito-infested jungles, didn’t.

Instead, Eads proposed a multitrack rail system for moving ships overland, across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico—at a cost much less then was estimated for the deep-cut canal envisioned by France. Eads’s scheme challenging Lesseps’s created a whirlwind of press everywhere. In a letter to President Rutherford Hayes, Eads grandly claimed the rail project would fulfill one of the great dreams of kings and conquerors over the last $350\text{years}$ .

Eads planned to slide a $350\text{-}\text{foot}$ flatbed—with adjusting rams to form a cradle, unique to each hull—under ships in a $450\text{-}\text{foot}$ dry dock. Three double locomotives abreast would pull the ships onto dry land and across Mexico on three parallel sets of railroad track. By the time Eads submitted his plan to U.S. Congress in 1880, he had already met with the president of Mexico to clear the way for a ship railway through his country.

In 1881, after Congress failed to take action on his proposal, Eads offered to build the $75 million ship railway at his own expense and at his own risk, provided the U.S. government would guarantee a dividend of 6 percent for fifteen years after the railway’s practicality was proven. Eads’s ship railway proposal was debated in Congress for months, never reaching a vote.

In 1884, Eads and his wife Eunice moved to New York City where he spent much of his time trying to motivate the federal government to sign off on his ship-carrying rail system through Mexico, but to no avail. Then it was too late. France had already begun construction on their grand canal. But as Eads predicted, in the end, the French failed to complete the project because many of the problems he outlined against it were overlooked—and eventually confounded them.

It would take the upstart United States and the unflappable resolve of President Teddy Roosevelt, the creativity of U.S. engineering giants John Stevens and George Goethals, and major redesign of the French canal system incorporating an intricate series of locks and lakes to accomplish the feat several decades later.

In February 1887, a frail and exhausted sixty-seven-year-old Eads, following the orders of his doctors, sailed to Nassau in the Bahamas for a much-needed rest. His wife Eunice and stepdaughter Adelaide accompanied him, aware he was dying. On March 8, 1887, the gallant self-made American civil engineer peacefully passed away.

His death was mourned throughout the country and around the world. American reporters almost universally wrote about his being a giant of inventiveness and reasoning, a man to whom the nation owed a huge debt of gratitude, and that his passing marked the end of an era.

The recipient of countless honors, Eads was awarded one of his most prestigious three years before his death—the Albert Medal from the British Royal Society of the Arts, “for services rendered to the art of engineering.” He was the first American to receive the honor.

In 1920, Eads was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in New York City, the country’s original “Hall of Fame.” Founded in 1900, the hall honors prominent Americans who have had a significant impact on the nation’s history, and whose vitality, ingenuity, and intellect greatly contributed to U.S. growth and prosperity. A bronze bust of Eads was placed in the hall’s 630-foot open-air colonnade alongside ninety-eight other notables, including Alexander Graham Bell, Eli Whitney, and George Westinghouse.

In 1932, the Deans of American Colleges of Engineering named Eads one of the five greatest engineering minds of all time, alongside Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison.