James Buchanan Eads Engineer, Innovator and Inventor Extraordinaire by Richard G

Great Achievements notable structural engineers James Buchanan Eads Engineer, Innovator and Inventor Extraordinaire By Richard G. Weingardt, P.E. Although most widely known as the builder ceived a U.S. patent for a special boat equipped of the great triple-arch steel Mississippi River with a diving bell that allowed workers to walk bridge that bears his name, James B. Eads’s on the dangerous river bottom. Relying on this range of influence reaches well beyond this invention, he convinced two established St. accomplishment. As a true Renaissance man Louis boat builders, Calvin Case and William of his day, this self-educated engineering Nelson, to partner in a river salvaging business ® genius amassed a fortune of $500,000 (in – which achieved immediate success. 1857 dollars) before he was 40 and became Within two years, a prospering Eads sought a one of most outstanding civil engineers of the woman to marry. Martha Nash Dillon – an in- 19th century. telligent, sultry, attractive debutante – turned James was born May 23, 1820, in Lawrence- James’s head. Martha came from a prominent burg, Indiana, the third child of Thomas and St. Louis family. Her mother had died when Ann (Buchanan) Eads. Thomas moved his she was young;Copyright her father, Colonel Patrick family from town to town following different Dillon – a highly successful St. Louis business- ventures that regularly failed, so James and his man – had married Eliza Eads, James’s first James B. Eads. Courtesy of Library of older sisters Eliza Ann and Genevieve received cousin, who made the introductions. From Congress Prints and Photographs Division. sporadic educations and did not develop last- the start, the Colonel violently disapproved ing childhood friendships. of his daughter dating this poorly educated bore into it even though Martha was pregnant On September 6, 1833, the Eads family salvage boat captain, so James and Martha again. When she gave birth to their only son, steamed into St. Louis, Missouri, aboard the met in secret. After months of courtship, Eads James, Jr., Eads was away at a salvage site. Carrolton, bringing all their possessions to proposed and Martha accepted – if her father Focused on keeping up with his escalating settle there. As the Carrolton approached would consent. He refused. empire, Eads built more salvage boats, each the docks, its chimney flue collapsed, engulfing The pair cooled their heels for a time. Eads one more sophisticated than the last. By 1849, the ship in flames and destroying all cargo on- traveled east to research a glass-making ven- his fleet could raise an entire steamship. board. Eight people died. The Eads, uninjured, ture.magazine In his many descriptive letters home, On May 17, 1849, disaster struck when the landed with only the clothesS on their backs.T RJames showedU his fascinationC withT the U.S.U steamer R White ECloud caught fire at the St. To help support his suddenly destitute family, Patent Office and its models of patented in- Louis city wharf. Its flames engulfed 15 blocks 13-year-old James sold apples on the street ventions. After Eads returned to St. Louis, their and destroyed 23 steamers – a boon for Eads’s and then ran errands for a store. The owner let frustration over the Colonel’s objections reached business that made him wealthy and allowed James read books on technology and machines a breaking point and they married anyway on him finally to receive his father-in-law’s ac- in his library. Intrigued with inventors and the October 21, 1845. Not surprisingly, this did not ceptance. But tragedy tinged his newfound latest inventions, the boy tinkered with some endear Eads to his new in-laws. prominence when his infant son died on June of his own, among them a six-foot-long scale- Once married, Eads rethought his life’s work 15, and again in 1852, when Eads’s mother model steamship. and its treacherous nature. He started a passed away. A year earlier, Martha had given When James was 17, his family moved to glass-manufacturing factory in St. Louis, again birth to their third child, another daughter. Le Claire, Iowa, but he refused to go, instead traveling east to purchase equipment and ma- Exhausted from caring for her ailing mother- getting a position as clerk on the steamboat terials. Martha, still at odds with her father, in-law and running the household, she went Knickerbocker. Nineteenth-century Mississippi stayed with Eads’s parents in their small cottage to Brattleboro, Vermont, for a much-needed riverboat travel was a perilous proposition. in Iowa. Eads discovered that establishing a rest – but too late. The former debutante, only The river was full of debris (called snags) that new business required constant attention, so 31 years old, succumbed to cholera. caused serious boating accidents and wrecks. the newlyweds decided that he would live in After mourning for two years, on May 2, When steamships sank, their cargos littered St. Louis and she in Le Claire – a living arrange- 1854, Eads married Eunice Hagerman Eads, the Mississippi riverbed. Young James realized ment that became permanent. The separated the widow of his cousin Elijah Clark Eads. He that a fortune could be made by retrieving couple exchanged hundreds of tender letters, adopted her three young children, Genevieve, sunken steamships and their treasures. But how hers imploring Eads to come “home” more of- Josephine and Adelaide, expanding his family could he do it? By inventing a salvaging tool. ten. He explained how the pressures of business of daughters to five. Eads’s efforts to build salvaging equipment prevented him from doing so, though he was In 1855, when the U.S. government stopped intensified on December 11, 1839, when the home in Iowa when Martha gave birth to their removing snags from the Mississippi, Eads Knickerbocker itself hit a massive snag and first child, Eliza Ann, in August 1846. purchased five of its snag boats and converted quickly sank with a valuable shipment of lead. Ead’s glass factory never got off the ground, them into salvage boats, further expanding Still, he needed another two years of experi- and its doors closed in 1848. Overwhelmed his fleet. In 1856, a Congressional proposal mentation to work out the kinks of his first with debt, James went back into the lucrative to clear snags from western rivers and keep salvaging invention. Finally, in 1842, Eads re- but hazardous salvage business, plunging full- them open year-round passed the House

STRUCTURE magazine26 November 2010 STRUCTURE magazine of Representatives but failed in the Senate. Undeterred, Eads formed the Western River Improvement Company, a syndicate of 50 insurance companies that let him finance the operation privately. After profiting in the river salvaging busi- ness for ten years straight, a prospering 39-year-old Eads retired – but not for long. The Civil War threatened. Eads anticipated the strategic importance of the Mississippi to both sides and advanced a radical idea – that the U.S. Army develop steam-powered, ironclad warships. It was coolly received at first. But shortly af- ter the Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in April, 1861, Eads got a telegram from Eads Bridge from the top of the St. Louis Jefferson Memorial Arch. Courtesy of Richard® Weingardt Consultants, Inc. President Lincoln’s Attorney General, Edward Bates. It read, “Be not surprised if you are forts. On July 4, 1863, Eads’s gunboats also massive bridge across the Mississippi, the city called here suddenly.” That August, Eads was played a role in seizing Vicksburg, Mississippi, petitioned the federal government for approval. awarded a contract to build seven iron-plated which gave Union forces a decisive victory One year after Congress authorized con- gunboats from which Union forces could and control of the Mississippi. Eads’s Civil struction of the proposed bridge, the St. Louis conduct their Western campaign and control War contributions won him powerful friends and Illinois Bridge Company was formed. the Mississippi. Eads rapidly built the Union’s in Washington,Copyright DC, among them General Although he had never built a bridge, Eads first ironclad armada, employing up to 4,000 Ulysses S. Grant, the future president. became its chief engineer. He revolutionized men and turning out his first ironclad in After the war, the powers-that-be in St. Louis U.S. bridge-building circles by engineering a only 45 days. By November 1861, four gun- fretted about the city’s status as the gateway multi-arched structure with three spans, each boats equipped with Eads-designed gun turrets to the west. Transferring goods, animals and exceeding 500 feet. His specifications called roamed the Mississippi. people via river ferries between the railway for structural steel rather than wrought iron. The following February, these gunboats were stations in St. Louis and East St. Louis was The three arches – then the largest in the tested at the bombardments of Fort Henry an ordeal. When water was low or the river world – were supported on four piers (cais- and Fort Donelson. Backed by firepower from frozen, crossing it proved impossible, delaying sons) extending deep into bedrock below the Eads’s ironclads, Union troops captured both commerce for weeks at a time. To build a riverbed. The 18-inch-diameter hollow tubes S T R ADVERTISEMENTmagazine U – For Advertiser Information,C visit www.structuremag.orgT U R E

November 2010 STRUCTURE magazine27 November 2010 for the arches used 60,000-psi steel from the water flowed, the more troublesome sedi- Andrew Carnegie’s steel works. To meet his ment it would carry into the Gulf. high standards, Eads frequently returned the Eads made his offer irresistible by proposing to steel to Carnegie to be re-rolled or replaced. build the jetties without an advance; the gov- On October 25, 1868, Eads’ 74-year-old ernment would pay only if the jetties worked. father passed away. The elder Eads had basked In January 1875, by a 6 to 1 vote, a board in the respect his son commanded, even of Army and civilian engineers handed Eads from St. Louis elites like the Dillons. When a second victory over Humphreys. Congress his granddaughter Eliza Ann – James’s oldest agreed to pay him as the canal reached certain – married Major James F. How, the son of depths. When it reached the final 30-foot depth, a former St. Louis mayor, 800 well-heeled Eads received $4.25 million. people attended the wedding. Ultimately, Eads had proven his point over Amid this uplifting activity, a federal board Humphreys. His jetties ensured that ships headed by U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Chief could travel into and out of the mouth of the Andrew Humphreys convened in September Mississippi. Because of them, New Orleans 1872 to hear complaints from steamboat inter- quickly advanced® from being America’s ninth ests about Eads’s bridge. Humphreys ordered a largest port to its second largest (after New canal to be built around the bridge to appease York). The news of Eads’s New Orleans success ship-owners. Eads rushed to Washington to con- sealed his reputation as a river engineering vince President Grant that the proposed canal master and placed him in the foremost ranks was unnecessary. Grant overruled Humphreys’s of engineers internationally. He was invited order, setting up a long-standing adversarial to consult on river control and navigation relationship betweenCopyright Humphreys and Eads. problems around the U.S. and in South When Eads’ Bridge opened on July 4, 1874, America, Canada and Europe. more than 300,000 people joined the cel- A decade later, in February 1887, an exhaust- ebration, treating its namesake like a hero. ed 67-year-old Eads followed doctors’ orders The structure – a magnificent triumph for St. and sailed to the Bahamas to rest. Aware that Louis – became the harbinger of its prominent he was dying, his wife Eunice and her daugh- role in transporting cargo between the east and ter Adelaide accompanied him. On March 8, west coasts. One reporter wrote, “No work of the self-made American civil engineer passed man on the globe so thoroughly combines away. American reporters called him a giant the useful and the beautiful as the grand steel of inventiveness and reasoning to whom the bridge that stretches its graceful line across the nation owed a debt of gratitude. Eads’s passing Mississippi at St. Louis.” was mourned around the world. Thosemagazine days, people believed that elephants The recipient of countless honors, Eads had S T R U C T Uearned R his most Eprestigious one in 1884, be- had uncanny instincts and would never cross an unsafe structure. So, to gain publicity coming the first American to receive the before the bridge opened, an elephant was led Albert Medal from the British Royal Society

ADVERTISEMENT – For Advertiser ADVERTISEMENT Information, visit www.structuremag.org across its deck. To prove its safety even further, of the Arts “for services rendered to the art 14 locomotives were driven continuously over of engineering.” In 1920, Eads was inducted its rail deck two weeks later. into the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in Little time passed before Eads embarked on New York City, where Americans whose vital- his next project – a year-round navigation ity, ingenuity, and intellect contributed to the channel at the mouth of the Mississippi. country’s growth and prosperity are honored. Near New Orleans, the river spreads out A bronze bust of Eads was placed in its 630- and gradually slows at the Gulf of Mexico, foot open-air colonnade beside 98 notables depositing enormous amounts of sediment including Alexander Graham Bell, Eli Whitney that create sandbars perilous to ship travel. and George Westinghouse. In 1932, the Deans In the 1860s, sandbars blockaded the port of of American Colleges of Engineering named New Orleans for weeks and caused massive Eads one of the five greatest engineering minds amounts of food to rot on the docks. The of all time, along with Leonardo da Vinci and exasperated U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Thomas Edison. To this day, Eads remains a could not maintain a clear channel through notable legend in engineering history.▪ the sandbar area. In 1874, under tremendous pressure, the head Richard G. Weingardt, P.E., is Chairman of the Corps (and Eads’s nemesis) Andrew of the Board for Richard Weingardt Humphreys proposed building a deep canal Consultants, Inc. in Denver, Colorado. from below New Orleans to the Gulf. Eads Mr. Weingardt is the author of nine books. thought the scheme ludicrous, instead sug- His latest, Circles in the Sky: The Life and gesting jetties or underwater walls parallel to Times of George Ferris, is the one-and-only the river’s current. This less costly plan would biography of Ferris and how he built his create a narrow channel, speeding up the 1893 Ferris Wheel. Mr.Weingardt can be water running between the walls. The faster reached at [email protected].

STRUCTURE magazine28 November 2010