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