James B. Eads

Though indeed his body was strong, with iron muscles and a fierce nervous energy, yet it was not a big body, and his health was weak. Again and again he worked beyond his strength, and only on the absolute order of his doctors would he go away from his work and rest. But he could not entirely rest. His brain would work. In his health tours to Europe he was always open to new ideas, always studying new methods to carry back to his task. "Your recreation," some one wrote him, "is Monitor discussions with Captain Ericsson." Another recreation was chess. Had he not elected to be the leading engineer of his day, he might have been the chess champion. This game, never one for the slothful and unthinking, he made even more exacting than usual. He would play several games at the same time; or, without seeing the board which his opponent used, he would carry the game in his head. Though it was his nature not to like to be beaten, yet he was as kindly as he was set in his purpose; and it was also his nature to take defeat gracefully: defeat seldom came. "Never let even a pawn be taken," he gave me, a small boy, as a rule for the game. Even in little things he liked thoroughness,—a capacity for painstaking which is, I think, characteristic of the "thoroughbred."

His appearance showed his traits. Not tall, and rather slight, he was always dignified. His wide and thin-lipped mouth shut so emphatically that it made plain his intention to do, in spite of all, what he believed could and should be done. Some one said that it was a hundred horse-power mouth. It admitted no trifling. When it spoke seriously, it spoke finally. But his eyes, with their merry twinkle, showed that he could also speak humorously. He was indeed a famous story-teller, fond of all sorts of riddles and jests, and remembering all of them he heard. He used often to point his arguments with an anecdote, always a fresh one. Believing with Lamb that a man should enjoy his own stories, he would laugh at his in a most infectious way, till he was red in the face. Indeed, he was the larger half of his stories. His face was thoughtful and stern. Though he seldom found fault, he never did more than once; but he was by no means violent. His mildness was more forcible than anger. He wore a full beard, but no mustache, thus exhibiting his long, determined lip. At forty he was already bald, and after he was sixty he always wore indoors a black skull-cap. Scrupulously cleanly, in his dress he was point-device. Without the least ostentation, his clothes were invariably faultless. From young manhood he had thought that it is due to one's self and to one's friends to look one's best; and he had also realized the practical value of a good appearance. Often impressing this on his wife and daughters, he would have them at all times well dressed. Really he seems to have been a point too precise. He was just the opposite to those geniuses whose great brain shows itself by a sloppy exterior. Eads was never sloppy, even at home.

His great brain showed itself in its restless activity, in its grasp of laws and of details, in its fight to help and to better the country and the world. For it was not only the lusty pleasure of battling with Nature that made him long for another struggle with the Mississippi: he saw the value there was in it to commerce and to civilization. Before the war he had long contended with stubborn currents, and with ice, and by his energy and his talent for inventing new devices he had become the most successful wrecker on the river. Abandoning the peaceful but lively triumphs of snatching hulls and cargoes from the maw of the stream, he had offered the government to cleanse its course and thereby to increase its safety and usefulness. In war times, owing to his knowledge of the waterways and of science, he had been able to build, with a speed fairly romantic, a gunboat fleet to patrol the Mississippi. Already now greater schemes for improving this central highway of our country were in his mind, but as yet the fullness of the time was not come. Still, he was no longer merely the careful son and father striving to protect his beloved ones and with no dreams of broader duties; he was no longer contented with rose-arbors for an occupation. The grim war had roused him; his years of rest were over; he was the well-known boat-builder,—engineer, perhaps some persons already called him,—and his mind was teeming with schemes of helpfulness. Yet his ambition was not for fame, but to do in the perfect way the work that only he could do.

In 1867 a grand convention for the improvement of the Mississippi and its tributaries met in Saint Louis. Even then people were beginning to see vaguely that the Mississippi Valley is destined to be the ruling section of the country. Eads in his speech showed that he foresaw it plainly. He urged the convention to persuade the government to take steps to improve the river; showing that for less money than was paid by the river boats in three years for insurance against obstructions, those obstructions could be removed. There was not one of them, he said, that engineering skill and cunning could not master.

Two years later he urged upon the commercial convention at New Orleans by letter the importance of introducing iron boats on the Mississippi; saying that it was the fault of the tariff on iron that the saving they would effect was not taken note of. Thirty years later this scheme has again been brought up. Perhaps Eads was before his time in advocating it. But it shows how he had the interests of commerce at heart.

His convention speech is a good sample of his style. He was so painstaking that even in private letters he would insert words and change sentences and sometimes rewrite. There are first draughts with excisions of whole half pages, for he sought conciseness. He sought also a certain rhythm or grace or forcefulness, it is hard to tell exactly what, since in his letters it often resulted in a rather self-conscious formality or a stiff playfulness, and in his speeches in a prettiness or a floweriness of style. He sought too carefully. Probably in delivery the speeches sounded better than we should imagine. In reading them, they seem florid. That was, however, the favorite style of the time. And while, by overdoing it, he often seems to lose force, he is almost always clear and always entirely logical. In contrast to his speeches his professional reports are models: simple and complete, written not faultlessly perhaps, but with a limpidity which makes one interested even in dry technical details. One of his most marked talents, often noted, was the ability to explain an abstruse subject so that it would be quite clear to anybody. And this he did nearly as well in writing as by word of mouth.

He thus made clear his remarkable plans for the bridge; for in 1867 the long talked of bridge at Saint Louis was at last begun.

In 1833, when Eads had arrived at the town, it had about 10,000 inhabitants. Though already seventy years old, it had not advanced very far beyond its original state of a French trading-post. With the introduction of steam and the waking up of the country, the growth of Saint Louis was rapid. In 1867 it had about 100,000 people. Despite a commanding situation, it could be seen that a struggle would have to be made for it to maintain the leadership among the river towns. As early as 1839 there had been a project for a highway bridge; and we are told that "the city fathers stood aghast" at an estimated cost of $736,600. In the following years there were several more abortive schemes for bridging, one of which, it is even said, would have been carried out, had not its projector died. Perhaps it is as well that he never lived to try it, for until Eads no one seems to have realized how enormous the undertaking was. Probably few others, realizing it, would have dared to go on.

In the winter of 1865-66 a bill was brought up in Congress to authorize the bridging of the Mississippi at Saint Louis. Dependence on ferries had become intolerable to the people, and often when the river was frozen even the ferries were blocked. A bridge was felt to be absolutely indispensable. However, the antagonism of rival commercial routes was so powerful that the bill was allowed to pass only after it had been so amended that it was supposed to require an impracticability. It declared that the central span of the contemplated bridge must be no less than 500 feet long, nor its elevation above the city directrix less than fifty feet. It was said at the time "that the genius did not exist in the country capable of erecting such a structure."

Still, a span of over 500 feet had been built in Holland; and the fact that there was not a total doubt as to the practicability of doing as well in the Mississippi Valley is shown by the inauguration of two rival bridge companies about a year after the passage of the bill. One of these, which was located in Illinois, after calling a convention of engineers, who considered the question for ten days, without an examination of Eads's plans, adopted a plan for a truss bridge. The other, the Saint Louis company, from the first had Eads as its chief engineer. For another year there was a sharp contest carried on between these two companies, confined, however, principally to the courts and the newspapers, until finally the Illinois company sold out to the Saint Louis company. Had the truss bridge been built, there is no knowing how long it might have stood, for the engineer who designed it did not arrange to base the foundations on the bed-rock of the river. Afterwards it was shown how necessary it was to do this; but at the time many people thought it quite superfluous, and on that, as well as on many other points, Eads met with opposition.

In every case it turned out that he had been right. No one else knew so well as he the immense power and the waywardness of the Mississippi. Good engineers supposed that the greatest imaginable scour at the river bottom in extreme high water would not remove over twenty-two feet of sand, and it was believed that there were perhaps one hundred feet of it along the east shore. But Eads had been sixty-five feet below the river's surface at Cairo, and there he had found the river bottom to be a moving mass at least three feet deep; and in cutting through the frozen river to liberate his diving-bell boats, he had found that the floating ice which goes underneath solid ice, as well as the rising or "backing-up" of the water above ice-gorges, forces the undercurrents lower than even a flood does; and he had found on cutting a wreck out of the ice that she had been held up by the gorged ice underneath her, which must therefore have been packed to the bottom. Knowing all this and much more about what goes on under the turbid surface of the river, he did not doubt that even beneath 100 feet of sand the bed-rock might at times be laid bare, and he was absolutely convinced that his bridge must be founded on it.

Moreover, he saw that on account of the exceptional force of the current in its rather narrow bed at Saint Louis, the masonry piers of his bridge must be made unusually big and strong to withstand it. Since they must be so big and sunk so very deep, it was evident that they would be so costly that the fewer there need be of them the better. The central span was required to be 500 feet; with three spans about that length the river could be crossed, and three spans would require only four piers. Steel trusses 500 feet long would have to be made extremely heavy; but Eads showed that a steel arch the same length, while quite as strong, would be lighter and consequently much cheaper. When his opponents objected that there was no engineering precedent for such spans, while he pointed out their mistake, at the same time he expressed his conviction that engineering precedents had nothing to do with the question of length of span; that it was altogether a money question. Therefore, since the cheapest method was to be carefully sought, he determined upon arches,—two abutment piers, two river piers, and three arches of respectively 502, 520, and 502 feet long.

There were many opponents to this plan; some of them people who would have opposed any bridge, as, for example, the ferry and the transfer companies. To his own company he explained away every objection that came up, as he was bound to do, in view of their confidence in him. He made the clearest of explanations of the theories involved; and even such absurd predictions as that his superstructure would crush his huge stone piers, he took the trouble to blast sarcastically. To an engineering journal he wrote three letters correcting mistakes in its accounts of his work. But he seems to have wasted little of his energy in arguing with the newspaper public. It was a question only of time till everybody should be convinced.

The most extraordinary care and pains were expended in every direction. The stone, granite, and steel were both hunted up and tested by experts, and by machines specially devised in the bridge works, though not by Eads himself. For his assistants he chose men who were of real ability and well trained, and to them he invariably gave great credit for their part in the work. The plans, after being figured out in detail by them, were gone over by the mathematician Chauvenet, then chancellor of Washington University, who found not one single error in them. Most of the big work, such as the masonry and steel, was given out on contract; and, as was natural, delays by the contractors often greatly delayed the progress of the bridge. The whole work occupied seven years.

While Eads had promised the company to prove by careful experiment, so far as was possible, everything connected with the bridge that had not already been fully demonstrated in practice, he did not pretend that in his main outlines he was without some examples. It was in his development of known ideas and his expedients for simplification that his genius perhaps most strikingly showed itself. Again and again he contrived some device so simple that, like a great many strokes of genius, it seemed that anybody should have thought of it. The massive piers were sunk to the bed-rock by means of metal caissons. These were adapted in design from some he had seen in use in France, and had examined during a trip his doctors ordered him to make in 1868. Eads himself compared them to inverted pans. They were open at the bottom, but perfectly air-tight everywhere else. They had several important features which were entirely original. Such caissons, sunk to the bottom, have the masonry of the pier built on top of them even while they are sinking; and workmen inside them keep removing the sand from underneath, and throwing it under the mouths of pipes which suck it up to the surface of the river. Evidently the caissons must be filled with compressed air to equalize the external pressure, which is constantly increasing as ever deeper water is reached; they must also have an opening connecting with the surface; and to admit of passing from the ordinary atmosphere to the denser one, there must be an air-lock. Before this bridge was built, the air-lock had always been placed at the top of the entrance shaft, where, as the caisson sank and the shaft was lengthened, it had to be constantly moved up. Eads placed it in the air-chamber of the caisson itself, where it never had to be moved; and thus, as the shaft was not filled with compressed air, less was needed, and there was less danger of leaks. Another of his useful innovations was to build his shaft of wood, and another was to put a spiral stairway into it. Indeed, in the last pier he put an elevator into the shaft. Moreover, he was the first person to run his pipes for discharging the sand, not through the shaft, but through the masonry itself; and he invented a very simple and effectual new sand-pump, which was worked by natural forces without machinery. All these improvements and various others seem to have been thought of so easily, that we are inclined to wonder why clumsier methods had ever been in use. He described them all in his reports and his letters about the bridge in a style which is not only clear but actually fascinating even to a person who has scant scientific knowledge or taste.

One of the piers was sunk 110 feet below the surface of the river, through ninety feet of gravel and sand. Eads's theories were justified by finding the bed-rock so smooth and water-worn as to show that at times it had been uncovered. This was the deepest submarine work that had ever been done, and Eads tells us in his reports many interesting experiments he made in the air-chambers. In their dense atmosphere a candle when blown out would at once light again. This was before the days of electric lighting: otherwise we may be sure that that would have been used, as so many other modern inventions were. For the first time in any such work, the last pier sunk had telegraphic communications with the offices on shore; which must have been comforting to workmen starting out to their labor in the dead of winter with two weeks' provisions. The dense air of the chambers caused not only discomfort to the ears, but also in the case of some of the workmen a partial paralysis. There was no previous experience to go by, but every precaution seen to be necessary was taken; the hours of work were made very short, the elevator was provided, medical attendance and hospital care were given free. After the first disasters no man was allowed to work in the air-chambers without a doctor's permit. And it is known that in helping the sufferers with his private means, Eads was as charitable as ever. Out of 352 men employed in the various air-chambers, 12 died. Eads, with his wonted generosity of praise, printed in his yearly report the names of all the men who worked in the deepest pier from its beginning till it touched bed-rock. It is interesting to note in passing that of all the workmen in the blacksmith's yard only the head smith himself could lift a greater weight than the designer of the bridge.

The superstructure consisted mainly of three steel arches, by far the longest that had ever been constructed; the first to dispense with spandrel bracing; and the first to be built of cast-steel. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" called them "the finest example of a metal arch yet erected." They were built out from the piers from both ends to meet in the middle; and were put into place entirely without staging from below,—once again, the first instance of such a proceeding. All the necessary working platforms and machinery were suspended from temporary towers built on the piers; and thus while the arches were being put up, navigation below was not interfered with. This throwing across of the 500-foot arches without the use of false works has been ranked with the sinking of the piers "through a hundred feet of shifting quicksands," as producing "some of the most difficult problems ever attempted by an engineer." One problem, caused by the fault of the contractors, presented itself when they came to insert the central tubes to close the arches. The tubes were found to be two and a half inches too long to go in, although they would be only the required length when they were in. It was left for Eads to insert them. Shortening them would of course have lowered the arch. Eads, who was just starting for London on financial business of the bridge, cut the tubes in half, joining them by a plug with a right and left screw. Then he cut off their ends, for the plug would make them any required length by inserting or withdrawing the screws a little. Then he went away. As it would have been much cheaper not to use this device, his assistants tried for hours to shrink the tubing by ice applications, and thus to get the arches closed; and there is a popular tradition in Saint Louis that they succeeded; but it was excessively hot weather, and they did not succeed. The screw-plug tubes, of course, were easily put in. Any part of this steel work can be at any time safely removed and replaced,—another structural feature original in this bridge.

Although Eads took care to protect his special innovations by patent, he was most willing to explain them with care to other engineers and to have others profit by his improvements; and several of the mechanical novelties of his bridge are now in the commonest use, and have been taken advantage of even in such famous structures as the Brooklyn Bridge.

During the building of the bridge Eads spent many months in enforced absence, but while in Europe he always had his labor in mind, and, as I have said, brought home from France one of his most useful appliances. During his absence he left absolutely trustworthy and efficient engineers in charge of the work, and before leaving home he provided for accidents that might occur. So much work was done in the winter that great barriers had to be built to keep it clear of floating ice. One curious detail connected with the bridge is that the Milwaukee, one of the double-turreted gunboats which Eads had built from his own plans, and which had been with Farragut at Mobile, was bought now from a wrecking company, and her iron hull used in making the caissons; so that her usefulness still continued in peace as in war.

It has been said of Eads that he grappled with great problems in engineering, and solved them as easily as a boy subtracts two from six. While this is true, it must not be forgotten that he had not the school-training of an engineer. Nothing is more untrue than the statement that he was, like de Lesseps, only a contractor. He was a very unusually brilliant engineer, and his ignorance of the higher mathematics served to show his brilliancy the more clearly. Some persons have said that his chief talent was in explaining abstruse reasonings simply; but an engineer has told me that he thought Eads's chief talent was his ability to arrive by some rough means at a certain conclusion to a given problem, which conclusion would in every instance be approximately the same that better trained mathematicians would reach by mathematics.

By the time the bridge was finished, indeed from the time (1868) when his first report for it made a decided stir in the scientific world, both at home and abroad, Eads was a very well-known engineer. In that same year a visit to Europe for his health's sake gave him the opportunity to interview a French steel company, through whom he met a famous bridge-builder, and was led to examine the piers of the bridge then being constructed at Vichy; and it was there that he found his new ideas for caissons. Going home, by way of England, he explained his plans to the engineers there, and was by them proposed as a member of the Royal Society. Even at home, in his own adopted State, he was not without recognition; for in 1872 the University of Missouri conferred upon him the honorary degree of LL.D. From the general of engineers he received a request for suggestions for improvements in guns; and from his work on the subject of Naval Defenses it is plain that his mind still found time to run on this favorite topic.

In 1874 the bridge was finished. After it had satisfactorily stood the severe tests put upon it, it was formally opened on the 4th of July. The celebrations of that day were the first public outburst of approval given to Eads's work. And to-day the strong and graceful bridge stands as his most beautiful and lasting monument. And as even the great tornado of 1896 was unable to do the piers any serious damage, they are likely to last indefinitely, and thus make the bridge "endure," as its builder said, "as long as it is useful to man."

To Saint Louis it has been so useful that while on the one hand the growth of the city was the cause of its being built, on the other it has been one great cause of the continued growth and prosperity of the city. But it had even broader results than that. "It made a radical change in the conditions of transportation East and West, and it made possible the Memphis bridge and the future New Orleans bridge."

And in another direction yet it is peculiarly important. In bridge-building it marks an era, not only because of its strength and beauty and the daring of its design, but also because of its many labor-saving devices, the inventions of a thoroughly practical mind. A distinguished engineer calls it "a great pioneer in the art of sinking deep foundations and building spans over wide stretches of space, that astonished in its construction the entire civilized world." London "Engineering" chose it, while building, as preëminently the "most highly developed type of bridge;" and says, "In that work the alliance between the theorist and the practical man is complete." In Eads it finds its long-sighed-for dream, combining the highest powers of modern analysis with the ingenuity of the builder.