James Buchanan Eads

Civil Engineer

  • Born: May 23, 1820
  • Birthplace: Lawrenceburg, Indiana
  • Died: March 8, 1887
  • Place of death: Nassau, Bahamas

American engineer and inventor

Eads so revolutionized long-span bridge construction that the Eads Bridge, which spans the Mississippi River at St. Louis, is the only such structure bearing an engineer’s name. He was also a highly successful capitalist and an inventor of note, with more than fifty patents credited to him.

Areas of achievement Engineering, business

Early Life

James Buchanan Eads (eeds) was born in an Ohio River town. His family was of moderate means, moving in search of better fortune to Cincinnati, Ohio, then to Louisville, Kentucky. As a result of economic difficulties, between the ages of nine and thirteen Eads had only minimal formal education. Nevertheless, by the time he was eleven years old, Eads, working from observations made during family moves on steamers, had already constructed a small steam engine and models of sawmills, fire engines, steamboats, and electrotype machines.

In Louisville, Eads’s father experienced serious business reverses, so at only thirteen Eads traveled to St. Louis, working passage on a river steamer and seeking employment. After suffering hardships, Eads found well-paying work in a St. Louis mercantile establishment. Recognizing Eads’s abilities, an employer opened his library (reportedly one of the Mississippi Valley’s finest) to him, and Eads used it intensively to study civil engineering, mechanics, and machinery. When he was nineteen, his family moved to Dubuque, Iowa, where young Eads signed as second clerk aboard the river steamer Knickerbocker, which operated between Dubuque and Cincinnati. In the next few years, having risen to purser, he served aboard several Mississippi steamers and became intimately acquainted with the navigational characteristics of the river with which his life became intimately linked.

Life’s Work

In 1842, now an attractive, industrious, tactful, ingenious, and personable man, Eads placed his savings into copartnership with Case and Nelson, a firm of St. Louis boat builders, in order to help the company to expand into the salvage of river wrecks. Hundreds of steamers were lost annually during the mid-nineteenth century because of boiler explosions, contact with bars or snags, and other accidents, and millions of dollars were lost to river pirates and to the unpredictabilities of the river itself. As a consequence, Eads and his partners extended their salvage operations the length of the Mississippi and to the Gulf countries of Central America, profiting greatly. Nevertheless, Eads sold his shares and established the first glass manufactory west of the Mississippi, an equally profitable enterprise.

Drawing upon his vast experience with the Mississippi and its tributaries, Eads founded his own salvage company in 1847. His success lay in his design and construction of a series of “submarines,” diving bells raised and lowered by derricks and supplied with compressed air, which revolutionized salvage work. Not only were sunken cargoes recovered, but also vessels themselves could be refloated. His final salvage boat, bought from the American government and redesigned, was the largest, most powerful of its type ever built.

Eads was so successful with his diving bells and snag boats that in 1856-1857 he proposed a federal contract to clear obstructions and maintain free navigation of the Mississippi and other western rivers over subsequent years. His proposal was defeated, however, chiefly by the opposition of Senators Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, the former to serve in several capacities Davis’s Confederate cabinet. Thwarted, but already wealthy, at the age of thirty-seven Eads retired with his second wife to the comfort of a St. Louis suburb, ostensibly to recover from his latest bout with tuberculosis.

The most significant phases of Eads’s career lay ahead. Edward Bates, a friend of the Eads family who had entered Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet as attorney general, alerted Eads to the possible need for his services as secession of the South threatened in 1860; the administration was anxious to preserve free navigation of the Mississippi. Shortly after war erupted in 1861, Eads won federal contracts for construction of seven six-hundred-ton armored steamers to be ready for action in sixty-five days.

Greatly handicapped by his illness, Eads still assembled men and materials from ten states and from the mills of half a dozen cities, successfully completing his first delivery in forty-five days. Within one hundred days he designed and constructed an aggregate of five thousand tons of military shipping. These vessels contributed to Union victories at Forts Henry and Donelson and at Island No. 10, thereby opening the northern Mississippi. Indeed, at the time of these victories, Eads actually owned the vessels, having paid for them with his own funds (he had not yet been reimbursed by Washington).

Before 1865, Eads built fourteen heavily armored gunboats, four mortar boats, and seven armored transports, all delivered on time and to specifications. Furthermore, his revolving gun turrets later became standard. For this and other inventions, Eads was elected a Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. Devoid of engineering training, Eads had amply demonstrated not only a mastery of novel shipbuilding but also a profound knowledge of iron and steel potentials. Combined with his grasp of the Mississippi’s peculiarities, his ingenuity, tenacity, high civic esteem, and organizational abilities, he was brilliantly equipped for his next enterprise: bridging the Mississippi at St. Louis.

With canal building and the era of the river steamer waning, railway expansion dominated the postwar period. From 1865 until Eads’s death in 1887, railway mileage increased from about 40,000 to more than 200,000 miles. Concurrently, need for bridges (hitherto of wooden or iron truss constructions) of long spans and heavy bearing capacities became imperative. Proposals for a St. Louis span had been made earlier than 1867 by Charles Ellet, Jr., as well as by John Augustus Roebling, engineers of distinction, but Eads’s plan won the vital approval of the St. Louis business community and of the city’s officials.

For his unprecedented scheme, Eads employed unprecedented means. Aware of his own weaknesses, he created a superb staff: Charles Shaler Smith joined him as chief engineering consultant, two other able men were chosen as assistant engineers, and the chancellor of Washington University served as mathematical consultant. With Bessemer steel then available, Eads selected steel as his basic construction material. This ran against the advice of many engineers; indeed, the British Board of Trade banned the use of steel for bridges until years later. Moreover, Eads helped transform Bessemer steel into chrome steel, that choice alone altering subsequent major bridge construction, in which special steels came to supersede iron.

Foundations created special problems. Eads knew the Mississippi, and by treading its bottom in his diving bell he confirmed that three or more feet of sand and silt moved along the river bed at speed of flow. Winter ice jams and the necessity of keeping navigational channels open further complicated planning. The pneumatic caissons devised for foundation work were not new in principle but they had seldom been tested and never on the scale or at the depths required to reach bedrock: 123 feet below the mean water level on the Illinois side and 86 feet at St. Louis. Moreover, these iron-shod timber caissons were seventy-five feet in diameter and designed to sink under their own weight as work progressed. Consequently, several lives were lost and others frequently endangered, and cases of “bends” from depths and pressures were numerous.

Double-decked for trains and for normal traffic, the bridge featured unique arches that had been cantilevered into position, the central sections coming last. Moreover, the three arched spans were of unprecedented length: 1,560 feet overall. Notwithstanding distinguished assistance, Eads designed and oversaw, as his engineers testified, every one-eighth of an inch of the structure, and his aesthetic sense produced a masterwork of great beauty, one still in service. It was completed in 1874, just as the nation’s first and longest industrial depression struck. Bondholders foreclosed on the bridge’s mortgage. Eads’s own bank proved to be one of the great financial disasters of the day. By 1877, the financier and speculator Jay Gould assumed control of the bridge.

Eads, however, swiftly recovered from this crash. By 1875 he had begun overriding congressional opposition to a $5,250,000 contract for permanently clearing major bars at the mouth of the Mississippi and extending its South Pass jetties into deep Gulf waters. Again through ingenuity developed after study of European river jetties, Eads designed an inexpensive “mattress” construction, successfully completing the job and recouping his fortune. Indeed, he offered seventy-five million dollars of his own money if Congress would charter his company for construction of a ship-railway across the Mexican isthmus at Tehuantepec, thereby bringing the Pacific twelve hundred miles nearer to the Mississippi than Ferdinand de Lesseps’s ongoing Panama project. Even as Congress moved to accept his proposal, however, Eads’s health failed. He died on March 8, 1887, in Nassau, the Bahamas.

Significance

Either as a great capitalist or as a great engineer, Eads would have enjoyed distinction. Essentially filling the ideal of the American self-made man, he combined both roles, distinguishing himself in both. He revolutionized the salvage business with his inventions, notably with his design of steam-driven centrifugal pumps and his diving bells. He revolutionized bridge construction with his arch designs and, above all, with his introduction of steel for such structures. He resolved through financial, political, and engineering inventiveness and skill the freeing of the river around which so much of his life revolved. In 1884, he became the first American recipient of the Albert Medal from the British Royal Society of Arts. Further, of the eighty-nine persons elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Eads (elected in 1920) was the sole engineer or architect chosen during the institution’s first sixty years of existence.

Bibliography

Barry, John M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. The title is deceptive; although the book is about the 1927 flood, Barry begins his tale during the 1870’s, describing the first serious attempt to control the Mississippi River. The effort pitted Eads against Andrew Humphreys, chief of the Army Corps of Engineers. The two hated each other and bitterly fought over river control plans. A compromise policy eventually was adopted, and Barry explains how the failure of that policy resulted in the disastrous 1927 flood.

Condit, Carl W. American Building: Materials and Techniques from the Beginning of the Colonial Settlements to the Present. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Sweeping and expert analysis. Chapter 12, “Long-Span Bridges in Iron and Steel,” treats Eads in proper technical context.

Kouwenhoven, John A. “The Designing of the Eads Bridge.” Technology and Culture 23 (1982): 535-568. Scholarly work in a widely available, learned journal.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “James Buchanan Eads: The Engineer as Entrepreneur.” In Technology in America: A History of Individuals and Ideas, edited by Carroll W. Pursell, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981. Chapter 8 on Eads is excellent; scholarly and well written.

Scott, Quinta, and Howard S. Miller. The Eads Bridge: Photographic Essay. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. The fullest description of the bridge; less useful for the general context of Eads’s other activities.

Weisberger, Bernard A. “He Mastered Old Man River.” American Heritage 44, no. 8 (December, 1993): 22. Describes Eads’s attempts to control the Mississippi River, including his invention of the diving bell.

Woodward, Calvin M. A History of the St. Louis Bridge: Containing a Full Account of Every Step in Its Construction and Erection. St. Louis: Janes, 1881. This account of the building of the Eads Bridge is old but is the most exhaustive.

Yager, Rosemary. James Buchanan Eads: Master of the Great River. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968. Interesting overview of Eads’s life and activities, but not the final word on Eads’s work.

May 24, 1883: Brooklyn Bridge Opens.