A diving bell settles into the muddy current of the Mississippi. Inside it, a man walks the river bottom in near total darkness, feeling for wrecks with his hands.
It is 1861.
He does not just salvage sunken steamboats. He designs a diving bell from a whiskey barrel and descends into the river again and again to recover cargo that others had written off as lost.
He does not just win a government contract. He builds a fleet of ironclad gunboats for the Union in roughly one hundred days, launching the first of them at Carondelet in the autumn of 1861.
He does not just span a river. He drives caissons deeper than any American builder had before, sinking foundation piers more than one hundred feet down to bedrock beneath the Mississippi at St. Louis.
He does not just improve navigation. He forces the river itself to scour its own channel, building jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi that opened the port of New Orleans to deep ocean traffic.
His Spark of Liberty was a refusal to accept that the river could not be mastered.
He treated the Mississippi as a problem of engineering rather than an act of God to be endured. He had walked its bed and knew its currents and its silt from direct experience, not from books. When engineers of standing insisted his steel arch bridge would fall and his jetties would fail, he answered with calculation and with structures that carried the load and moved the water. He did not hold a formal engineering degree, and by most accounts he had little schooling past his early teens, which makes the scale of what he built more striking, not less.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
He was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, in 1820. As a young man he moved to St. Louis and worked as a purser and clerk on Mississippi steamboats, which gave him close knowledge of the river and its hazards. In the 1840s he patented a diving bell and formed a salvage business to recover sunken vessels and their cargo, work that reportedly made him a considerable fortune and cost him his health more than once.
During the Civil War, he was contracted by the federal government to construct ironclad river gunboats. The first of these, launched in 1861, and the vessels that followed played a significant role in Union operations on the western rivers, including the campaigns that opened the Mississippi. He carried out the work under tight deadlines and at personal financial risk.
After the war he undertook the project for which he is best remembered, a bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis, completed in 1874. It was among the first major uses of steel in bridge construction and among the earliest to rely on the cantilever method and deep pneumatic caissons in the United States. Workers in the caissons suffered from what was then poorly understood as caisson disease, now known as decompression sickness, and several died, a cost recorded in the accounts of the project’s physician.
In the 1870s he turned to the mouth of the Mississippi, where sandbars blocked ocean vessels from reaching New Orleans. Against the recommendation of the Army Corps of Engineers, he proposed a system of jetties to narrow the flow and let the river carry away its own sediment. He agreed to be paid largely on results. The jetties, completed at South Pass by 1879, deepened the channel and proved his principle. He later promoted a ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a scheme that was never built. He died at Nassau in the Bahamas in 1887.
His name was James B. Eads.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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