of whom he treated with a uniform dignity and courtesy, even when they
were unfriendly, and a few of whom he was on the most intimate terms
with. Among all of them he was admired; perhaps already he was as
prominent a citizen as there was in Saint Louis, and as it was still in
the good old times when the mayoralty there was a high honor to the
best men, it was suggested to him that he hold the office. Nor was this
the first honor offered to be thrust upon him; early in the war Bates
had wanted him appointed commissary of subsistence at Saint Louis, and
though it was unusual to appoint a civilian to that position, Lincoln
had been willing to do it to oblige Bates,--but Eads had not wished it.
More than a year later he was given a commission of lieutenant-colonel
by the governor, but he was never sworn in. Like all men in those
troublous times, he took a peculiar interest in politics; and on being
asked privately in a joint letter from the editors of three Saint Louis
papers (two of them German) exactly what his politics were, he replied
that he was as strongly in favor of emancipation as he was opposed to
slavery, and that he believed in no "kid-glove policy;" but he remarked
incidentally that if he were to be offered the mayoralty he should
refuse it.
His work was for the whole country. While he was still too much
engrossed with his turrets and his plans for new boats, he fell very
ill. Indeed there can be no question that he sacrificed his health to
build the gunboats. Never very robust, he was now so ill that eight
doctors gave him up. His indomitable spirit pulled him through, but he
was ordered away from his workshop to Europe, he and his family. His
overburden of labor had crushed him,--before this his eyes had been
tired out. Bates charged him to take care of himself; "the country
can't spare you," he said "and I can't spare you."
Unless Bates was a prophet, we may well think the first of these
statements unduly strong. To be sure, when in a crucial moment the
gunboats were needed, and needed quickly, Eads's unparalleled haste in
building them certainly did an inestimable service to the country. But
so far in his career,--and he was over forty,--while he had shown a
marked inventive talent, he had not as yet made clear his signal genius
for engineering. And although he had exhibited wonderful executive
ability and such true patriotism as made him a valued citizen, he had
still to render himself indispensable to the development of the nation.
III
THE BRIDGE
Eads was bred to the Mississippi. He had mastered its secrets by hard
experience; he had worked in successful opposition to its great wayward
forces. But he was not to be content till he had tamed it, till he had
saddled it, and, wild as it will always be, had made it nevertheless
subservient to him. To his quietly stubborn spirit there was a
delightful invigoration in using his brain to conquer the brute force
of this capricious monster. For the river is the grandest power between
our two oceans. Niagara is more sublime; but Niagara is constant, and
therefore its immense strength has been easily set to a task. The
Mississippi is so irregular that one tends unconsciously to personify
it by calling it tricky. To find the causes of its sudden changes one
must go back hundreds of miles to the mountains east and west. Seeming
to delight in destruction, it tears down or eats away the checks that
are put upon it. Only a mind never discouraged, a mind capable of
discovering and comprehending the laws that after all underlie the
apparently blind and brutal jests of this untiring giant, can, by the
use of those very laws, tame it. And such a mind Eads had. "That
everlasting brain of yours will wear out three bodies," said one
friend.
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
"Encyclopaedia 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.