Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America

by Henry Petroski

  The formal opening of the bridge, scheduled for July 4, 1874, was to be a gala affair. Invitations announced that President Ulysses S. Grant would attend, but he canceled at the last moment—too late to have his picture and references to him deleted from memorabilia of the event. The citizenry might have been more disappointed if James Eads had not attended, however. His portrait alone graced the invitation; it dominated a broadside issued for the occasion; and a fifty-foot-high portrait of him hung from the bridge, with the notation that the Mississippi had been discovered by Marquette in 1673 and spanned by Eads in 1874. A parade almost fifteen miles long, with a great line of carriages leading a procession of representatives of various trades and occupations, crossed and recrossed the bridge.

  A contemporary photograph taken after the arches of the St. Louis Bridge became self-supporting (photo credit 2.11)

  Eads began his speech at the opening ceremonies by admitting his belief that “the love of praise,” whether “a frailty or a virtue,” was “common to all men,” that he was not exempt from its fascination, and that it served as a “laudable stimulus to effort.” Love of praise was, furthermore, “the grand motor which actuates the mind of man to attempt the accomplishment of worthy deeds,” and the building of what that day was the greatest bridge in America was certainly a worthy deed. Eads, however, like many a chief engineer at the dedication of a great work, recognized that he had not built the bridge himself, and he spoke explicitly of the help he had received:

  Yon graceful forms of stone and steel, which prompt this wonderful display, stand forth, not as the result of one man’s talents, but as the crystallized thought of many, aye, very many minds, and as the enduring evidence of the toil of very many hands; therefore I would forfeit my self-respect and be unworthy of these pleasing evidences of your good will, if on this or any other occasion, I should appropriate to myself more than an humble share of the great compliment you are paying to those who created the bridge.

  Eads spoke of himself that day as the representative of a “community of earnest men, whose combined labor, brains and wealth, have built up this monument of usefulness for their fellow-men.” He mentioned few facts and figures about the bridge, about which already so much had been written. Rather, he spoke of the design and construction process that assured him and his fellow engineers that the bridge was safe:

  Everything which prudence, judgment and the present state of science could suggest to me and my assistants, has been carefully observed, in its design and construction. Every computation involving its safety has been made by different individuals thoroughly competent to make them, and they have been carefully revised time and again, and verified and reexamined, until the possibility of error nowhere exists.… When the first arch was closed, Mr. J. S. Morgan, of London, whose firm has supplied so many millions for this work, and whose confidence in it has contributed so much to its success, wrote me, hoping that the closing of the arch had made me as happy as it had him. I replied that the only happiness I felt was in the relief that it afforded my friends, for I knew it would be all right.…

  Eads also confessed that he had felt no great relief when the piers reached bedrock, or when the first heavy locomotives were driven over the finished bridge, for he “had felt no anxiety on the subject.” He felt “justified in declaring that the bridge will exist just as long as it continues to be useful to the people who come after us, even if its years should number those of the pyramids.” He explained with some technical detail how the sun and temperature caused various parts of the bridge to be relieved of strain at different times of the year, so that any piece of steel could be “easily taken out and examined, and replaced or renewed, without interrupting the traffic of the bridge.”

  Among those individuals Eads singled out in connection with making the dream of the bridge a reality, the financier Morgan was the one most prominently mentioned. Several bridge-company directors were also acknowledged by name, complete with titles, for their “unswerving confidence and kindness.” The longest list of names, however, comprised those of the assistant engineers, their assistants, and others who provided “indispensable services.” Eads’s listing of these by surname only was no doubt a sign of his familiarity with them: “Flad, Roberts, Pfeiffer, Dwelle, Cooper, Devon, Gayler, Schultz, Wieser, Smith, McComus, Wuerpel, Klemm, and a host of others, earnest, faithful and accomplished.” He also acknowledged James Andrews, master mason; Walter Katté and his foreman, McMahon, “the skillful engineer” who swung the bridge’s steel arches into place; William S. Nelson, responsible for the caissons beneath the piers; and Charles Shaler Smith, for the Illinois approach to the bridge. There was no mention of Andrew Carnegie. Eads closed by observing what has been heard at many a bridge dedication ceremony, that “a great work is rarely erected without the sacrifice of human life,” and he remembered those who had died during the construction project, especially those who had died in the caisson work.

  That evening, there was to be a spectacular display of fireworks set off from the bridge, and hotels and steamboats had long advertised their verandas and decks as the best viewing locations. The pyrotechnic artist W. W. Judy was pictured along with President Grant and engineer Eads on a memorial broadside, but the show was a great disappointment. One of the “grand Temple pieces” was to be “of the bridge itself surmounted by allegorical figures representing Missouri and Illinois, clasping hands.” Another was to be of “Eads in the Temple of Honor, flanked by a locomotive and a steamboat, being crowned by Genius.” The illuminated “Phantom Train,” however, which was to traverse the entire bridge as a climax to the day’s events, was nowhere to be seen. The organizing committee had apparently economized in its contract with Judy, who came to be called “Judy Iscariot.” Many of the actual trains expected to cross the new bridge were also in fact phantoms, for it would be almost a year before the first regular passenger train contributed to the revenue. This, of course, was contrary to estimates made when the bridge was being financed, and soon the company went bankrupt.

  The official name of the bridge, as it appeared on invitations, was the “Illinois and St. Louis Bridge,” but Chicago newspapers delighted in calling it the “Chicago and St. Louis Bridge.” The definitive history of the engineering enterprise, published in 1881, called it the “St. Louis Bridge,” but then as now it was known to all as the “Eads Bridge,” making it one of the few major structures in the world named after their engineers. Ironically, in 1924, the Eads Bridge was identified as among the works of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “conducted principally, or in most important executive or advisory capacity,” by West Point graduates. This was, of course, a gross misattribution, and it did not escape the notice of Arthur E. Morgan, the fractious first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Morgan was a self-educated engineer whose work in drainage and flood protection gave him a special perspective on the work of the Corps. From 1920 to 1936, he was president of Antioch College, where he fostered the school’s work-study plan, and he wrote books on topics ranging from religion and science to a critical history of the Army Corps of Engineers.

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  The Corps of Engineers had little control over the Eads Bridge, of course, for it was planned and built before there was a law requiring prior approval by the secretary of war and the chief of engineers for bridges over navigable waters. Not that the secretary and the Corps did not try to influence the bridge. As the arches of Eads’s bridge were closing over the river, the operators of Mississippi steamboats had complained to William Belknap, the easily bribed secretary of war who would be impeached in 1876, that the bridge would interfere with their tall stacks, which, “flamboyant in their gaudy paint and gilded fretwork, were the boatmen’s pride, cherished trademarks of the western steamers.” The Corps of Engineers was ordered by Belknap to look into the matter of the bridge as an obstacle to navigation, and its report recommended that one of two actions be taken: (1) a deep-water canal be constructed on the Illinois side to bypass the bridge,
or (2) the bridge be dismantled. Furthermore, all future bridges across the Mississippi at St. Louis were to be of the truss type. Eads appealed to President Grant, whose birthplace near Point Pleasant, Ohio, was less than fifty miles up the Ohio River from Eads’s Lawrenceburg, and Grant suggested that Belknap “drop the case.” Though the Corps persisted, Eads prevailed.

  Eads’s nemesis in the Corps of Engineers was General Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, who had concurred in the recommendations of the Corps’s board. Humphreys and his associate, General Henry Larcom Abbot, had in 1861 first published their Report on the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River; it had since become the “bible” of the Corps, and its authors the Corps’s authorities on questions of river improvements. To challenge Humphreys and Abbot was to invite trouble, as Eads was to learn. A year before his bridge was completed, a convention of congressmen, governors, and interested citizens was convened in St. Louis to discuss the Mississippi River, whose mouth was constantly silting up and hindering shipping. The Corps of Engineers, which had been working for forty years to keep the channel open, were now proposing a canal from New Orleans to the sea. Eads joined the delegates on an excursion to New Orleans and the delta, and he proposed a system of jetties as a quicker, more economical, and more effective solution. It was within two months of Eads’s proposal that his bridge at St. Louis had become the subject of retrospective scrutiny by the Corps of Engineers.

  Whereas the action backed by Humphreys and Abbot was to build a canal from New Orleans to the Gulf of Mexico, Eads proposed extending parallel jetties from one pass of the river into the Gulf. He recommended first constructing long parallel screens of willow branches, held in place by piles under the water, in order to slow the current through the obstacles enough so that the sand it carried would be deposited. Properly arranged, this barrier would cause the water to flow more quickly in the unobstructed channel, and the increased velocity would itself in time scour out a deeper channel.

  A Board of Army Engineers was instructed to report on the canal scheme, which it endorsed, and on the idea of jetties, which it condemned. Only General John Gross Barnard, president of the board, dissented. He considered his fellow board members to be engineers in name only, engineers “in a narrow executive capacity,” but lacking in “the wide induction of experience [and] the wide observation of travel to see and judge other engineering works—[and in] the indispensable familiarity with what engineering is in its practical developments all over the world which alone can give any insight into an opinion on a great engineering question.” Furthermore, and perhaps most culpably, they did not even “know their own deficiency.” There were certainly extra-engineering reasons behind the opposition to Eads, however, no doubt fueled by his lengthy review, occupying twenty-five pages of small type in his collected addresses and papers, of the Humphreys and Abbot “bible.” In this review, which first appeared at the height of the canal-jetty debate—in 1878, in Van Nostrand’s Engineering Magazine—Eads stated that Humphreys and Abbot’s book, then recently reissued, “contains certain grave errors,” which Eads proceeded to expose, “touching the navigation of the river and the reclamation of its alluvial basin.”

  The official Corps of Engineers estimate was that a canal would cost $13 million whereas Eads’s scheme would run to twice that amount, and his jetties would constantly have to be extended into the Gulf of Mexico to maintain channel depth. Eads countered with a proposal to secure a 350-foot-wide channel at a depth of twenty-eight feet in half the time it would take to construct a canal, and with payment from the government commencing only after he had achieved a certain measure of success; the total bill was to have been about $10 million. This presented a classic choice between a government project and private enterprise. Not surprisingly, the Corps continued to oppose Eads’s proposal, and a protracted legislative battle ensued. Eads revised his proposal, promising a deeper channel through the preferred Southwest Pass of the river through the delta, at a lower cost of $8 million. The final legislation gave approval to Eads’s latest financial offer, but authorized jetties only at the smaller South Pass.

  In an address at a banquet in honor of the passage of the 1875 Jetty Act to Improve the Mouth of the Mississippi, Eads spoke eloquently of his conviction that his system would work:

  If the profession of an engineer were not based upon exact science, I might tremble for the result in view of the immensity of the interests which are dependent upon my success. But every atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home amid crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the 1,500 leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the river, its scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and deposits, are controlled by laws as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer needs only to be assured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the result he aims at.

  I therefore undertake the work with a faith based upon the ever constant ordinances of God himself; and so certain as He will spare my life and faculties for two years more, I will give to the Mississippi river, through His grace, and by the application of His laws, a deep, open, safe, and permanent outlet to the sea.

  Eads was expressing the same confidence in the engineering method with regard to opening a deep channel at the river’s mouth as he did in his bridge, of course, and his success was virtually guaranteed, because he knew the laws governing the fluidity of the river even better than he had come to know those governing the solidity of steel. Constructing the jetties took Eads’s own capital, however, and he had to fight continued battles with the Corps of Engineers to get paid for work done according to specifications. The jetty system, called “the most difficult piece of engineering in river hydraulics,” was ultimately a tremendous success. After four years of work, in 1879, the South Pass channel reached a depth of thirty feet, a depth greater than required even in busy New York Harbor, and it was said that “the savings on transportation of one year’s cotton crop alone was equivalent to the cost of the entire jetty project.”

  With the establishment of the South Pass channel, Eads had thus added another monumental engineering achievement to his life’s work. But, although he was not yet sixty years old, his health had suffered from the many extended periods of time he had worked underwater, first in his diving bell but especially in the compressed air of the caissons at St. Louis, which would remain the deepest such atmosphere at which workers toiled for almost a century of bridge building. Nevertheless, Eads was not the sort of person to retire, and one of the major engineering issues of the day continued to interest, if not obsess him.

  A common thread to all of Eads’s work related to the efficient transportation of goods, upon which he believed national prosperity depended. In a speech at the dedication of the Grand Hall of the Merchants’ Exchange in St. Louis, in 1875, he articulated his fervor for the subject:

  The key-note of our national prosperity is sounded in the simple words, “Cheap Transportation.” They should be stamped upon the stripes of our national banner and thrown to the breeze from every farm-house, mill, and factory throughout the commonwealth. Schoolboys should be taught that the superior facilities for cheap transportation secured to Phoenicia, Athens, Venice, Genoa, the Florentine Republic and Holland, the commerce of the world. Each retained it until its rival became a cheaper carrier; and it is a notable fact that art, refinement, literature, history and eloquence attained in each State their highest development during its commercial sway.

  Great civil-engineering projects to facilitate transportation and communication—including roads, harbors, canals, and bridges—were essential to the prosperity to which Eads was referring, of course. He was echoing the growing spirit of the nin
eteenth century, which recognized the importance of the engineer in “directing the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of man,” as Thomas Tredgold had defined civil engineering a half-century earlier for the purposes of obtaining a Royal Charter for the Institution of Civil Engineers. This formalization of the profession was the natural culmination of the realization that the work of engineers had in fact “changed the aspect and state of affairs in the whole world.” But engineers like Eads did not think the job was yet completed, for there remained many obstacles to cheap transportation, especially between the East and West Coasts.

  Increasing international commerce in the latter part of the nineteenth century created worldwide interest in a canal across Central America, to reduce the time and risk that ships took in transporting people and cargo between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. By 1855, a fifty-mile railroad across the Isthmus of Panama—the first transcontinental railroad—presented an alternative to the thousands of sea miles (and added perils) it took to get around the southernmost part of South America. Of course, unloading ship cargo onto railroad trains and reloading it onto ships at the other terminus was as costly as ferrying rail freight across rivers without bridges. By the late 1870s, a private French company had been formed to explore options, and the prospect of an Isthmian canal, promoted by “Le Grand Français,” Count Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had been responsible for the Suez Canal, offered some promise amid great engineering controversy.