Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Science, however, is a process. Humphreys considered his own work final, proclaiming, “Every river phenomenon has been experimentally investigated and elucidated. Thus every important fact connected with the various physical conditions of the river and the laws uniting them being ascertained, the great problem of protection against inundation is solved. At the mouths of the river, a similar course has resulted in the development of…the principles upon which the plans for deepening the channels over them should be based.”

  TO CONTROL FLOODS, levees-only advocates called for confining the river to increase the volume of water, hence increasing the current velocity and scour, thereby deepening the channel.

  Ellet had called for the reverse approach, building outlets and reservoirs to decrease the floodwater the river carried.

  Humphreys’ own observations seemed to favor outlets as well. His report repeatedly dismissed the levees-only approach, stating, “The investigations of the Delta Survey have rendered untenable that position [that] the exclusive use of levees…lowered the flood by deepening the bed.” Again, “The legitimate consequences which result from Guglielmini’s theory are all contrary to observation.” Again, “Measurements demonstrate with a degree of certainty rarely to be attained in such investigations, that the opinions advanced by these writers are totally erroneous.”

  Significantly, he warned that calls by levees-only advocates for closing natural outlets of the Mississippi, especially the Atchafalaya River, “would, if executed, entail disastrous consequences.” Regarding artificial outlets, he wrote: “The investigations of the Delta Survey prove that outlets, in the few localities where they are practicable, may be made to reduce the floods to any desired extent in certain divisions of the river…. [S]o far as the river itself is concerned, they are of great utility. Few practical problems admit of so positive a solution.”

  Since this analysis suggested that Ellet was correct, Humphreys demolished Ellet personally. “The task of criticism is always ungrateful,” Humphreys wrote unctuously, “and had [Ellet’s report] been proposed by an obscure writer, it would have remained unnoticed. Coming, however, from a civil engineer so well known as Mr. Ellet, and furnishing, as it does, the basis [of] practical conclusions believed to be most erroneous and most mischievous, it cannot be passed by in silence.”

  Then he attacked. He damned Ellet with a mocking faint praise, calling Ellet’s work on the Ohio River “admirably executed, as far as the field work was concerned, but…the computation…seems to be a repetition of Destrem’s misapplication of Prony’s rule.” He also lashed out: “Mr. Ellet shows he does not understand the essential requirements”; “the exactness of measurement deemed essential in the operations of this Survey was not attempted by Mr. Ellet”; “Mr. Ellet’s opinion is based on erroneous measurements”; “the discharge of the Mississippi calculated by Mr. Ellet, cannot be relied upon as very accurate.”

  Finally, after reviewing recommendations made over the course of three centuries by engineers from Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, Britain, and the United States, Humphreys concluded, “Mr. Ellet’s is the worst ever suggested.”

  Ellet had called for outlets. If Ellet’s recommendations were the worst ever suggested, how could Humphreys recommend outlets?

  He could not.

  Humphreys had begun his survey with intellectual curiosity and honesty. But he had also always intended to write a masterpiece. No masterpiece can merely confirm another’s findings. I hate to be second to anyone, he had said. He would not be second. Instead, he would become corrupt. The corruption did not infect his data—even today his data are considered reliable and instructive—but it did infect his reasoning and his recommendations.

  The reasoning was key. He convinced himself of the validity of two new arguments against outlets that not even levees-only advocates had raised. Like a deus ex machina, they allowed him to alter the direction in which his own scientific observations pointed.

  First, he claimed that outlets risked creating a new main channel for the river. Humphreys’ own deputy Forshey, the man who provided the raw data that went into the analysis, had earlier called this fear “groundless,” but Forshey was now, after the war, relying on Humphreys for patronage and did not protest.

  Second, Humphreys insisted that creating outlets would cost too much for the benefits gained. There may have been considerable validity to this argument in 1861, but the cost-benefit equation would change as more land was developed. Humphreys made no mention of that.

  So Humphreys rejected outlets, and Ellet with them. “It has been demonstrated,” he concluded, his italics implying that no reasoning man could dispute him, “that no advantage can be derived either from diverting tributaries or constructing reservoirs, and that the plans of cut-offs, and of new and enlarged outlets to the Gulf, are too costly and too dangerous to be attempted. The plan of levees, on the contrary, which has always recommended itself by its simplicity and its direct repayment of investments, may be relied upon for protecting all the alluvial bottom lands liable to inundation below Cape Girardeau.”

  Humphreys continued to reject the engineering hypothesis that underlay the levees-only idea. He continued to warn that the closing of natural outlets would be disastrous. Yet he was recommending that levees, and levees only, be used to contain the Mississippi River and its floods. He had found a facile way to reconcile his conclusion with seemingly contradictory analysis and data.

  And who could challenge him? Certainly no one in the South. People along the river were destitute, exhausted physically, emotionally, and financially. The war had ripped enormous gaps in the levees, either through erosion or sabotage by Union forces. Humphreys’ first assignment after the war was to inspect the Mississippi levees, and he recommended the federal government spend several million dollars to rebuild them. Though Congress did not appropriate the money, no southerner would antagonize this new friend. And behind him he had the weight of the U.S. Army.

  Ellet could not protest. He had been killed during the war, commanding a Union ram on the Mississippi. Humphreys seemed to stand alone, where he had always wanted to be. And he would soon have the power to enforce his will upon the nation.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  IN 1866, HAVING CHAMPIONED the Army against civilian critics and having been honored by scientific societies throughout the world, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys became chief of engineers of the U.S. Army. Ironically, by then there was no scientist left within him. Only the soldier remained.

  He cared now only about obedience, power, and rank. Rank in particular obsessed him. The Army shrank after the war, and officers returned to their permanent rank. Some brevet major generals became captains again. Humphreys, a brevet major general, fell only to brigadier general, a rank that automatically went with his command. Yet he resented even this. He began lobbying congressmen to make the chief of engineers a major general, arguing that his duties were “far more onerous, extensive, and responsible than of any department commander.” Unsuccessful in that, he then asked the secretary of war that he “be relieved from duty as Chief of Engineers and assigned to command under my brevet rank,” although he soon wrote to “beg leave to withdraw” that request.

  Inside the Corps his rule was absolute. He sought to have all engineering officers formally “detached” from the Army, thus making them answerable only to him. This effort earned him a reprimand, but he still sent a chilling message to underlings when one of the Corps’ civilian engineers, a man named Daniel Henry, invented a new instrument to measure water outflow; it gave far more precise results than a method Humphreys himself had developed for the Delta Survey. A scientist would have welcomed the advance, and the innovation was important enough to be displayed later at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. But when Henry used the new method in Army work, Humphreys relieved Henry’s military commander—a general—of his command for allowing its use, and forced Henry out of his job.

  Humphreys tolerated no criticism. Even less woul
d he tolerate a rival. But a rival far more formidable than anyone he had ever encountered was emerging.

  Humphreys and this rival would soon meet in a great collision over control of the Mississippi River. The rival was James Buchanan Eads. Their collision began over a bridge.

  THE CONSTRUCTION of what came to be known as the Eads Bridge at St. Louis was an epic in itself. The story began with money, and commerce. Prior to the Civil War, steamboats from St. Louis could navigate 15,510 miles of rivers, and an enormous and growing river trade seemed to guarantee the city’s future, helping the city grow from a population of 77,860 in 1850 to 160,773 in 1860 and 310,864 in 1870. Of railroads, the Missouri Republican said in 1854, “It may be properly assumed that trade, shipping, or business cannot be diverted by mere artificial means, from channels which nature…[has] given it…nor can any amount of capital supply the place of the rivers which constitute her great highways.”

  But capital built railroads and railroads made Chicago explode. Its population skyrocketed from 4,479 in 1840, to 29,963 in 1850, 109,260 in 1860, and, officially, 298,977 in 1870. (Chicagoans charged, probably correctly, that St. Louis boosters manipulated the 1870 numbers to keep Chicago from surpassing St. Louis in population.)

  The competition between the two cities, and between steamboats and railroads, was vicious. It came to a head when railroads bridged rivers. The first bridge across the Mississippi came in 1856 at Davenport, Iowa. Poorly designed, it was promptly hit by a steamboat, which sank (Eads salvaged it). St. Louis interests financed a famous lawsuit, seeking to tear down the bridge as a hazard to navigation. Abraham Lincoln argued for the railroad. His success—actually, a hung jury—was a major blow to river transport, and to St. Louis.

  But as a result, the Corps of Engineers demanded, and Congress gave it, authority to review future bridges over the Mississippi to ensure their safety to shipping.

  The Civil War meanwhile cut off St. Louis from much Mississippi River trade. Chicago took up the slack, and more. In 1860, not a single Chicago mercantile house did $600,000 worth of business a year; in 1866, with several bridges across the upper Mississippi open or under construction, twenty-two Chicago firms did over $1 million worth of business. The St. Louis Merchants Exchange finally recognized that without a railroad bridge across the river at their city, its business would evaporate; the exchange asked Eads to chair a subcommittee to reconcile bridge and steamboat interests.

  Though long identified with steamboats, Eads was intrigued with bridging the Mississippi. He knew more about the river than any man who had ever lived. His experience with ironclads and naval artillery had taught him much about iron, and even about the then experimental metal steel.

  After studying the problem, Eads proposed an arched bridge made of steel with either one span of at least 600 feet, or two of at least 450 feet. At the time he made this recommendation, not a single steel bridge existed anywhere in the world; in addition, the proposed arches would be the longest in the world. But on April 18, 1866, in the Merchants Exchange Building, his subcommittee adopted his proposal unanimously. Such was the faith St. Louis businessmen had in Eads.

  An existing company already owned a state charter to build a bridge, but after a year in which it made no move toward actual construction, Eads and his associates bought it. He became the company’s chief engineer. Suddenly, things began to move swiftly.

  First, Eads met with his old friend Missouri Senator Benjamin Gratz Brown, who won congressional authorization for the bridge over opposition from ferries, steamboats, railroads with established connections, and Chicago politicians. The authorization passed, Brown said, only because it stipulated at least one span of at least 500 feet or two of at least 350 feet, which was considered “impossible…. In fact, the utterance was then and there boldly made that the genius did not exist in the country capable of erecting such a structure.”

  Eads had never built any bridge, and this would have the longest arches ever built, with a material never before used for such a purpose—indeed, the British then forbade the use of steel in bridges. It would span the Mississippi below the mouth of the Missouri, after that river’s tremendous volume joined the upper Mississippi. No bridge on the upper Mississippi itself nor anywhere else crossed a comparable flow of water.

  Yet in an expression of almost suicidal self-confidence, Eads decided to design this bridge himself. He did hire outstanding assistants, including Henry Flad and W. Milnor Roberts, who both later became presidents of the American Society of Civil Engineers. But the basic design was his, many of the calculations his, many of the technical innovations his.

  His plans called for a center arch 520 feet wide resting on piers sunk to bedrock, and two side arches 502 feet wide. The key to success would be steel. Steel was as revolutionary as his plans. Though Eads probably knew more about steel than any engineer in the world, and most metallurgists, it was still a new medium; not until 1867—the year Eads committed himself to the metal—was the open-hearth process even developed.

  This did not reassure. Bridges built by experienced engineers, including Ellet, across lesser rivers had already collapsed, costing lives and money. In fact, roughly one out of every four bridges built in this period collapsed. The cost estimate for the St. Louis Bridge approached $6 million. Almost certainly it would rise. Eads would need to find capital not only in New York and Boston, but in London and Paris. To build investor confidence Eads hired as consulting engineer Jacob Linville, former bridge engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad and president of the Keystone Bridge Company, which Linville and Andrew Carnegie had formed. But after examining the plans in July 1867, Linville said: “I cannot consent to imperil my reputation by appearing to encourage or approve its adoption. I deem it entirely unsafe and impracticable.”

  Linville’s criticism was only one blow. A few weeks later a rival bridge builder tried to undermine further Eads’ ability to raise capital by convening a meeting in St. Louis of twenty-seven engineers. Their report announced “unqualified disapproval of spans of five hundred feet…for which there is no engineering precedent”; it was printed as a pamphlet and distributed nationally.

  Yet Eads never took a backward step. Elmer Corthell, a third Eads assistant who later became president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, wrote of him: “It is absolutely certain that no obstacle of an engineering, financial or any other kind ever for a moment disturbed or discouraged him. His complete knowledge of the conditions and the forces he was dealing with gave him unfaltering faith in the plans of the work, and yet there was something more than knowledge…. There was genius of the highest order that gave to him unalterable determination…and a sublime faith in what he always believed were the clearly written laws of the Creator.”

  Eads answered his critics three ways.

  First, he fired Linville and eliminated the position of consulting engineer.

  Second, he gathered in the financial resources at his immediate command—mostly investors who had faith in him personally—and, on August 21, 1867, began construction of a cofferdam even as the twenty-seven engineers met. Supposedly, he chose as the site the same spot on which he had first landed in the city, dragged wet and destitute from the river three decades before.

  Third, he prepared his first report to the bridge company directors. The report, actually an open letter to investors, typified Eads. Much of the force of his personality lay in his ability to explain the most esoteric science in terms an intelligent layman could grasp. The report began, “Anyone who can be made to understand the principles of all mechanical powers, the lever, can readily comprehend the explanation I propose making.” Step by step, each one laid with mathematical certainty atop the preceding, he presented his plans. Reaction around the world in engineering journals was, finally, universal praise. Newspapers published the plans. They were talked about everywhere.

  And he applied his charm. He charmed the roughest of men working on the bridge; although he always carried a knife and pistol around
them, they addressed him as “J.B.” and he competed with them in weight-lifting contests on the blacksmith boat—he finished second. He was professional and focused on the task in the extreme, explaining, for example, that an employer must “have constant control of his temper, and be able to speak pleasantly to one man the next moment after having spoken in the harshest manner to another, and even to give the same man a pleasant reply a few minutes after having corrected him. Self must be left out of the matter entirely, and a man or boy spoken to only as concerns his conduct; and the authority which the controller has over the controlled, used only when absolutely necessary, and then with the utmost promptness.”

  More important, he charmed investors in New York, London, and Paris. His logic made the boldest goal seem attainable. His enthusiasm made it seem inevitable. Even Andrew Carnegie was charmed and first became involved in international finance selling the bridge’s bonds in London.

  The bridge rose. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, nearly 2,000 men were swarming about on twenty-four large derrick-equipped barges and boats and scaffolding as the steel and masonry took shape. (Thirteen men who worked as deep as 125 feet below the surface would die of caisson disease, later known as the bends, caused by nitrogen bubbles forming in the blood under pressure; problems continued until Eads’ personal physician cut the shifts to forty-five minutes.) Thousands more worked in quarries in New England and machine shops and foundries in Pittsburgh, Wheeling, and Philadelphia.

  But the money pressure did not abate. The estimated cost was soon up to $9 million. In one crisis the arches had to be closed by a certain date or the bridge would collapse financially. Temperatures of 100 degrees had caused the steel to expand, making it too long by fractions of an inch. Eads was in London negotiating a new loan from Junius Morgan, J. Pierpont’s father, when his assistants wired that even applying hundreds of tons of ice had failed to cool and contract the metal. Eads had anticipated the problem and wired back the solution (telescoping the metal and screwing it into place, in the same way one might adjust a shower rod). Eads astounded Morgan when he, supremely confident of success, left for Paris without waiting to hear the result.