James Eads And Marine Salvage
James Buchanan Eads is remembered today mostly for his magnificent Eads Bridge across the Mississippi River in St. Louis. The world’s first triple steel-arch bridge, it was completed in 1874.
Few remember that Eads—the first and only man ever publicly urged by Scientific American magazine to run for president of the United States—was a marine salvor before he was a civil engineer. In fact, he was the father of marine salvage on the inland rivers. He not only pioneered many techniques used in river salvage and diving, but later pioneered the use of river training structures to scour navigation channels.
A self-taught engineer and inventor who educated himself by plunging into the extensive library of his first employer, a dry-goods merchant, Eads made his first fortune as a marine salvor. He went into business with two partners to whom he showed his design for the first diving bell, a modified wine-barrel, paired with a special salvage vessel. Eads dubbed it a “submarine” and did most of the dangerous diving himself, recovering valuable cargoes from steamboat wrecks up and down the Mississippi. The knowledge of the river he gained from his underwater salvage activities, which equaled that of any river pilot, earned him the honorific title “captain.”
When the Civil War broke out, Eads won a contract with the Union army to build seven steamships designed by engineer Samuel Pook with iron plating within just 65 days. They wound up taking 100 days to build, using 4,000 men working seven days a week. These were among the first U.S. ironclads to be built after the pioneering Monitor. Eads’ ironclads played an important part in allowing the Union to seize control of the Tennessee River and Mobile Bay during the war.
Despite his successes, Eads still had trouble getting his innovative ideas accepted. When he proposed the use of what he called “jetties”—projecting river dikes designed to train the Lower Mississippi River to scour a river channel—he was widely ridiculed, despite his past successes. The New York Times ran a prominent editorial mocking the idea, and Eads ended up building the project at his own expense. Nevertheless, by 1879 the jetties had fulfilled their purpose.
Having overcome much skepticism, Eads had received many honors and recognitions by the end of his life. In Eads’ day, river and marine transportation (along with railroads) were as important as the internet is today. While river transportation remains very important to the country’s economy, it doesn’t occupy the place in pubic consciousness that it once did. But the river industry owes to James Eads debts that extend well beyond the impact of his famous bridge.
