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'James Buchanan Eads' (23 May, 1820–8 March, 1887) was an American structural engineer and inventor.
Eads was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and named for his Mother's cousin, then Congressman and subsequent President of the United States James Buchanan. His early life was spent growing up in St. Louis, Missouri.

Contents

Fortune

Civil War

Bridge

External links

Fortune

Eads made his initial fortune in salvage, by creating
a diving bell for retrieving goods from the bottom of rivers that were sunk there by riverboat disasters, especially along the busy Mississippi River. He also devised special boats for raising the remains of sunken ships from the river bed.

Civil War

In 1861, after the outbreak of the American Civil War he was contracted to construct ironclads for the United States Navy, and impressed the Navy by producing 8 such ships within 100 days. He continued to produce ironclad steamships throughout the war, which greatly aided the Union.

Bridge

Eads designed and built the first road and rail bridge to cross the Mississippi River, the famous Eads Bridge at St. Louis, Missouri, constructed from 1867 through 1874. After destruction by a tornado in 1871, it was designed to be tornado proof and was famously struck again by a tornado in 1896, this time surviving. Eads bridge was the first bridge to use the cantilever construction method. This allowed steam boat traffic to continue using the river during construction. The bridge also was the first to be made of steel alloy.
The Mississippi in the 100-mile-plus stretch between the port of New Orleans, Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico frequently suffered from silting up of its outlets, stranding ships or making parts of the river unnavigable for a period of time. Eads solved the problem with a wooden jetty system that narrowed the main outlet of the river, causing the river to speed up and cut its channel deeper, allowing year-round navigation. Had a similar system been used throughout the entire Mississippi Valley, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the Great Flood of 1993 and Hurricane Katrina Disaster in 2005 would have been reduced. As Eads was a civilian engineer rather than a military engineer, top officials of the Army Corps of Engineers lobbied Congress for levees and flood walls of their own design, which exacerbated these disasters, and against Eads' jetty system, which would have reduced these disasters.
He designed a gigantic railway system intended for construction at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which would carry ocean going ships across the isthmus from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean; this attracted some interest but was never constructed.
In 1884 he became the first US citizen awarded the Albert Medal of the Society of the Arts.
Port Eads, Louisiana is named for him.
He has his own star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Eads died in Nassau, Bahamas on 8 March, 1887.

External links

★ ''Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America'' by John M. Barry, ISBN 0-684-84002-2

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★ PBS - Secrets of a Master Builder