James B. Eads

by Louis How

When the Jetties were finished and paid for, Eads found himself in a very good situation. Not only was his bold scheme proved to be a complete success, but it had in the end paid him well; and he was promised still further payment for maintaining his works twenty years longer. His reputation was world-wide. He was now fifty-nine years old. Five years later, in 1884, he went to live in New York. It is not hard to imagine why so busy a man wished to be more in the centre of things, though, for that matter, he had not for some years past spent much of his time at home. There was too much to make him travel. Besides the frequent voyages which he was ordered to take for the sake of his health,—and which, as he was a very bad sailor, he said were real medicine,—he was in demand here and there, in places miles apart, for professional services; and then, too, he visited many engineering works in various remote lands,—river improvements, docks, the Suez Canal. It was not alone that his curiosity was always healthy, but also that his education—the broad, useful education that he gave himself—was never ended.

We have seen how he refused to go to Brazil. He was also wanted at Jacksonville, Florida, where the citizens called him in 1878 to examine the mouth of the Saint John's River, and to report on the practicability of deepening the channel through the bar with jetties. He went there, and, after a personal examination, presented a very elaborate report. In 1880 the governor of California had requested him to act as consulting engineer of that State, and he accordingly visited the Sacramento River, and reported upon the plans for the preservation of its channel and the arrest of débris from the mines. In 1881 he was consulted by the Canadian Minister of Public Works on the improvement of the harbor of Toronto, which he also examined. This was the first instance in which the Canadian government had ever employed an American engineer. When he was in Mexico, the government there asked him for reports on the harbors of Vera Cruz and Tampico and suggestions for their improvement. Although he did not examine these two harbors personally, he drew up plans on surveys furnished by engineers whom he sent there; and the work which has since been carried out after his instructions has proved eminently satisfactory. Again, it was the people of Vicksburg who sent for him to tell them how to better their harbor; and at another time he was consulted about the Columbia River in Oregon and about Humboldt Bay. In 1885 the Brazilian Emperor made a second attempt to secure his services for an examination of the Rio Grande del Sul, but ill health and pressing business prevented his acceptance of the offer; nor was he able to undertake the examination of the harbor of Oporto requested by the Portuguese government. It seems superfluous to say that all the reports he did make "were exhaustive and eminently instructive in their treatment of the subjects discussed."

Perhaps the two most important professional cases submitted to him were those in 1884 on the estuary and bar of the Mersey River and on Galveston Harbor. In the case of the Mersey he was called in, at the solicitation of the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board of Liverpool, to settle a dispute. Appearing before a committee of the House of Lords, he gave his testimony as to the effect which the proposed terminal works of the Manchester ship canal would have upon the estuary of the Mersey and the bar at Liverpool. "He brought to the solution of this question that same keen insight into hydraulics and the same close application that had made him so successful in this country." He showed so plainly what would inevitably be the deleterious results of the proposed plans that the committee decided against them. Subsequently they were changed to conform to his suggestions. For this report he received £3500, said to have been the largest fee ever paid to a consulting engineer.

In the Galveston case, the same year, he was requested, not only by the city but by the state legislature, to formulate a plan and to take a contract from the United States government for improving that harbor. The government had already been carrying on works there for several years and accomplishing nothing. Indeed, it was the jetty method—by this time more highly thought of than ten years before—which was being attempted, but not in proper form. Eads, after long and careful study of the situation, made a plan, which he offered to carry out on conditions very similar to those adopted in the case of the Mississippi Jetties, but Congress was not willing to grant the contract. Since then, however, the works there have been altered according to his suggestions, and have consequently been more successful.

For a good many years, owing to the weakness of his lungs and to other illness, Eads had not only had to travel much for his health, but to take special care of himself generally; and yet, to judge from the following account, in the first person, of how he had spent the year 1880, it seems that his wondrous energy had not failed: "I inspected the River Danube about 800 miles of its course; and investigated the cause and extent of the frightful inundation at Szegedin, in Hungary, which involved an examination of 150 miles of the Theiss River. I also examined the Suez Canal, to familiarize myself more thoroughly with the question of a ship canal across the American isthmus, having previously visited the Amsterdam ship canal and the one at the mouth of the River Rhone. As a member of the Mississippi River Commission I also aided in perfecting the plans for the improvement of that river, and the preparation of its report now under consideration before Congress. As consulting engineer of the State of California I made a thorough inspection of the Sacramento River, to consider the best method of repairing the injury to its navigation caused by the hydraulic mining operations there, and submitted a lengthy report upon it. On my way back I visited the wonders of the Yellowstone Park, crossing the Rocky Mountains in that excursion six different times. Within this time I have thrice visited the Jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi, besides my visit to the city of Mexico, Tehuantepec, and Yucatan.... I have also, at the request of the mayor and council of Vicksburg, twice visited that city during the last year, to examine its harbor with a view to its improvement."

In 1884 Eads received perhaps the most distinguished honor of his career—the award of the Albert Medal. As it came only two or three months after the report on the Mersey, it was undoubtedly due to that as its immediate cause, although the Jetties were almost specifically named as the reason for this honor,—and Eads had not by any means lacked even earlier appreciation in England. Three years before, at a meeting of the British Association, he had been urged, nay pressed, to deliver an impromptu address on his works, both completed and projected. Nevertheless, it was not until after the Mersey report that the Albert Medal was conferred upon him. This medal, founded in 1862 in memory of the Prince Consort, is awarded annually by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. It was in Eads's case awarded "as a token of their appreciation of the services he had rendered to the science of engineering," to the engineer "whose works have been of such great service in improving the water communications of North America, and have thereby rendered valuable aid to the commerce of the world." He was the second American citizen and the first native-born American to receive this medal.

Of course he belonged to many scientific organizations. He was a member of the Engineers Club of Saint Louis, and for two years president of the Academy of Science there; he was also a member of the American Geographical Society, of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Great Britain, and of the British Association, and of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce; a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and a member, fellow, and for a year vice-president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

He was now a person whose return from Europe, with plans for river improvement, and news about a fresh engineering scheme, was an item in the small as well as the large newspapers. For, since the Jetties were finished, he had a new scheme,—a decidedly new one it seemed to most people,—though, as formerly, he made no pretense of having originated the idea. Instead of resting content, now that he was almost sixty,—rich, and honored, and frail,—instead of resting content on his laurels of the gunboats, the Bridge, the Jetties, he was as active as ever, with the hope of opening more roads to commerce and prosperity. The publication of the proceedings of De Lesseps's Interoceanic Canal Congress in 1879 gave Eads an opportunity to propose, in a letter to the New York "Tribune," his own project for spanning the isthmus. The Tehuantepec route from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific would be, in the general lines of travel, about 2000 miles shorter than the Panama route, or 1500 miles shorter than the Nicaragua. And it was at Tehuantepec that Eads proposed building, not a canal, but a ship-railway. The proposition was astounding. It certainly suggested very picturesque visions of transportation; but at first sight it did not sound very practicable. However, Eads held that it presented six great and purely practical advantages: First, it could be built for much less than the cost of a canal. Secondly, it could be built in one quarter of the time. Thirdly, it could, with absolute safety, transport ships more rapidly. Fourthly, its actual cost could be more accurately foretold. Fifthly, the expense of maintaining it would be less than for a canal. Sixthly, its capacity could be easily increased to meet future requirements.

In 1880 he appeared before a committee of the House, and in reply to De Lesseps, who was advocating the Panama Canal, he stated his plan for the ship-railway. A few months later he went to Mexico, where the government gave him, besides a very valuable concession for building the ship-railway, its cordial assistance in his surveys. It was at this time that Mexico requested his aid in improving its two harbors, and when he returned home, sent him in the Mexican man-of-war, the Independencia. The next year he proposed to Congress to build the ship-railway at his own risk, and to give the United States special privileges, which had been arranged for in his Mexican charter, provided the government would, as he proved the practicability of his plan by actual construction and operation, guarantee part of the ship-railway's dividends. Although this arrangement would have laid as little risk on the government as the jetty arrangement had, it was not accepted.

Strange and even unnatural as the idea itself appeared, it was adapted from perfectly simple ship-railways already in existence and in satisfactory use. Science, he said, could do anything, however tremendous, if it had enough money. In the magnified form contemplated, the plan provided for a single track of a dozen parallel rails, and a car with 1500 wheels. On this car was to be a huge cradle into which any ship might be floated and carefully propped. The car having then been hauled up a very slight incline out of the water, and monster, double-headed locomotives hitched to it, by gentle grades it and the ship were to be drawn across to the other ocean a hundred miles away, where the ship could be floated again. To obviate any chance of straining the ships, all curves were to be avoided by the use of turn-tables.