James Buchanan Eads
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James Buchanan Eads (23 May 1820–8 March 1887) was an American 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.
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[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
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, which caused the river to speed up and cut its channel deeper, so allowing year-round navigation. This system did, however, exacerbate flooding during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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.
[edit] External links
Categories: 1820 births | 1887 deaths | American civil engineers | American inventors | American autodidacts | Bridge engineers | Marine engineers and naval architects | People from Indiana | People from St. Louis | St. Louis Walk of Fame | Missouri in the Civil War | American Civil War industrialists
