The elephant’s crossing was the ultimate test. Everyone gathered at the western landing of the new steel bridge over the Mississippi River knew these wise animals could sense structural integrity and would refuse to venture onto a span that might collapse. With its vote of confidence in 1874, the elephant inaugurated a new era of American geography and engineering, opening the West to new branches of railroad development and funneling vast tonnage (and wealth) through St. Louis via its new bridge. John K. Brown’s Spanning the Gilded Age is a double biography: a life history of this novel engineering work and of its designer and promoter, James B. Eads. In ten chapters, the book describes both bridge and engineer in a world of massive changes in technology, design, finance, and urban development, pinned together in the ambitious crossing – both technically and symbolically – of the great river.
“Captain” Eads was a river rat from a young age; although he lived in St. Louis, his home was more properly the Mississippi itself. After a teenage stint as a mud clerk on a steamer, Eads got into the salvage business and built his fortune from stripping moribund shipwrecks. With no formal technical education, the young Eads famously developed a diving bell that allowed him to scour the river bottom. The invention was just the first demonstration of his knack for mechanical wizardry. Soon, with partners and centrifugal pumps, Eads learned how to patch and refloat sunken wrecks before they filled with sand and mud, substantially increasing his profits. Money drove the engineer’s mechanical ingenuity. From a modest background, and with a disapproving father-in-law, Eads prioritized selling his talents and prodigious energy and even contemplated joining the California Gold Rush. Lust for returns inspired Eads to develop a significant tolerance for risk in both finance and design decisions, especially compared to his contemporaries. It also gave him a reputation for sharp business practices that sometimes left partners and investors worse off.
The bridge itself was similarly bold in concept and far from guaranteed to succeed, either structurally or financially. When Eads and his potential investors huddled during the Civil War to plot out railroad expansion in the postwar West, a key issue was where the main trunk lines would cross the Mississippi. In 1867, the engineer presented his partners with a stunning design: an arched truss bridge that would span the great continental barrier in three graceful arcs. The bridge would be built out of steel, not the customary iron, distinguishing it radically from every other structure on the planet. This thrilling vision led to the assembly of an army of engineers, designers, and industrialists to figure out the details. Eads’s drive and persuasive powers drove the project through significant resistance from the established engineering community, who believed the design to be a boondoggle. Eads’s tenacity paid off and yielded unexpected results, such as innovations in the pressure differentials in caissons, the subterranean structures used for sinking the bridge’s massive piers to hard substrate. Specifying steel truss chords too had an effect, as Eads virtually willed the U.S. steel industry into existence to supply the project’s material demands.
Spanning the Gilded Age’s most interesting contribution is the thorough description of the financial structure that enabled the bridge’s construction. Railroaders like Tom Scott and Andrew Carnegie involved themselves at various stages of the process; Carnegie’s focus on the huge orders for steel Eads generated would later lead to a major shift in that industrialist’s life. The project’s real movers, though, were from the House of Morgan. John Pierpont was part of the process, but Junius, his father, performed the heroic work of drumming up funds in Great Britain for the project in Missouri, aiding in the postwar shift of the global financial center of gravity from London to New York. The project’s financial structure had a great impact on American business well after the last bolts were tightened. Eads’s megalomania and novel construction practices led the bridge company into eventual bankruptcy and receivership. Carnegie would later adopt the maxim that, in building projects, “pioneering doesn’t pay” (168). The narrative of engineering and financing as close-fitting partners highlights the power of entrepreneurial city planning undertaken by private actors and enabled by the laissez-faire state. Perhaps indirectly, the story of the bridge and its collateral financial ruin raises questions about how ruthless the private bridge-building business could be, as well as the efficacy of high-leverage, pump-and-dump infrastructure construction in the long term.
Throughout the book, there is a slight tendency to lionize Eads and the financial titans he worked with and, in terms of engineering, to perhaps overstate the conceptual originality of the bridge and Eads’s other innovations. While Eads certainly had a brain bursting with creativity, it was his charisma and drive that vaulted him from mud clerk to consulting engineer for U.S. presidents rather than a dedication to achieving any deep paradigm shift in design. However, this point is a very minor wrinkle in what is otherwise an excellent and thorough study that will be the defining reference for both the man and the bridge for many years. Grippingly written, and with eighty-four outstanding illustrations ranging from cityscapes and maps to construction details, the book will be essential for U.S. and technology historians and of interest to the general reading public. Eads was an American original – relentless, brilliant, bold, and lucky – who shone brightly among the many, testing the limits of design, materials, and financial sorcery of the time.
