Engineer Extraordinaire

he Mississippi River was littered with sunken steamboats that had hit snags or had gone down in flames. Someone could make a fortune retrieving cargoes that were sitting on the bottom of the river.

- Elizabeth Howard

Someone with imagination and the right kind of boat. In 1842, James B. Eads proved that he had both the imagination and the know-how to design such a boat.

Eads was born in 1820 in Indiana. His family moved around a lot as his father tried to earn a living. When the Eads family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in 1833, James stopped attending school and found jobs to help support his family. In his free time, he read books about civil engineering and machinery. By the time he was 19, he had a job as a cargo clerk on the Knickerbocker, a river steamboat.

An accident on the steamboat got Eads thinking about salvage. He started with a flat-decked barge holding a derrick. A 40-gallon wooden barrel served as a makeshift diving bell. Lowered into the Mississippi River by the derrick, the diving bell allowed Eads to walk on the river's bottom. He spent hundreds of hours exploring. He observed that where the river ran fast, it scoured and deepened its channel. Where the river slowed, it deposited sediment that collected into sandbars.

By 1856, Eads was the respected captain of a fleet of salvage boats on the river. And his firsthand knowledge of the river became invaluable to him as he created monumental works of engineering that forever altered the Mississippi.