Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

JAMES B. EADS, THE DESIGNER AND ENGINEER OF THE ST. LOUIS BRIDGE. (Rischgitz Collection.) THE ST. LOUIS BRIDGE. BY LESLIE WILLIAMS, M.A. TOWARDS the middle of last century the rapidly-growing city of St. Louis was forced to recognize that the mag- nificent waterway on the right or western bank of which it stands, and to which it owes its origin, was in danger of becoming a hindrance rather than a help to its commercial activities. The railway system of the United States was developing apace, and quickly linking up out- lying towns with New York and the industrial centres of the East; but between the railway and St. Louis ran the formidable and at times impassable barrier of the unbridged Mississippi. Recently augmented by its great tributary, the Missouri, the river sweeps past the bluffs upon which the city is built with one of the broadest bosoms of running water in the world, and offers to the engineer difficulties out of proportion even to the vast width and volume of its flow—difficulties which, as is not sur- prising, remained unsurmounted until James B. Eads had completed his famous bridge in 1874. The ever-shifting currents and sand-banks of the Mississippi, at all times of the year a turbulent stream, are familiar to those who have read Mark Twain’s fas- cinating stories of river life, ^*ss*s" , , , i , 41. sippi. and are due not merely to the frequently-recurring floods, but also, and in greater measure, to deeper and less obvious causes. To the discovery, by long and pa- tient investigation, of these causes, no less than to his skill as a constructive engineer, Eads owed the unqualified success of his great un- dertaking. In response to invitations from the city authorities, various proposals for spanning the