642 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



made one of the shallowest mouths of the Mississippi permanently 

 navigable for ocean steamers." The story of his life reads like a 

 romance. Born at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, May 23, 1820, he was 

 even as a small child passionately fond of machinery. The family 



moved to Louisville when he was 

 nine years old. At ten years he 

 was busy making models of all 

 sorts of machines — sawmills, fire 

 engines, steamboats, and steam 

 engines. Financial reverses 

 forced him to take care of him- 

 self at the age of thirteen. At 

 that time the family moved to 

 St. Louis, and, curiously, the 

 steamboat on which they were 

 traveling burning, the boy 

 found himself on shore, bare- 

 footed and coatless, upon the 

 very spot where later he was to 

 locate the abutements of the 

 great and famous bridge. For 



a time he sold apples on the 

 street. Then, securing a posi- 

 tion in a mercantile house, he 

 labored diligently, reading in his leisure hours books borrowed 

 from the library of one of his employers. In 1839 he was- 

 purser on a river steamer. In 1842 he invented a diving-bell boat 

 to recover cargoes from lost steamers, and later a boat to raise sunken 

 steamers. In 1845 he sold out his interest in this business, and 

 started a glass factory, which completely failed in two years. 

 Helped by his creditors to a small capital, he returned to the work of 

 raising wrecked steamers, and in ten years he was out of debt and 

 had business interests worth five hundred thousand dollars. In 

 1861 there began those great public enterprises which rendered his 

 name famous the world around. At the request of the Govern- 

 ment he designed and constructed a squadron of ironclad river gun- 

 boats. The next year he built others, some of which bore turrets 

 of novel pattern, in which the guns were worked by steam. In 

 1874 he completed the St. Louis Bridge, a marvel of engineering, 

 in the building of which several new problems had to be solved. 

 Later on, in the face of doubt and lack of confidence, he devised and 

 carried on to successful completion the jetty system at the mouth 

 of the Mississippi. Had his ideas with reference to the improve- 

 ment of the river farther up been carried out, there would be 



James B. Eads, LL. D. 



