Profiles in History: James Eads, the Self-Taught Genius Who Conquered the Mississippi

James Buchanan Eads, a self-taught engineer who began his working life as a riverboat worker, built a bridge that helped revive St. Louis’s stalled economy. In the mid-1800s, the city faced a major gap: about 1,500 feet across the Mississippi meant there was no direct railroad bridge connecting St. Louis to the eastern U.S. In 1867, the St. Louis and Illinois Bridge Company hired Eads, despite him having never built a bridge before. Born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana in 1820 and raised partly in St. Louis after a steamer fire killed eight people on board when he was 13, Eads learned through street work and patent-office research. After a salvage plan for sunken ships, he partnered on a diving-bell recovery system and later shifted to the Mississippi bridge challenge.