Engineer James Buchanan Eads completed his namesake bridge connecting St. Louis, Missouri, to East St. Louis, Illinois, after seven years of construction plagued by financial troubles and a mysterious illness—decompression sickness, then not understood—that killed or crippled dozens of workers who dug the deep-water piers using pressurized caissons.
Eads had no formal engineering training; he made his fortune building a business salvaging cargo from wrecked steamboats on the Mississippi using a diving bell of his own design. That practical, hands-on knowledge of the river's treacherous currents and depths made him uniquely suited to conquer it with a bridge, despite skeptics who insisted a bridge of such span using untested steel could never stand.
To reach bedrock nearly 100 feet below the riverbed, workers descended in pressurized caissons, and dozens suffered what was then called 'caisson disease'—now known as decompression sickness or 'the bends'—since no one yet understood the need to decompress gradually. At least 15 workers died from the condition, and Eads himself was partially paralyzed for a time after making too many trips into the caissons to inspect the work himself.
The finished bridge featured three steel arch spans, the longest measuring 520 feet, making it the longest arch bridge in the world at the time. To prove its safety to a distrustful public before opening to trains, Eads famously walked an elephant across it, based on the folk belief that elephants refuse to cross unsafe structures. The bridge still carries traffic today, a testament to Eads's engineering.
Key people: James Buchanan Eads