James B. Eads

📖 The Scoop

"Known as one of the world's most accomplished engineers in all history, [James Buchanan Eads] made a fortune at an early age inventing a diving bell to salvage steamboat wrecks from the bottom of the Mississippi River. The knowledge he gained about the river prompted the United States Government to contract him to build an inland navy fleet of ironclad gunboats during the Civil War ... After the war, his reputation as an unschooled civil engineer continued to blossom, after he built the first bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis ... Not long after this, he further quieted the skeptics when he opened up the South Pass at New Orleans, Louisiana, to gulf shipping trade, by creating jetties that forced his Mississippi to scour out its own channel. Before his death in 1887, and before the construction of the Panama Canal, he planned a railway to move great ships overland from one ocean to the other to shorten the Pacific shipping route to the Mississippi by thousands of miles"--Page 4 of cover.

Genre: Biography & Autobiography / General (fancy, right?)