speaking for twenty-five years to undergraduates in UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. His students called him “Doc Brown,” a nickname derived from the handsome, charismatic character in Back to the Future. Research specialties in American industrial, business, and technological history led him to the Eads Bridge. He lives in Charlottesville and is happily married to the dynamic Wendy Brown. They have two adult children.
Brown applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Spanning the Gilded Age: James Eads and the Great Steel Bridge, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Spanning the Gilded Age profiles Thomas Alexander Scott (1823-1881), detailing his reputation and activities circa 1868. At that time he wore many hats: vice president of the largest corporation in the world (the Pennsylvania Railroad); wide-ranging investor in manufacturing, railroads, mines, and just-about-anything that could make him money; a charming rogue, speculator, and corrupter of legislators; and mentor to the young Andrew Carnegie—Scott’s partner in scheming and avarice.Visit the Spanning the Gilded Age website.
The page makes a miserable window on the book as a whole: a faceted account of the origins, design, financing, construction, and consequences of the Eads Bridge. Did Scott have any tie to Eads or his bridge? An intelligent browser (surely my book would have none other) would suspect that Scott does come into the project. After all, why give him a full page, if he does not? But nothing on page 99 even hints at his roles.
Not one word there prepares browsers (regardless of their IQ) to expect that Scott’s Pennsylvania Railroad would first support, then turn against the bridge venture led by James Eads. Eads believed that this betrayal “cost our company not less than a million and a half of dollars” (p. 216). And that 1874 letter to financier Junius Morgan (father of J.P.) predated the boycott that Scott orchestrated against the bridge, a campaign that drove Eads’s company into foreclosure.
James Eads began his project to build a railroad bridge over the Mississippi River at St. Louis in 1867. He had never built any bridge anywhere. His was the first structure of any kind—worldwide—to rely on structural steel. Its arched spans broke world records. Its stone piers to bedrock broke world records. Eads introduced to North America an audacious technique to build those piers, a method using pneumatic caissons. In March 1870, Washington Roebling stood 100 feet beneath the surface of the Mississippi River, soaking up all the hard-earned knowledge he observed. Then he applied those technologies and techniques to his own challenges at Brooklyn.
Against Scott’s truculent obstruction, Eads completed his bridge in 1874. Walt Whitman described it as “a structure of perfection and beauty unsurpassable.” The architect, Louis Sullivan, credited the bridge as inspiring his insight that “form follows function.” While earning monopoly profits for a half century, it became the centerpiece of an important antitrust case which today guides law on networks, including internet service providers. Long before the Gateway Arch, the Eads Bridge became an icon for St. Louis.
Despite Tom Scott.
--Marshal Zeringue
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