Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/562

546 Two years later this enterprise culminated in financial disaster, and left him, at the age of twenty-seven, burdened with debts to the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars. He then returned to the business of raising steamers, removing obstructions from the channel, and improving the harbor of St. Louis. By the great fire of 1849, twenty-nine steamers were burned at the landing of that city, and most of these wrecks had to be removed by him. The capital with which he started again at this business was supplied by his creditors, and amounted to only fifteen hundred dollars. Ten years later he bad increased this modest sum to nearly half a million dollars, and had long previously paid off his creditors in full.

His first undertakings in this peculiar and instructive study of hydraulics occurred while he was constructing the first diving-bell boat, not then completed. A barge loaded with about a hundred tons of pig-lead was sunk upon the rapids of the Mississippi River, near Keokuk, in fifteen feet of water. A contract was made for the recovery of this lead. He had had no experience whatever with the submarine armor, or diving apparatus of any kind; but, engaging a diver from the lakes who was familiar with it, with an armor, an airpump, and a sailor skillful in the use of rigging, he started—at that time only twenty-two years of age—to the scene of the wreck. Obtaining a barge, this was promptly anchored over it, and preparations made for the diver to go to work; but the current was found so exceedingly rapid that it was impossible to use the armor with any safety. A belt around the diver's waist was attached by a cord to the bow of the boat to hold him against the current, and a ladder procured on which the diver undertook to descend, but it was impossible for him to control his body in the current. Determined not to be baffled, Mr. Eads immediately visited the town of Keokuk and purchased a forty-gallon whisky-barrel, with which to improvise a diving-bell. With several pigs of lead secured around one end of the barrel by a net-work of ropes, and with that head taken out, a block and tackle attached to the net-work at the other end, and a temporary derrick erected, he was soon prepared to commence the recovery of the cargo. But the diver demurred and would not descend in this dangerous looking apparatus. Mr. Eads then set an example which he has followed throughout all his varied experience as an engineer—which was, never to ask a man in his employ to go where he was unwilling to trust his I own life. The bell thus suspended was held against the current by a rope which led up to the bow of the barge, and a strap across the lower end of the barrel was used as the seat for the diver in it. He at once got into the diving-bell and ordered his men to lower him down. He had a trace-chain attached to a lead-line, the lower end of the trace-chain having a ring in it, and with this he was readily enabled to form a loop, which was placed over one of the pigs of lead, and at a given signal it was hoisted up. A small cord sufficed to draw