This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau asked his readers who would know knives better, a boy who went to Harvard and took all the best courses on metallurgy, or a boy whose father had him dig, smelt and refine iron ore, and then forge, temper, and sharpen a knife himself.
Captain James B. Eads of LeClaire had that one answered before Thoreau asked it. Growing up along the Mississippi at the head of the Rock Island Rapids, young Eads got to know the river firsthand. "A river never does anything unnatural," he concluded, "It always obeys the laws of God."
Eads grew up to become a largely self-taught civil engineer. In 1873, he visited New Orleans, where the United States Army Engineers had been trying for forty years to devise a way of opening a silted-in channel at the mouth of the Mississippi which had long kept New Orleans from being a major port. Now, they had decided that the only solution was a canal around the channel with a granite lock 500 feet long, at a cost of eight million dollars.
"Why not let the river do the job?" asked Eads. He proposed to build jetties out from each shore to constrict the flow of water to a narrow channel. Eads knew that the same amount of water flowing through a narrower space would have to move faster, and the fast water would scour the bottom deeper. Eads knew the bottom of the river; he had been there in a diving bell of his own invention.
The Army Engineers scoffed. The mayor of New Orleans called him crazy. Eads offered Congress a bet: let him try the jetties. If he succeeded in deepening the channel to 28 feet, he got ten million, if he failed, nothing. Congress took the bet, and the jetties were built, as the whole world jeered. Eads supporters, and his crew, worked for promissory notes.
As the channel deepened, foot by foot, the jeering softened.
It stopped entirely four years later when the channel reached 30 feet permitting 840 steamers to reach New Orleans during the following year, and sending the writers of textbooks on river hydraulics back for some re-calculations.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
