The first steel structure in the world wasn’t built in New York or London or Paris—or even Pittsburgh—but rather in St. Louis, from 1867 to 1874. In “Spanning the Gilded Age,” former University of Virginia history professor John K. Brown tells the fantastical story of the St. Louis Bridge (aka the Eads Bridge), a triple-span engineering marvel that, as the oldest working bridge over the Mississippi River, testifies to the enduring, inspiring legacy of building and construction projects, along with the human cost they can demand:
In an era that loved its superlatives, the bridge across the Mississippi was both a proud civic boast and a great engineering triumph. The abutment on each shore and the bridge’s two river piers, built of Missouri limestone and Maine granite, suggested the strength and permanence of a medieval castle. The stone piers extended down through the flowing Mississippi and its shifting sandy riverbed to land on the bedrock below. During construction, curious and well-connected friends of the project had taken giddy excursions to the riverbed, climbing down an iron staircase inside the stone pier. Once past the airlock, they found themselves standing on the bottom of the Mississippi, but safe and dry inside a riveted plate-iron caisson, a capacious inverted box. Elegant ladies made the otherworldly trip to watch as sweating laborers, mostly immigrants, excavated the sand—the scene darkly lit by smoky oil lamps. While the sandhogs dug, skilled masons laid new courses of stone far above, building up the bridge pier atop the caisson. In a brute-force ballet, every piece of cut granite or limestone that they added pressed the caisson down, while growing the pier upwards.
Unfortunately, bedrock lay progressively deeper toward the eastern side of the river. Below depths of 60 feet, mysterious pains had struck down many of the sandhogs (or submarines, as they were also called) soon after they came up from the pressurized caissons. Fourteen had died by the end of 1870, a mournful toll for this great accomplishment.
