History of Science and Technology Colloquium

Just after the Civil War, the citizens of St. Louis became seized with the need to bridge the Mississippi, seeking rail connections to the East analogous to those propelling Chicago, their great Midwest rival. By 1867 two bridge projects competed for engineering, financial, and political resources. A Chicago firm led by Lucius Boomer seemed to hold the strongest hand: this experienced bridge company amassed support for its proposed St. Louis span from a convention of America’s leading civil engineers -- lions of the profession. By contrast, a competing proposal originated with an engineer/entrepreneur, James B. Eads, who had never designed a bridge before in his life. Eads would amass an engineering team, mostly trained in Germany, to redress that shortcoming. A third key player who would exert great influence over this project, Major Gouverneur Warren, derived his authority as the leading member of the Army Corps of Engineers with responsibility to oversee bridge projects on the Western rivers.

It simplifies matters to speak of these three men; as the paper will clarify they really represented three different engineering communities, each with divergent membership and professional affiliations, and each valuing different allegiances and bodies of knowledge. This paper looks at how each of these vying communities was constructed, considering why they differed so markedly and how they clashed over the St. Louis project. In this era American civil engineers were fully engaged in the project of securing professional status for their elite members, men well represented in the Boomer and Warren camps. But the contests among these three coalitions reveal very different routes to professional status. Ironically, it was the outsider, Eads, who bested both Boomer and Warren with an innovative design for the St. Louis Bridge.

Historians of technology have long been interested in the nature of engineering communities, their professionalizing imperatives, and their roles in forming new knowledge. Among the many relevant titles, works by Calhoun and Sinclair cover the formation and operation of professional societies, while Seely and Reynolds consider the evolving knowledge parameters that constituted professional status. More recent studies by Meiksins, Dawson, and Brown look at professional communities within regional or national contexts. To go beyond those literatures, this paper seeks to assess the relative importance of social networks, knowledge endowments, and engineering paradigms in the professionalizing project of nineteenth-century engineers.