The letters between the engaged couple show Eads at twenty-five as a keen, experienced, and yet an unsophisticated young man; generous, proud, brave, and courteous; a lover of Nature, of poetry, of people, and of good books; an inveterate early riser; reverend in religion, and yet, while nominally a Catholic, really a free-thinker; sentimental in his feelings almost as if he had lived a century sooner, and at the same time controlling his true and deep emotions, and showing his strong love only to those he loved.
At last Eads and Miss Dillon were married, he being over twenty-five at the time, she nearly twenty-four. Eads then sold out his wrecking business and left the river. He probably made this change because he hoped thereby not only to be more with his wife, but also to support her in the comfort she had been used to, and to show her father that he could do so. The new enterprise, into which at least one of his old partners entered with him, and into which he put all his money, was the manufacture of glass; and they built the first glass factory west of the Ohio River. He had to go to Pittsburg--then a long journey by boat, stage, and rail--to get trained workmen and to learn the process himself. Almost all of the necessary ingredients and apparatus had to be sent for to Pittsburg, to Cleveland, or to New York; and they were often slow in arriving and thereby made matters drag considerably. Still there was always something to do, and Eads, the only one of the partners who understood the trade, was forced to work extraordinarily hard. With his usual persistence he stuck to it pluckily, often staying up late into the night and rising the next day before dawn to oversee operations. He was also indispensable for his faculty of managing men; and a letter to his wife written on his twenty-seventh birthday (1847) shows how strong the man already was in that power of getting the most from a workman, which was afterwards to count for so much in his best work. An employer, he says, must "have constant control of his temper, and be able to speak pleasantly to one man the next moment after having spoken in the harshest manner to another, and even to give the same man a pleasant reply a few minutes after having corrected him. Self must be left out of the matter entirely, and a man or boy spoken to only as concerns his conduct; and the authority which the controller has over the controlled, used only when absolutely necessary, and then with the utmost promptness."