Captain Eads, who had studied the improvements on the Danube, Maas, and other European rivers, observed that all rivers flow faster in their narrow channels, and carry along in the swift water, sand, gravel, and even stones. This familiar law he applied at the South Pass of the Mississippi River, where the waters, though deep above, escaped from the banks into the Gulf, and spread sediment far and wide.
The water on the sand-bars of the three principal passes varied from eight to thirteen feet in depth. Many vessels require twice the depth. Two piers, twelve hundred feet apart, were built from land's end, a mile into the sea. They were made from willows, timber, gravel, concrete, and stone. Mattresses, a hundred feet long, from twenty-five to fifty feet wide, and two feet thick, were constructed from small willows placed at right angles, and bound securely together. These were floated into position, and sunk with gravel, one mattress upon another, which the river soon filled with sand that firmly held them in their place. The top was finished with heavy concrete blocks, to resist the waves. These piers are called "jetties," and the swift collected waters have already carried over five million cubic yards of sand into the deep gulf, and made a ship-way over thirty feet deep. The five million dollars paid by the United States was little enough for so priceless a service.
In June, 1884, Captain Eads received the Albert medal of the British Society of Arts, the first American upon whom this honor has been conferred. Before his great enterprise of the Tehuantepec ship railroad had been completed, he died at Nassau, New Providence, Bahama Islands, March 8, 1887, after a brief illness, of pneumonia, at the age of sixty-seven.
The history of inventors is generally the same old struggle with poverty. Sir Richard Arkwright, the youngest of thirteen children, with no education, a barber, shaving in a cellar for a penny to each customer, dies worth two and one-half million dollars, after being knighted by the King for his inventions in spinning. Elias Howe, Jr., in want and sorrow, lives on beans in a London attic, and dies at forty-five, having received over two million dollars from his sewing-machines in thirteen years. Success comes only through hard work and determined perseverance. The steps to honor, or wealth, or fame, are not easy to climb.