In a while the pulse of industry began the slow feeble beat of revival, and the interrupted story of imagination and will, again renewed its deep refrain in arousing energy. The Garden City had vanished with its living story. That tale could not be twice told; that presence could not be recalled. It had gone forever with the flames. Hence a new story must be told. Naught else than a new story could be told. Not again would the city be the same. It could not be the same—men could not now be what they were. It was the approach of this new story that excited Louis; he would bide his time. He worked briefly now, at intervals, in the office of this or that architect, until he had nearly covered the field. These men were mostly of the elder generation, whose venerable clients clung to them for Auld Lang Syne. They were men of homely makeup, homely ways. Louis found them very human, and enjoyed their shop-talk, which was that of the graduate carpenter. He did not demur because they were not diplômés of the Beaux Arts. He preferred them as they were; much of their curious wisdom stuck to him. They were men of their lingering day. To them Louis was a marvel of speed. Indeed one of the younger of them, who laughed like a goat, remarked to his partner: “That Irish-man has ideas!”
He was a caustic joker and a man of brains, this same Frederick Baumann. Educated in Germany to the point of cynicism, he was master of one idea, which he embodied in a pamphlet entitled “A Theory of Isolated Pier Foundations,” published in 1873. The logic of this essay was so coherent, its common sense so sound, that its simple idea has served as the basis of standard practice continuously since its day. All honor therefore to Frederick Baumann, man of brains, exploiter of a new idea, which he made up out of his head. His vigorous years reached on to ninety-five, and as each one of them passed him by in defile, the world and its people seemed to his sharp, mirthful eye, to grow more and more ridiculous—a conviction that gave him much comfort as his vertebrae began to curve. Louis met him frequently of evenings, at the gymnasium, and liked to talk to him to get his point of view, which he found to be not bitter, but Mephistophelian. He was most illuminating, bare of delusion, and as time went on Louis came to regard him as a goat-laughing teller of truths out of school—but he, Louis, did not forget.
Reliable text books were few in those days. Due to this fact Louis made Trautwine’s Engineers’ Pocket Book his Bible, and spent long hours with it. The engineering journals kept close track of actual current doings, and thus Louis found himself drifting towards the engineering point of view, or state of mind, as he began to discern that the engineers were the only men who could face a problem squarely; who knew a problem when they saw it. Their minds were trained to deal with real things, as far as they knew them, as far as they could ascertain them, while the architectural mind lacked this directness, this simplicity, this singleness of purpose—it had no standard of reference, no benchmark one might say. For he discerned that in truth the science of engineering is a science of reaction, while the science of architectural design—were such a science to be presupposed—must be a science of action. Thus Louis arranged in his mind the reciprocal values of the primary engineering and the primary architectural thought, and noted the curious antagonism existing between those who professed them. The trouble as he saw it was this: That the architect could not or would not understand the real working of the engineering mind because it was hidden in deadly literal attitude and results, because of the horrors it had brought forth as misbegotten stigmata; while the engineer regarded the architect as a frivolous person of small rule-of-thumb consequence. And both were largely right; both professions contained small and large minds—mostly small or medium. Nevertheless they were all human beings, and therefore all ridiculous in the Mephistophelian sense of Frederick Baumann.
About this time two great engineering works were under way. One, the triple arch bridge to cross the Mississippi at St. Louis, Capt. Eades, chief engineer; the other, the great cantilever bridge which was to cross the Chasm of the Kentucky River, C. Shaler Smith, chief engineer, destined for the use of the Cincinnati Southern Railroad. In these two growing structures Louis’s soul became immersed. In them he lived. Were they not his bridges? Surely they were his bridges. In the pages of the Railway Gazette he saw them born, he watched them grow. Week by week he grew with them. Here was Romance, here again was man, the great adventurer, daring to think, daring to have faith, daring to do. Here again was to be set forth to view man in his power to create beneficently. Here were two ideas widely differing in kind. Each was emerging from a brain, each was to find realization. One bridge was to cross a great river, to form the portal of a great city, to be sensational and architectonic. The other was to take form in the wilderness, and abide there; a work of science without concession. Louis followed every detail of design, every measurement; every operation as the two works progressed from the sinking of the caissons in the bed of the Mississippi, and the start in the wild of the initial cantilevers from the
