"On This Day" In Engineering History

Today is the one-hundred eighty-first anniversary of the completion of the Erie Canal, a 363-mile artificial waterway that runs from the Hudson River to Lake Erie and connects the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. In 1807, Robert Fulton's steamboat made its maiden voyage from New York City to Albany in a trip that lasted 32 hours. A year later, the state legislature funded a survey for a canal that would connect the Hudson to Lake Erie. Although the project was derided as "Clinton's Big Ditch", a reference to then-Governor Dewitt Clinton, the Erie Canal was completed in the fall of 1825. Four feet deep and 40 feet wide, it included 18 aqueducts, 83 locks, and a towpath for farm animals.

In many ways, the Erie Canal is a monument to engineering by amateurs. James Geddes and Benjamin Wright, the Erie Canal's principal planners, were experienced judges but novice surveyors. Nathan Roberts, a math teacher and land speculator, provided technical expertise and mixed motives. Only Canvass White, a 27-year old engineer who had visited Great Britain to study the Bridgewater Canal, offered serious canal-building experience. Nevertheless, according to Peter L. Bernstein, author of Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, these men "carried the Erie Canal up the Niagara escarpment at Lockport, maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit creek, spanned the Genesee River for it on an awesome aqueduct, and carved a route for it out of the solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady - and all of those venturesome designs worked precisely as planned."

On November 4, 1825, Governor Dewitt Clinton celebrated the opening of the Erie Canal by sailing aboard the Seneca Chief from Buffalo to Albany. Later, when he arrived in New York City, Clinton emptied two casks of water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic Ocean, celebrating the canal's completion with a "Marriage of the Waters". Within 15 years, New York City boasted the busiest port in America, proving the truth of the governor's predictions in 1817. "The city will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations," said Clinton. "And before the revolution of a century, the whole island of Manhattan, covered with inhabitants and replenished with a dense population, will constitute one vast city."