About a decade ago, commercial shipping on the New York State Canal System began a steady rebound following decades of decline. This year, commercial shipping on New York’s canals is poised to hit a 30-year high. There are a number of possible explanations for this, including the growth of stone shipping in upstate New York and the superior fuel efficiency of inland waterway shipping during a spike in oil and diesel fuel prices.
This commercial shipping rebound is a surprising development for America’s original superhighway and first American feat of civil engineering. At this time exactly two centuries ago, workers were toiling to dig the canal. On the heels of “canal mania” in Europe, the idea for a man-made waterway linking the Hudson River with the Great Lakes had been proposed as early as 1724, but most serious proposals were dismissed as impractical or even impossible. Because New York’s topography rises 600 feet from east to west and early 19th century locks could only provide lift of about 12 feet, building a canal with 50 locks would prove to be a monumental expense.
The young country also had no trained civil engineers. The four men who designed the canal and oversaw its construction included two judges with minimal surveying experience, a 27-year-old amateur engineer and a math teacher. Yet they designed a mechanical stump puller to quickly clear virgin forests, built massive aqueducts to carry the canal across valleys and rivers, and installed flights of locks to move boats over steep terrain.
A novel mechanical stump puller (above) could pull 40 stumps in a day. Image source: Elderhostel on the Erie Canal.
The series of locks at Waterford, at the canal’s eastern terminus, is believed to be steepest in the world, lifting boats 169 feet over a distance of less than two miles. The American Society of Civil Engineers has since named the “Waterford flight” a significant historic civil engineering landmark.
The image below shows Lock E2, the first of the Waterford flight, built in 1907. The lock lifts boats almost 34 feet.
The 363-mile Erie Canal was completed in 1825 at a cost of $7,143,000 (equal to $109 million in 2017). It proved so popular that New York’s construction debt was earned back within a year via tolls on freight. Its construction resulted in a number of novel inventions, including the stump puller mentioned above, a high-performance, inexpensive waterproof hydraulic cement developed by Canvass White for sealing locks and cracks, and an improved streamlined wheelbarrow for easily moving mud in swampy areas.
The canal immediately cut shipping costs by 95%. Commercial shipping peaked in 1855: 33,000 shipments traversed the canal that year. In 1918 New York improved the Erie Canal and merged the state’s four canals into the 525-mile New York State Barge Canal; since 1992 the Barge Canal has simply been referred to as the New York State Canal System.
The growth of railroads and automobiles as well as construction of the Saint Lawrence Seaway in 1959 rapidly eroded the Canal System’s utility. For decades, the vast majority of the canal’s use has been purely recreational boating and tours. Commercial shipping bottomed out at 15 shipments in 2007.
The Erie Canal, which spurred new inventions and rapidly opened the American West to settlement, is a true engineering marvel. Engineering360 will be covering the canal’s surprising commercial shipping rebound in more detail in the coming months – stay tuned.
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Re: America’s First Feat of Civil Engineering is Getting a Boost