Today, we ride 568 feet uphill in a barge. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
A storm rises over central
New York, and a ferryman, trudging beside his mule,
hauling a barge through the Erie canal, sings:
Oh the Er-i-e is a-rising
And the liquor is getting low
And I scarcely think
We'll get a drink
Till we get to Buffalo.
The Erie canal is deeply grooved in our
national awareness. It was a marvel -- a real marvel.
Four of the Great Lakes lie above Niagara Falls --
Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie -- and they form
a huge inland waterway with access to thousands of
miles of shoreline: a waterway that touches
Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois,
Ohio, Pennsylvania, as well as New York. For our new
country to be whole, East Coast commerce had to gain
access to this waterway.
But the inland port of Buffalo, New York, at the
east end of Lake Erie, is 363 miles from Albany on
the Hudson River. Worse than that, Lake Erie lies
568 feet above the Hudson River. Connecting the two
ends with a canal was no routine task.
In 1801 Thomas Jefferson appointed a Swiss emigrant
named Albert Gallatin as
secretary of the Treasury. In 1808 Gallatin
finished a proposal that we build a giant network
of canals, including one between Lake Erie and the
Hudson river. In 1810, the mayor of New York City,
De Witt Clinton, picked the idea up. His support
for the project got him elected governor of New
York by a landslide in 1817. Construction of what
was to be by far the longest canal ever built was
ceremoniously begun on the fourth of July that
year.
The task took 8 years and $7,000,000 to complete.
It involved building 83 locks, an 802-foot aqueduct
to carry shipping over the Mohawk river, and
countless other innovations. Yet the job was done
by four principal engineers who'd never seen a
canal. Like so much early American technology, the
work was done by amateurs whose zeal and
self-assurance took them where angels would fear to
tread.
The effect of the Erie canal on this country was
stunning. Cargo that cost $100 a ton and took two
weeks to carry by road could now be moved at $10 a
ton in 3½ days. Horses and mules drew barges
through the canal in end-to-end 15-mile shifts. And
our ferryman sang the familiar song:
I've got an old mule, her name is Sal,
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
She's a good old worker and a good old pal,
Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal.
The Erie canal completed one of Thomas
Jefferson's dreams. It was a task that should've been
beyond the engineers who did it. But they simply
didn't know that.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Tarkov, J., Engineering the Erie Canal, American
Heritage of Invention & Technology, Summer,
1996, pp. 54-57
This episode has been revised as Episode 1420.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2004 by John H.
Lienhard.
