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 trudges beside his mule,
hauling a barge through the Erie Canal. He sings:
Oh the Er-i-e is a-rising
And the liquor is getting low
And I scarcely think
We'll get a drink
'Til we get to Buffalo.
The Erie Canal is deeply grooved in our national
awareness, and it was a marvel. Four of the Great
Lakes, Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie, all lie
above Niagara Falls, and they form a huge inland
waterway with access to thousands of miles of
shoreline. It is a waterway that touches Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and
Pennsylvania, as well as New York. For our new
country to be joined together, 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 three hundred and
sixty-three 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 like no engineering task that'd ever been done.
In 1801 Thomas Jefferson appointed Swiss emigrant
Albert Gallatin as
Secretary of the Treasury. It was Gallatin who
first developed a systematic plan to build a giant
network of canals, including one between Lake Erie
and the Hudson. In 1810 De Witt Clinton, mayor of
New York City, picked up the idea. 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 (outside
of China. See note below*.) ceremoniously began on
the Fourth of July that year.
The task took eight years and seven million dollars
to finish. It required 83 locks, an 800-foot
aqueduct to carry shipping over the Mohawk River,
and countless other innovations! Yet the four
principal engineers who built it had never seen a
canal. Most early American technology was done by
amateurs whose zeal and self-assurance seemed to
outreach reason. But the Erie Canal's magnitude
still put it in a class by itself.
The effect of the Erie Canal on this country was
stunning. Cargo that'd cost $100 a ton and taken
two weeks to carry by road could now be moved at
$10 a ton in three and a half days. Horses and
mules drew barges through the canal in end-to-end
fifteen-mile shifts. And the ferryman sang his
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 Canal completed one of Thomas Jefferson's
dreams. It was a task that should have been beyond
the engineers who built it, but they simply did not
appreciate that fact.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds