by
Ed Nisley
And
on the pedestal,this legend clear:
My
name is Ozymandias,king of kings,
Look
on my Works ye Mighty,and despair!
Nothing
remains beside.Round the decay
Of
that colossal wreck,boundless and bare
The
lone and level sands stretch far away.
- Shelley
In the
early 1800s,Jessie
Hawley got the entrepreneurial notion of planting wheat in the fertile plains of upstate NewYork-milling the grain
, shipping the flour to
yet having been written,wound up in the
Canandaigua debtor’s prison.
Having
sufficient funds for paper and postage, he embarked on a letter-writing
campaign extolling the virtue of spending federal money on a canal system
across NewYork state from
This
past July,my family bicycled 400 miles from
Keep
the telecom and computer biz in mind: These stones have a lesson.
The
Plan
Run a
finger along a raised-relief map of the
eastern United States to find the notch in upstate New York where the Mohawk
River cuts eastward through the Appalachian Mountain Range.That gap separating
the catskills from the Adirondacks,the only such opening from Maine to
Alabama,could hold a canal between the hudson River and Lakes Ontario and Erie.
The
Hudson,a navigable estuary with tidal flow extending north beyond Albany,could
carry freight from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes.That proved a
compelling incentive in the 1800s and,even today,the port of Albany handles ocean-going
freighters from around the world.
Canals
are,by definition,level waterways,but the surface of lake Erie is nearly 600 feet higher than the
A
canal’s cost depends strongly on the volume of earth moved as well as the
number of locks.The final design called for a 363-mile-long rectangular prismatic
channel 40-feet
wide at the top,28-feet wide at the bottom,and 4-feet deep,Thus,unless you were very
short or stone-cold drunk,it was impossible to drown in the Erie Canal.
The
channel accommodated two-way traffic and each lock could hold a single barge 61-feet long,7-feet wide,and drawing 3.5 feet of water. Earth
removed form the channel would form a single towpath on the downhill side.
Towpath?
Mule teams at the end of long ropes hauled the barges both upstream and
down,with an elaborate rope-handling ritual occurring when two barges passed in
opposite directions.A quick-release hitch resolved protocol violations that
would otherwise drag a team into the canal: Harnessed
mules can drown in four feet of water.
Why
not lay a railroad along the route? Recall that James Watt invented the
separate-condenser stream engine in 1769 and the first stream locomotive hauled 10 tons at 4.5 MPH early in 1804.Heavy,bulky freight
went by water in those days or just didn’t go at all.
By
today’s earth moving standards,this
would be a moderately large project. Back then,it
was incredible because it would be dug by hand. The Ages of stream,Dynamitte,and Internal combustion were
in the future.
The
Team
In
1800,the
Benjamin wright,the canal’s Chief
engineer,helped survey the terrainlayout the canal’s route,and design the
channel and locks. Hydrodynamics hadn’t yet been codified which left some
design decisions in the realm of guesswork.
At one point in the design
phase,Governor Clinton suggested that they could skip most of the locks by
simply building a channel from the Niagara Escarpment(elevation 570 feet) to
cayuga Lake (elevation 380 feet).Wright pointed out that,although the
downstream trip would be exciting,hauling those barges upstream might pose a
bit of challenge for standard mules.He also noted the need for 250-foot
embankments at some points,which was well beyond the state of the art.
The surveyor-engineer bears won that
round and the side-by-side locks stepping through the Niagara Escarpment at
Laborers drawn by relatively high
wages($8-12 per month) and an evening slug of rum came from everywhere.Wright
imported German masons to cut the precise stone structures required for each lock. Those masons laid off at the end of the project, went on to
build spectacular stone structures throughout
The
Problems
Construstions
began on
Two years later, the 15-mile route
between
In 1820, the middle of
Rather than cutting trees, the crews
began attaching ropes to the treetops and simply winching them over. A massive
vertical pulley arrangement then ripped the stumps directly out of the ground.
They invented an ox-Drawn earth scraper, designed larger wheelbarrows, and used
mule-drawn carts to haul dirt faster than previously imagined. A three-man
team(plus an ox and mule or two)could now excavate one mile per season.
Completing the canal on schedule became a
simple matter of up - staffing.(!)
And then the westward crews entered
the Montezuma Swamp north of the Finger Lakes. In addition to saturated soil
that required cofferdams to hold the waterway in place, they hit a different
staffing challenge: In 1819, almost 1000 workers died of malaria. Without drugs
or insecticides, progress on the canal halted until cold weather grounded the
mosquitoes. The crews finished that section with a prodigious effort during the
winter months.
Water admitted to each section as it
was completed revealed another problem. No matter how closely those German
masons fitted and grouted the stone blocks, the locks leaked. Wright appointed
engineer canvass White, who had earlier investigated the British canal system,
to solve the problem. In 1820, White was awarded a patent for a hydraulic cement
made from local materials. Nearly 400,000 bushels of the stuff waterproofed the
stone locks.
The 6-inch clearance beneath loaded
canal boats caused severe erosion of the puddle-clay bottom, which was
partially solved by a 4-MPH speed
limit. Repair boats hit 10 MPH on their way to spots where beavers, which
considered the towpath bank an ideal residence, caused massive washouts.
DeWitt
Clinton bailed Hawley out of the Canandaigua slammer in October 1825 for the first trip
along the completed Erie Canal. The two journeyed from Buffalo to Albany, then
along the Hudson to New York city, with a crowd of dignitaries and two barrels
of Lake Erie water detined for the Atlantic Ocean. Ceremonial cannon fire
preceded the seneca Chief in a nonelectric “telegraph” that took 90 minutes to reach NYC.
Much of the artillery had been captured from the British during the War of 1812, an event that
had delayed the start of construction for a few years.
The
most immediate effect of the canal was, as Hawley had predicted, to slash the
cost of shipping to and from the Great Lakes by an order of magnitude. Disruptive technology, indeed!
People
accompanied all that freight as workers, passengers, opportunists, and
vagrants. NYC was a blustling city of 150,000 that
would balloon by 1 million
people in the next 30 years.
Buffalo, a sleepy village of 2000, gained another 40,000 people
by 1850. Rochester went from the middle of nowhere to the middle of the canal and saw its population
jump from 1500 to
56,000. The canal powered
rapid development of the Midwest frontier.
The
original canal design anticipated 1.5 million tons of cargo a year, which proved to be entirely
inadequate. The channel and locks were enlarged almost immediately, again in
the late 1800s,
and were replaced by the adjacent NY Barge Canal in 1918. The canal was so successful that
tolls were abolished(!) in 1883 after $121 million had been collected.
The Aftermath
In 1853,
the New York Central Railroad forged 10 smaller
railroad companies into a system that connected Buffalo with Albany, Because
railroads and canals both require smooth, flat terrain, the two transportation
systems ran roughly in parallel across New York.
The advent of motorized transport in the
early 1900s wove a third strand, often overlaying the
long-disused original Erie Canal.Nearly every town along the way has a wide,
flat, bar-straight, east-west Erie Avenue or canal street.
To grossly oversimplify events, the railroads killed the canal with faster and cheaper
cargo transportation, where-upon trucks and automobiles killed the trains with
faster and more convenient access. In
each case, designers could not foresee the next disruptive technology or its
effect on their planned system.
The New York Barge Canal, now the NYS canal
System,handles only a few pleasute craft. Cargo ships ply the st. Lawrence
seaway between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean to eliminate cargo
transshipping. The remains of the original canal serve as a biking/jogging
trail and a rather skinny tourist attraction.
The New
York central railroad tracks, now part of Conrail and Amtrak, still carry
freight and passenger traffic. Amtrak’s Maple Leaf took us from Albany to
Buffalo to retrieve our van, passing miles of idle automobile carriers and
freight cars along the way. Many corroded brick buildings display faded
rail-side ads:”National Biscuit Company.Biscuit Box 5 cents.”
Although we like to think we’re
better at technology than our forebears, the evidence that we’re approaching a
discontinuity seems clear. Some data points will illustrate why- a few decades
from now, our works may seem as transient as the Erie Canal.
The cost of long-distance
telephone traffic is dropping asymptotically toward zero, as evidenced by the
collapse of the telecom industry. Based on regulations and physics,
telecoms strung thousands of fiberoptic strands across the country. The
regulations changed and wavelength-division multiplexing boosted fiber bandwidth
by a factor of 1K, so that about 95 percent
of all those long-haul fibers remain dark. Voice-over-IP
is poised to blowtorch the local access market and few rational business models generate any revenue.
Wireless providers plunked down big money to
acquire bandwidth that will likely never be used, as improved coding and
changing application models rendered those frequencies useless. Perhaps paying
the military to move out of other frequencies will generate some return on
investment; certainly nothing else has.
Hardware design continues to be blindsided by
Moore’s Law, with CAD tools lagging far behind the available transistor
count. Producing high-end chips now requires iterating through the
archietecture, layout, and routing while simulating the final circuit floorplan
until the timings converge. There’s no way to
determine how a given system will perform until it’s actually laid out, an
end-to-end task not well handled by existing tools.
Software design, such
as it is, has foundered upon the
increasing complexity of network-enabled systems. Building large projects from
small, well tested components has
demonstrated both the lack of small, well tested components and that
Embedded developers, only recently converted to
off-the-shelf componentry, now struggle with multiple CPUs and
operating systems in devices networked to the world. Unfortunately, the Internet
model of open access has conspicuously failed, as simple programming errors in
mission-critical systems permit remote access for morally
stunted crackers.
All else has rotted away from the cut stones of
those locks and aqueducts. Can we design long-lasting structures that our
great-to-the-nth-grandchildren will admire and use?
*******************************************************************************
More on Jessie Hawley and the
Erie Canal is at <http://www.wxxi.org/canaltown/transcripts/tgrasso.htm>. A canal timeline is at <http://www.home.eznet.net/dminor/ucanal.html>
, and a timeline of major inventions is at <http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Invention_timeline> . The history of the New York cemtral Railroad is at <http://www.crisny.org/not-for-profit/railroad/nyc_hist.htm>.
A 1925 pamphelt
describing the Erie Canal is at <http://www.canals.state.ny.us/cculture/history/finch/finch_history_print.pdf> . The homepage shows the canal’s current state of affairs.
Syracuse University Professor Sam Clemence’s
presentation on
Erie Canal engineering is
available at <http://www.fcms.syr.edu/showcase/SPClemence
/ErieCnl/> . I was in the front row of his talk during
our bike ride. Syracuse the city has more canal stories, maps,and links at <http://www.syracuse.com/features/eriecanal/>. An open-channel flow calculator Wright would have died for can be
found at <http://www.lmneng.com/manning.htm> .
Information about the New York Parks and
Conversation Association’s annual cycling the Erie Canal ride is at <http://www.nypca.org/canaltour/index.shtml> . Go for it!
You can find several authoritative versions of
shelley’s sonnet. I used the handwritten copy at <http://www.nla.gov.au/worldtreasures/html/theme-literature-2-ozy-mandias.html>
, with further background at <http://www.rc.umd.edu/rchs/waith.htm> .
Vernor Vinge discussed the coming technological
discontinuity at length in his books, most notably Across Realtime(now out of
print), and in the article found at <http://www.ugcs.clatech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vingesing.html> .