Let me most seriously caution all travelers who may accidentally purpose the travel this terrible country to avoid it as they would the devil for a thousand to one, but they break their necks or their limbs by overthrows or breaking down they will meet with ruts, which I actually measured four feet deep and floating with mud only from a wet summer. What therefore must it be after a winter? Those were the words of one Arthur Young, an agricultural writer from his 1770 book a six month tour through the north of England. The four feet deep ruts he's referring to were on the Wigan Turnpike.
The turnpikes of the time were the best roads in England and they required payment to travel on them. So what were the shabby roads open to everyone like? To be honest, it's difficult by our modern standards that call them roads at all. They were seldom looked after.
Travelers often got lost trying to follow them. The most backcountry dirt roads today are significantly better to travel on than the best roads of 18th century Great Britain. Riding on horseback in those days probably wasn't too difficult, but carrying wagons long distances sure would have been. And that meant there was a significant barrier to trade within the country.
But if there's one thing the British were getting really good at during this age of global empires, it was water-based transport. So, in a time before modern rubber and modern cement, before trains and trucks, the British used the tools and learning available to them to build an entire water-based transport infrastructure. And in the process, they made the Industrial Revolutions possible. This is the Industrial Revolutions, Chapter 11 Canal Mania.
Re-routing water goes back to the first large-scale irrigation projects of the Stone Age in the Fertil Crescent. Canales were built across Eurasia in the centuries to come, including some large ones in China that allowed the Empire to grow, as well as an ancient Suez Canal between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. That ancient Suez Canal, by the way, used a system of locks designed by Greek engineers. And locks are an important technology to understand for everything we'll be discussing today.
Imagine you're shipping something up a river. You're gonna go against the current, sure, but in some places you're going to be going against the laws of gravity in general because rivers flow downward. To go up in elevation on the river, you'll pass through a lock, a series of gates that allows the height of the water to change. So you pass through the first gate and it closes behind you.
Then the gate in front of you opens ever so slightly so water slowly comes in, filling the lock so your boat rises in elevation, until it is as high as the water on the other side of the second gate. Then the second gate opens and you're able to continue up the river. In England, the use of locks for river navigation began hundreds of years before the first Industrial Revolution. But it was down in southern France where Canal Transport really starts to take off.
As early as 1660, the French government wanted a way to ship goods from north to south and vice versa without traveling around the Iberian Peninsula. The best way would be to extend the groan from Bordeaux to the Mediterranean. Under the approval of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and after decades of study and construction, the Canal Royal and Longudac was completed in 1681. More than a century later, when the monarchy was overthrown in the midst of the French Revolution, it was renamed the Canal Dumidi.
You can still travel on it today, although it's not really used for shipping anymore. The insights gained during construction of the Canal Dumidi were invaluable for what was the common England. After winning his bid to construct New Docks in Liverpool, an engineer by the name of Thomas Steers began surveying the rivers of Lancashire. He then proposed two navigation projects, one on the river Douglas and one on the river's mercy in Erwal.
Parliament approved the projects in 1720, and Steers got to work. Adding several new locks to the rivers, Steers vastly improved shipping in Lancashire, just in time for inventions like the fly shuttle and spinning jenny to transform the textile industry there. Rock Cotton could make it up the river mercy from Liverpool to Manchester. From there it could head north up the river Erwal as well.
And back down to Liverpool would travel the finished cotton products. Additional projects would follow, including a 1757 effort to broaden and deepen Sankey Brook, to improve the transport of coal from St. Helens to Liverpool. But these projects wouldn't be enough to meet the needs of the first industrial revolution.
It was going to take a well-financed visionary to build the Canal of the future. His name, Francis Egerton, the third Duke of Bridgewater. Born in 1736, Francis was elevated to the status of Duke at 12 years following the death of his older brother John. As a child, Francis had been so unpromising, in terms of his health and his intellect, that his family considered disinheriting him.
Though lacking perhaps in familial love, Francis was an altogether failure in romantic love. In 1758, he had become engaged to a young widow, the Dowager Duchess of Hamilton. Hamilton and her older sister, the Lady Coventry, hailed from rural Ireland, but they had become famous London socialites by the early 1750s. Her first marriage to the Duke of Hamilton had been love at first sight.
They met at a party and fell so head over heels for one another they got married that very night. The ring he used actually came from a bed curtain. By contrast, the Duke of Bridgewater may have seemed a bit disappointing. It didn't take long for them to break off the engagement, perhaps due to an affair her sister was having actually.
Bridgewater then gave up on romantic love all together and turned his attention to his greatest love, Canales. You see, in the years before his engagement, Bridgewater had been suffering from coughing fits and chest pains, so severe people figured he wouldn't survive in England. So it was arranged for him to take a grand tour of Europe, going as far east as modern day Turkey. Perhaps a Mediterranean climate could restore his health.
It didn't help that the teenage aristocrat was a bit of a party animal, who's drinking probably made his health problems worse. It was also an ongoing concern to his tutor, Robert Wood, who complained the Duke would rather spend his time in bed company than reading. He had taken a mistress and used deception in his rank in the process, seriously upsetting his entourage. Wood tried raining in the Duke, but allowed him one strange request.
The Duke was obsessed for whatever reason, and seemed the Canal du Midi. Bridgewater was intellectually lazy, so Wood chalked it up to a touristy interest. Yet, when the Duke learned about the immense challenges of the project being overcome by new engineering techniques, he was quite impressed. So, after breaking up with the Duchess, he left London for good and returned to his estate at Worsley.
Among the income-generating works on that estate was coal mining. And with the Canal down to the nearby, growing city of Manchester, Bridgewater saw an immense market opportunity for his coal. It was at this time that his agent, John Gilbert, introduced Bridgewater to an engineer named James Brindley. Brindley was 20 years' Bridgewater senior, and yet socially quite beneath him.
The son of Yeoman farmers in Derbyshire, he was educated at home by his mother and a apprentice to a millwright in rural Cheshire at age 17. After completing the apprenticeship, he set up his own shop and slowly grew that business. Despite his lack of formal education, he was a proficient tinkerer and a great solver of technical problems. Then, in 1750, he had a breakthrough.
Running a shop from the famous Josiah Wedgwood, he expanded the business to include all kinds of machinery, from textile spinning machines to steam engines. How, in 1759, he became the best man to build England's first modern canal? It's hard to say, but over the next two years, Bridgewater, Gilbert, and Brindley got approval from Parliament to build the canal. They surveyed the land, developed a plan, and started digging.
For the most part, they didn't do anything too crazy. Brindley wanted to make sure the canal followed the contours of the land as much as possible, which meant it would be quite a bit longer, but they wouldn't need to rely on locks and earth-moving would be minimal. Canal building in those days was done by men with shovels, after all. But the act of Parliament that approved the canal did not allow it to join with the Merseen Erwell Navigation.
So, rather than enter the Erwell River, the Bridgewater Canal actually had to cross it. To make that work, they built the most fascinating element of the canal, the Barton Aqueduct. Imagine you're looking at a bridge over a river, but with a boat traveling on that bridge. It's weird to imagine today, and it was super weird to see in the 18th century.
So popular was that part of the canal, though, Bridgewater would open it up for tourism, taking two passenger boats a day on tours along the canal, moving very slowly and offering coffee and wine on board. As impressive as the Barton Aqueduct was, the development that was more instrumental was something Brindley thought of, called clay puddling. You see, if you dig a canal and let the water in, the muddy bottom would absorb much of the water and turn it into a swamp. So instead, Brindley created a clay bed for the canal, making it watertight.
Additionally, Brindley knew that the lateral pressure of the water could make the banks at risk for bursting, so he worked out an ingenious method for isolating sections, so in the event of a bridge, the entire canal wouldn't just drain away. Also impressive, the canal would serve as drainage for Bridgewater's coal mine. Water flooding in the mine would flow out into the canal, and a network of underground canals was constructed to make it possible. After the Bridgewater Canal opened, the price of coal and Manchester was cut in half, practically overnight, and although construction nearly bankrupted Bridgewater, he was able to recoup all his expenses by 1771, and from there, getting insanely rich.
The Duke of Bridgewater and his canal turned heads across England, and just like that, Canalmania had begun. Okay, so when I say Canalmania, I'm not just making that term up, that's what scholars call the 40-odd years of British infrastructure history after the Bridgewater Canal opened. Imagine Beatlesmania, with the band playing the Ed Sullivan show, except instead of John Paul, George, and Ringo, you have canals, and instead of teenage girl screaming, it's members of Parliament. Over the next 15 years, 52 acts of Parliament were passed to encourage the further building of canals, one of which allowed the Bridgewater Canal to connect to the mercy and er well navigation.
But most of the acts chartered new joint stock corporations that would get exclusive rights to build and maintain canals and then charged holds. The ROI on those stocks would be so much higher than government bonds, it provided investors with new opportunities to build some serious wealth. The most important development of this period was the right of eminent domain. While the concept of compulsory purchase had existed for centuries, it was refined during this period, and this was important not only because of the recent developments of private property rights in England, but also for what was to come with the railroads and other large-scale infrastructure.
Among the most important of the new canals would be the Trent and Mercy Canal. By linking those two rivers, the British could now navigate from the Port of Liverpool on the Irish Sea to the Port of Hall on the North Sea, without having to sail around the entire island. It also put the textile industry of Lancashire in closer contact with Arkwright's mail at Derbyshire. The bid to build the Trent and Mercy Canal was awarded to none other than James Brindley, although he would die before it was completed.
He wouldn't build this one like the Bridgewater Canal though, he couldn't do the incredible changes in the elevation. So to make it work, he needed to include 35 locks across the canal as well as five tunnels, including the 9,000 foot long hair-cassle tunnel. That one alone took 11 years to build. Tunnel building in the 18th century was a dangerous job which people were too experienced with, and just like digging mines, collapses, flooding, and poisonous gases were always serious threats.
Now, on the canals themselves, the barges would be pulled along by a horse walking on the bank of the canal on a towpath of Ash and Cinders, which were in planning supply thanks to all the coal burning going on in the first industrial revolution. But the tunnels were too low for the horses, so they'd have to go around instead. So to get the barges through the tunnel, they'd hire these guys called Leggers who would lay on their backs and walk upside down across the ceiling of the tunnel. Canal mania climaxed in 1793 and 1794, as another 38 acts of parliament were passed through new canal schemes.
Not everyone was a fan of what was happening though, and a war of pamphlets for and against the new canals was waged. Pro-canal voices argued that they were bringing down prices, creating the possibility of cheaper food for the masses. Also, a horse could pull 50 times as much freight by canal barge as it could by wagon, and that meant, soon, fewer horses would be needed, meaning less horse food would be needed, and I suppose less horse crap to pick up after. Anti-canal voices typically came from the landowners, who were generally peeved that some company could just set up on their land for years digging a canal, taking away acres that could be used for farming.
But textile mill owners were also concerned that the new canals would divert water from their rivers, reducing the degree of water power, critical to their spinning mills and other machines at the time. And canal mania saw it brilliantly succeeded by a new generation of legendary canal builders, the most famous among them was a guy named Thomas Telford. Telford was born in the rural lowlands of Scotland in 1757. His father was a shepherd who died not long after.
Young Thomas grew up in a one room craft, raised by a single mother who struggled as the family slid into poverty. But Thomas was able to get an apprenticeship with a stonemason at age 14. Throughout his 20s, he traveled across Britain, working on construction projects in Edinburgh, London, and Portsmouth. It was during this time he met one Sir William Pultany, a wealthy landowner and politician.
Pultany was impressed by his work and helped him get appointed to the office of Surveyor of Public Works in Shropshire. As his work became more prestigious, Telford branched out into architecture and what we would today call civil engineering. Among other things, he was renovating castles, churches, and he was building bridges. He was especially wowed by the Iron Bridge, built by Abraham Darby III and John Iron Mad Wilkinson, although he noted how the design of it was overly complicated.
By 1793, Telford was appointed general agent, surveyor, engineer, architect, and overlooker, to the Ellesmere Canal, which was to join the river's mercy, Dee, and Severn. And although he would go on to do much more than build canals, his particular canal feats really stood out in the age of canal mania. The most impressive feat of this project would be a 120 foot high iron aqueduct over the river Dee in north Wales. Caring water from the Clangotland Canal, the Puntkull sultec aqueduct, is a thousand feet long.
You can still sail a boat on it if you're not too afraid of heights. You can also walk on where the horses used to. Originally, the plan was for a series of locks on both sides of the river Dee Valley, with a low stone aqueduct in the middle. But getting up and down those locks takes a long time.
Telford knew it would be much better for the canal's eventual customers if it was a straight shot. So he managed to convince investors to let him build this huge iron structure. It took 10 years to build, but when it finally opened in 1805, it opened to wild fanfare. Grass bands played, canons were fired, and a procession of barges crossed the aqueduct like a parade.
Another great Telford project was the Caledonian Canal, linking a series of Scottish locks, okay, note that's L-O-C-H-S-Locks, across the great Glen of the rugged highlands. The Caledonian Canal eliminated the need for shipping around the stormy seas north of Scotland. To complete it, he needed to build a lot of locks, note that's L-O-C-K-S-Locks, including, at one point, a series of eight successive locks nicknamed Neptune's Staircase. One poet friend of Telford's, Telford was a big fan of poetry, saw Neptune's Staircase and said it was more impressive than the pyramids.
Yes, canals were going up everywhere in Great Britain. Among the most significant were the fourth in Clyde Canal, which linked to Glasgow to Edinburgh, the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, which linked industrial Yorkshire to the Great Port of Northern England, and had the distinction of going over the Pennine Hills, a masterful feat of engineering, and the Kennet and Avon Canal, which linked Bristol to London. In fact, probably too many canals went up. By the 1790s, plans were being drawn up for canals that could never really be profitable, and the surge in demand for construction during this period led to huge increases in wage expectations and the prices of supplies.
And this was on top of the broader inflation taking place during the Napoleonic Wars. Making matters worse, the acts of parliament that chartered these endeavors usually limited the amount of money the companies could raise. And in this age, before widespread understanding of economics, the canal companies' investors often suspected corruption or negligence. I mean, why else would they be running out of money?
Another problem? As the canals got bigger and crossed higher and higher grounds, it became more and more difficult to keep them full of water. It required the British to build dams across high streams, building up a water supply over the course of a year so it could be fed into the canals and keep them going. The construction of canals had some other key effects during the first industrial revolution.
They created economic stimulus, including in some remote, poor regions of the kingdom, and an array of new jobs. In addition to the leggers there were the navvies, an abbreviated word for navigators. They didn't navigate the boats coming up and down the canals, they dug out the canals from the ground, the navigations. Originally, canal builders would hire local subcontractors, who in turn hired seasonal laborers to do the digging.
But as canal mania intensified, digging became a full-time profession. In time, Navi became a general British slang word for any worker who uses a pick and shovel. Then there were the bargemen, the guys who traveled with the barges up and down the rivers and canals. Now, compared to most of the new unskilled labor opportunities of the first industrial revolution, the job of the bargemen was pretty darn good.
You got to work outdoors, get a tan, get good exercise, work with horses, see great views, and you could look pretty cool by decorating your bargemen, painting it with bright colors. You weren't cooped up in a mill, breathing in cotton debris, or puddling hot iron, or working in a gas-filled, flooded, poorly lit coal mine that could collapse on you. On the other hand, not many people liked the bargemen. Maybe they were just jealous, but often times it was because they suspected bargemen of being thieves.
And this was at a time when, if you grew up in a rural community, you almost never saw people you didn't personally know. I mean, who is this random guy passing through our town? How can we trust him? The bargemen were regularly accused of petty theft by the residents of the towns and villages they passed through.
And because of their nomadic profession, some folks thought they were gypsies, and from there they piled on all the normal prejudices associated with the Romani people and other traveler communities. And for what it's worth, bargeing was more than a job. It was a way of life. By the early 20th century, it was a way of life passed down in some families for over 100 years.
Then there were the lockkeepers. Their job was to open and close the gates of a lock, make sure the embankments were watertight, and of course, collect the tolls. They worked out of little lockkeeper cottages, many of which still stand today. But all these jobs would peter out, starting in the 1830s, as canal shipping was gradually replaced by rail shipping.
But they would still be used well into the 20th century, and although they're not really used for commercial shipping anymore, they are still in use today by tourists and local slow-boding enthusiasts. It's a good way to enjoy rural Great Britain in a tranquil, slow-moving manner, which is ironic because they were very much designed for speedier transport to fuel industrialization. By 1830, there was at least 3,900 miles of canals in the United Kingdom. And they weren't the only ones.
Another country saw the benefits of canals, and had its own moment of canalmenia. The United States. Among the many complaints of the British colonists in North America was the state of the roads and waterways. Sure, infrastructure wasn't as sexy as taxation without representation, but in colonies that existed pretty much for the express purpose of producing raw materials to send back to the mother country, it was lost on nobody that transporting those raw materials was a pain in the ass.
Parliament was passing new taxes on its American colonies, but not passing any acts that did canals. In 1772, Benjamin Franklin was visiting London, and he wrote about how he wished the colonies could poach some of Britain's canal builders and put their skills to work across the pond. So following independence, American officials practically fell over themselves in the rush to modernize the new nation's transport infrastructure. In particular, canal projects were proposed for several routes through New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.
Not only were they excited to start building, they had a little money to work with. What they didn't have was any engineers who knew how to build a canal. So in 1791, a group of merchants in Pennsylvania formed the Society for the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation, led by the state's new Senator Robert Morris, a personal friend of George Washington's, and widely known as the Financier of the Revolution. The Society laid out plans to build canals across the state, and they put out urgent RFPs to British engineers.
Seeing how their King viewed Americans as traitors, these British engineers were probably more than a little wary of going over there, and it took a while to find someone. But finally, they managed to talk somebody into it. His name was William Weston, a 29-year-old native of the Oxford area. We don't know a whole lot about him, but he may have been a student of James Brindley.
He first came to prominence in 1787, when he engineered and managed construction of the Trent Bridge at Gainesville, a wide and impressive bridge for its time. It was also the only thing he was known for before he came to America. In 1792, he sailed to Philadelphia with his new wife and took up residence with Senator Morris, to begin a five-year commitment to the Schuchill and Susquehanna Navigation Company of Pennsylvania. Weston got to work immediately, and he was loved for it.
His salary was soon doubled, and he was treated like a celebrity. The company he was contracted with, like immediately went insolvent, but Weston remained a hot commodity. Among other things, he engineered or consulted on six canals along the eastern seaboard, a turnpike road, and a freshwater supply scheme for New York City. He finally headed back to England in 1801.
In his place came another British engineer, Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Born at near Leeds, his father was the pastor of a Moravian church, who sent him to Moravian schools, which emphasized subjects we would now call STEM subjects. During his early career, Latrobe probably worked under Canal Engineer William Jessup, a frequent collaborator of Telfords. In the 1790s, he twice presented a proposal to Parliament to improve the Blackwater and Kelmer navigation, but both proposals were rejected, and the deflated Latrobe decided to do something that would soon become common for ambitious Europeans.
He emigrated to the United States. First arriving in Norfolk, Virginia, Latrobe moved around the US working on tons of projects in need of an engineer. He built a new Bank of Pennsylvania building in a Greek Revival style, which would become the architectural style of American institutions, and helped the Federal Government survey and build up the new City of Washington on the Potomac River. Latrobe consulted on several Canal projects, but almost all of them fell through due to shaky financing in the new country.
He had more luck with the water supply scheme for Philadelphia, which led him to get hired by the city of New Orleans, where he would head in 1820. He had an idea to use a steam engine to pump fresh water for the city, but almost immediately upon arriving in New Orleans, he contracted yellow fever and died. The legacy of Weston and Latrobe in the United States wasn't that they completed all these projects they meant to, in fact most of the projects they started failed, but they did manage to train a generation of civil engineers in the United States who built the new nation from the ground up, literally. Among Weston's pupils was Colonel Lomie Baldwin, the so-called father of American civil engineering, who built the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts, and he was the inventor of the Baldwin Apple.
And Benjamin Wright, the chief engineer of the Erie Canal, the most famous and hugely important canal running from the Hudson River across New York State to the Great Lakes. Still in contact with his American disciple, Weston consulted by mail with the Erie Canal Commission. Latrobe's disciples included his son, Benjamin Henry Jr., and William Strickland, both of whom would use their skills to help build America's railroads. But rail transport was for the next generation of American industrialists.
The Weston and Latrobe generation of Americans was all about those canals. And one of them, a guy by the name of Robert Fulton, was so inspired by the canals he saw over in Britain that he got to thinking, what can we do to improve canal transportation? What if we got rid of the horses? What if we got rid of the sails?
The age of the steamboat was coming, next week on the Industrial Revolutions. If I mispronounce anything today, who else names or got any facts wrong, I want to know about it. Please direct a message me at intrevpod.com. That's at i-n-v-r-e-b-p-o-d on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
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