And on the pedestal,this legend clear:
My name is Ozymandias,king of kings,
Look on my Works ye Mighty,and despair!
Nothing remain beside,Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck,boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe
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 New York city,And
getting rich in the process.He went broke while discovering how shipping cost
affects selling price and,chapters 7 and 11 not
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 Lake Erie to the Hudson
River,with the intent of slashing shipping costs and encouraging industry
along the way. The feds, including
president Jefferson,thought he was nuts, but
his proposal caught the fancy of soon-to-be-NY-Governor De Witt
Clinton(no relation)and,after many dramatic twists and turns,Hawley’s idea
became the first Erie canal.
This past July,my
family bicycled 400 miles from Buffalo
to Albany along the canal as part of a group ride.The Erie canal was one of the
first full-throttle engineering projects in the then-new United States, which
made the ride something of a pilgrimage for the engineering bears in the group.
Keep the telecon 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
Hudson at Albany. State-of-the-art locks in 1800 could match about 12 feet of elevation difference and the canal would
require 83 of them along its
route.
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 United States boasted about 10
engineers,a
situation so dire that six year earlier,George Washington had established an
engineering corps at West point to train future military engineers.By 1816,the number of
civil engineers had nearly tripled to 27.The Erie canal was
engineered by land surveyors.
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 Lockport remain a gorgeous example of
practical artistry in stone.
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 New York rather than return to Germany.
The Problems
Construstions began on July 4,1817,at Rome, New
York, with excavations extending in both directions. By starting in relatively
flat Land, they could demonstrate rapid progress, sign on early adopters, and
work the bugs out of the system. In short, they could easily be 100-percent buzzword compliant.
Two
years later, the 15-mile route between Rome and Utica opened. By simple
extrapolation and igoring the fact that this was the easiest section, the rest
of the canal would be finished in about half a century. It was obviously
time for some scheduled inventions.
In
1820,the middle of New York State was essentially a trackless wilderness, which
meant the canal had few right-of-way issues. However, the workforce lacked
enough axe-men to cut down all those trees, had no good way to remove the
stumps, and spent a lot time carrying dirt. Nearly everything else became
secondary to those problems.
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
sucessful 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 provides 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 soe 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 Newton’s Laws don’t apply to code. At least we now understand that we
don’t understand the inherent complexity of large-scale projects.
Embedded developers, only recently converted to
off-the-shelf componentry, now sruggle 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> .