At Home - Bill Bryson [104]
But in 1810, DeWitt Clinton, then mayor of New York City and soon to become governor of the state, produced an idea that many thought was possibly mad but certainly delusional. He proposed building a canal across the state to Lake Erie, connecting New York City with the Great Lakes and the rich farmlands beyond. People called it Clinton’s Folly, and not surprisingly. The canal would have to be dug with picks and shovels, to a width of forty feet, through 363 miles of rough wilderness. It would need eighty-three locks, each ninety feet long, to manage all the changes of elevation. Along some stretches the slope would have to average no more than one inch per mile. No canal of even close to this degree of challenge had ever been attempted anywhere in the settled world, much less in a wilderness.
And here was the thing. America didn’t have a single native-born engineer who had ever worked on a canal. Thomas Jefferson, who normally venerated ambition, thought the whole idea insane. “It is a splendid project, and may be executed a century hence,” he allowed after reviewing the plans, but added at once: “It is little short of madness to think of it at this day.” President James Madison refused to give federal aid, at least partly motivated by a desire to keep the center of commercial gravity farther south and away from that old Loyalist stronghold.
So New York’s options were to go alone or go without. Despite the costs, risks, and almost total absence of necessary skills, it decided to fund the project itself. Four men—Charles Broadhead, James Geddes, Nathan Roberts, and Benjamin Wright—were appointed to get the work done. Three of them were judges; the fourth was a schoolteacher. None had ever even seen a canal, much less tried to build one. All they had in common was some experience of surveying. Yet somehow through reading, consultation, and inspired experimentation, they managed to design and supervise the greatest engineering project the New World had ever seen. They became the first people in history to learn how to build a canal by building a canal.
Early on, it became apparent that one problem threatened the viability of the whole enterprise—a lack of hydraulic cement. Half a million bushels of hydraulic cement (a bushel is thirty-two U.S. quarts or about thirty-five liters, so half a million bushels is a lot) were needed to make the canal watertight. If water seeped away on any section, it would be a disaster for the whole canal, so clearly it was a problem that had to be fixed. Unfortunately, no one knew how to overcome it.
A young canal employee named Canvass White volunteered to travel to England at his own expense to see what he could learn. For nearly a year White walked the length and breadth of Britain—two thousand miles in all—studying canals and learning all he could about how they were built and kept together, with a particular eye on waterproofing. By chance, it turned out that Parker’s Roman cement—which, as we have seen, played a central role in the downfall of William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey because of its lack of strength as a building material—worked unexpectedly well as a hydraulic cement, where it needed only to be used as a water-resistant mortar. Its inventor, the Reverend Mr. Parker of Gravesend, didn’t grow rich from this, unfortunately, as he sold his patent within a year of taking it out, and then, rather ironically, emigrated to America, where he soon died. His cement, however, did very well till it was superseded by superior varieties in the 1820s, and gave Canvass White