At Home - Bill Bryson [105]
Returning home, and now armed with some knowledge of the scientific principles of adhesion, White experimented with various native ingredients and quickly formulated a compound that worked even better than Parker’s Roman cement. It was a great moment in American technological history—indeed, it could be said to be the beginning of American technological history—and it deserved to make White rich and celebrated. In fact, it did neither. White’s patents entitled him to a royalty of four cents on each bushel sold—a small enough sum as it was—but the manufacturers declined to share their profits. He pressed his claims through the courts but was unable to enforce any judgments that went his way. The result was a long slide into penury.
The manufacturers, meantime, grew rich making what was now the best hydraulic cement in the world. Thanks in large part to White’s invention, the canal opened early, in 1825, after just eight years of construction. It was a triumph from the start. So many boats used it—thirteen thousand in the first year—that at night their running lights looked like swarms of fireflies on the water, according to one captivated witness. With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one. The effect on New York’s fortunes was breathtaking. Its share of national exports leaped from less than 10 percent in 1800 to over 60 percent by the middle of the century; in the same period, even more dazzlingly, its population went from ten thousand to well over half a million.
Probably no manufactured product in history—certainly none of greater obscurity—has done more to change a city’s fortunes than Canvass White’s hydraulic cement. The Erie Canal secured the economic primacy not only of New York within the United States but also, very possibly, of the United States within the world. Without the Erie Canal, Canada would have been ideally positioned to become the powerhouse of North America, with the St. Lawrence River serving as the conduit to the Great Lakes and the rich lands beyond.
So the great unsung Canvass White didn’t just make New York rich; more profoundly, he helped make America. In 1834, exhausted by his legal battles and suffering from some serious but unspecified malady—probably consumption—he traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, in the hope of restoring his health; unfortunately, he died there soon after arriving. He was already forgotten by history and so poor that his wife could barely afford to bury him. And that is probably the last time you will ever hear his name.
I mention all this here because we have descended to the cellar, an unfinished and basic space in the Old Rectory, as in most English houses of the period. Originally, the cellar served primarily as a coal store. Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment, and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years. It isn’t a very congenial space, but it does have the compensating virtue of providing some sense of the superstructure of the house—the things that hold it up and keep it together, which is the subject of this chapter. The reason I have prefaced it all with the story of the Erie Canal is to make the point that building materials are more important and even, dare I say, interesting than you might think. They certainly help make history in ways that don’t often get mentioned in books.
Indeed, the history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials. For a country famed for being rich in natural resources, America along the eastern seaboard proved to be appallingly deficient in many basic commodities necessary to an independent civilization. One of those