Hydroelectricity helped elevate America to world leadership in the new industrial age. Between 1907 and 1929, U.S. nonfarm homes with electricity multiplied tenfold to 85 percent. By 1930, Americans were consuming more electricity than everyone else in the world combined, as well as providing half the world’s industrial output. Hydroelectricity’s legacy in America’s history loomed even larger than that because it was one of the core technologies that ultimately unlocked the wealth stored in the nation’s arid, western hydrological frontier. Nature offered few sites like Niagara between Lakes Erie and Ontario with the high falls and steady, year-round flow suitable for mass production of hydroelectricity. Around the turn of the century, however, industrial technologies converged to provide an artificial, man-made alternative—giant concrete dams. The pioneering, giant, multipurpose Hoover Dam on the Colorado River in the southwestern United States, completed in 1936, provided flood control, irrigation, and vast amounts of hydroelectricity through each of its 100,000 horsepower Francis turbines. It and subsequent similar giant dams modeled upon it became the critical infrastructure of America’s development of its Far West. Hoover was the largest hydroelectric facility in the world; at the end of the twentieth century, its 17 upgraded Francis turbines were capable of producing some 2.7 million horsepower of clean, endlessly renewable energy.
Other turbine designs and applications also helped to foster America’s rise. The screw propeller turbine, a derivative of the Francis turbine, powered fast naval vessels. As good hydroelectric sites grew scarce, steam turbines powered by fossil and nuclear energy plants instead of falling water evolved to produce mass electricity alongside rivers, whose water was used as coolants. By the end of the nineteenth century, the temperate, rainy, river-rich half of the United States from the East Coast through the heart of the Mississippi Valley, was on the verge of overtaking Britain as the world’s greatest economic power. Yet this historic transition in the global balance of power could not have occurred without a prior revolution in transportation that forged America’s many navigable rivers into an interconnected, inexpensive, inland waterway network. The water transport network was galvanized by two developments in water history in which America not merely followed, but took the lead from industrial Europe in applying new technologies—steam-powered, wooden riverboats, and modern, long-distance canals.
George Washington’s unfulfilled ambition of a Potomac passage through the Alleghenies had faltered partly due to the lack of a commercially viable steamboat capable of traveling upstream. Washington’s hopes had been pinned on a steam-pump-powered boat built by Virginian James Rumsey in 1784, a year after the French had pioneered early steamboats on the Saone River. In 1787, the eccentric, ill-starred American silversmith and inventor John Fitch launched a stern paddle-wheel-driven steamboat on the Delaware—even giving rides to members of the Constitutional Convention then meeting in Philadelphia—but its commercial viability was undermined by unreliable boilers and an inability to stay on schedule. In 1802, the first successful, practical steamer gave very brief service as a canal tug that crossed Scotland. The era of commercial river steamboats began full throttle in August 1807 on the Hudson River when American Robert Fulton’s 149-foot, twin-side paddle-wheeled North River Steamboat, later popularly called the Clermont, completed the 150-mile journey from New York to Albany in only 32 hours at a time when competing sail-powered sloops required four days.
A failed painter, self-made engineer, astute calculator of business costs, and ambitious schemer, Fulton was living in Europe in pursuit of his painting career when he encountered the burgeoning ferment over steamboats. Soon, he gave up painting, wrote a treatise on the efficiency of inland transport using small canals and invented a submarine that he tried to sell to Napoléon for his war against England. His main chance came in Paris in 1801, at the age of thirty-six, when he met Robert Livingston, the U.S. minister to France who soon was to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, and who had presciently obtained a twenty-year monopoly for steamboat navigation in New York before taking his post. The two men formed a partnership. Managing to obtain a 24 horsepower steam engine from Boulton and Watt, Fulton returned to America and built his historic steamboat. It was financially successful from its first run. Fulton and his associates soon launched a steamer on Pittsburgh’s Monongahela River that made the nearly 2,000 mile downstream trip on the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans in only two weeks. By 1815 the first riverboat was able to steam its way against the Mississippi current to complete the return trip in about four weeks. Previously crops and other goods had been floated downriver in one-way wooden flatboats that had to be dismantled and sold for lumber at journey’s end. The era of Mississippi shallow-draft riverboats and two-way western river cargo transport had begun. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started its career assisting navigation by removing snags and sandbars from the major rivers. Within five years some 60 steamers plied western rivers; by 1840, 536. Freight costs plummeted and commerce boomed throughout the Mississippi River Valley. By the end of the decade, western river steamboats were carrying freight comparable to that of the entire British Empire.
The boom in western river steam commerce could not have occurred without the conquest in the meantime of the long-insuperable obstacle—the absence of a trans-Appalachian water route. Without such a passage, the western rivers remained unconnected to the vibrant industries, farming and markets of the East, where the vast majority of Americans still lived and traded along the seacoast, effectively hemmed in by the Appalachians. Yet at the start of the river steamboat age, the grand engineering breakthrough that unified America, unlocked the wealth of the Mississippi Valley, and recast its historical orientation from north-south toward western expansion was on the verge of being launched—the Erie Canal, built from 1817 to 1825.
While George Washington was dreaming of a Potomac waterway to the west, he was keenly aware that a rival group was striving to transform New York’s Mohawk River into the main western gateway. The Mohawk had the advantage of being the only American river that cut through the mountains, which it did via a 500-foot-deep gorge. Although it had many waterfalls, rapids, and rocky shallows like the Potomac, it had an invitingly gentle slope for most of its route. If extended to Lake Erie south of Niagara Falls, it offered a potentially fabulous trade water route from New York City and the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and, with some adaptation, down the Mississippi to New Orleans. As with the Potomac, the initial effort to convert the Mohawk into a navigable waterway failed. But the New Yorkers hit upon another scheme—a 363-mile canal alongside the river. It was an audacious, grandiose plan. One early advocate was Robert Fulton. In 1807, he meticulously (and with remarkable accuracy) calculated the costs and rewards of building it for the federal government’s report on how to improve U.S. inland transportation. Fulton enthusiastically concluded that “when the United States shall be bound together by canals, by cheap and easy access to market in all directions, by a sense of mutual interests arising from mutual intercourse and mingled commerce, it will be no more possible to split them into independent and separate governments.”
Nevertheless, on the eve of its construction, little more than 100 miles of canals had been built in the entire United States. While proponents pointed with encouragement to the successful model of Europe’s epoch-making canals, the truth was that the 1761 coal-carrying Bridgewater Canal that spurred England’s canal craze had been only 10 miles long, while France’s more complex, 150 mile, 1681 Canal du Midi joining the Atlantic and Mediterranean, had been built across a civilized, heavily populated landscape. The much longer Erie was to traverse vaster expanses of untamed, barely inhabited wilderness. Large government financial support was needed. Thus when the project was presented in January 1809 to President Jefferson, the usually visionary leader passionate about promoting improved internal navigation, dismissed it as a wonderful but unrealistic idea that was a century ahead of its time. “It is little short of madness to think of it at this day,” he told his
disappointed visitors.
The project might have died at that point had not an outstanding New York politician, De Witt Clinton, stepped forth to become its champion. A longtime mayor of New York, U.S. senator, scion of a leading political family, and later to be New York governor, Clinton had been persuaded to steam up the Hudson in early July 1810 on Fulton’s Clermont to embark on what would be a revelatory, nearly two-month round-trip expedition between Albany and Buffalo to study the feasibility of the canal. He came back inspired to make the Erie Canal the capstone of his political career. Over the next seven years he determinedly overcame all political obstacles, technical doubters, and the disruptions of the War of 1812 to win the backing of the New York legislature for the state-financed canal. Finally on July 4, 1817, three days after Clinton himself had been elected governor of New York, ground was broken on what his many critics called “Clinton’s ditch.”
Building the four-foot-deep, 40-foot-wide canal and mule towpath was an immense technical and financial challenge. The work was done in three stages, entirely by hand labor, horse, oxen, and blasting powder. European canals provided engineering experience to cross rivers and build locks. But clearing and excavating through hundreds of miles of thick, forested wilderness was an utterly novel challenge. Ingenious solutions were found by work teams on the job through trial and error to expeditiously fell trees, remove stumps, and slice through the tangle of tree roots by the use of plows. When common quicklime proved unstable for lining and sealing the culverts, locks and aqueducts, the engineers found a source of inexpensive New York state limestone that acted like waterproof Roman cement when it hardened. By the fall of 1819, the midsection of the canal, which ran through the state’s lucrative salt-producing region, was finished and filled with water. The first tolls were collected along the finished stretch in July 1820.
The moment of financial truth for the canal came with the Panic of 1819, and the related bank lending contraction and national economic depression, which had initially been triggered by the depleted Treasury’s urgent 1818 calling in of $3 million in gold in order to meet a large debt payment due to France for the Louisiana Purchase. From the start, many of Erie’s doubters contended that Clinton’s $6 million budget was simply beyond the wherewithal of the state and nation’s limited capital. But the steadiness of state financing enabled work on the canal to continue without interruption, insulating New York from the worst of the national depression. The national economic collapse, moreover, caused capital market borrowing rates to plunge. With the canal increasingly looking like a viable project and few other attractive issues being offered, demand for New York’s new issue of canal bonds surged, lowering the cost of the project. Previously cautious large investors jumped in. So did British speculators, as the frenzy for Erie paper spread overseas; by 1829, foreigners held over half the canal’s $7.9 million in obligations.
By 1821, 9,000 men were working to build out the midsection in the canal in both directions. At each extreme it faced its toughest geographical challenges. To negotiate the steep gorge that sliced through the Appalachians, an aqueduct was built some 30 feet above the rushing white water and falls. Farther east, the steep descent toward the Hudson River was managed by the construction of long aqueducts, one supported by 26 piers, which crisscrossed the river. The greatest challenge of all lay at the western end, where the canal had to surmount the precipitous six story high cliffs leading to the escarpment from which Niagara Falls poured 17 miles away. At the end of two and a half years, workers had completed five flights of giant, 12-foot locks and sculpted a canal and towpath channel through seven miles of solid rock face. When it was finally finished in October 1825, the Erie Canal was the nation’s marvel. Across its 363 miles it had 83 locks and 18 aqueducts that carried 50 ton, mule- or horse-pulled freight boats up and down over 675 feet.
The two-week-long dedication was led by Governor De Witt Clinton, who paraded through Buffalo before setting out on a triumphal week-long journey on the canal to Albany—a trip that had taken him thirty-two days by land fifteen years earlier. At Albany he and his entourage boarded the Hudson steamer for New York. At the mouth of New York harbor, Clinton performed a symbolic wedding of the waters by pouring water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic. Other dignitaries stepped forward to pour water bottled from 13 of the world’s great rivers—Ganges, Indus, Nile, Gambia, Thames, Seine, Rhine, Danube, Mississippi, Columbia, Orinoco, Rio de la Plata, and Amazon.
The Erie Canal was an immediate, heroic success. At four cents a mile, it slashed freight transportation costs by 90 percent overnight. Toll collections surged as some 7,000 boats plied the canal the very first year; within just twelve years, the entire canal debt had been paid back. Relieved of the stultifying burden of transportation costs, midwestern wheat, corn, and oats quickly won new markets throughout the East Coast and across the ocean in Europe. Farm production soared, prices plunged, and settled cropland throughout the Mississippi Valley expanded. Georgia’s governor was shocked to find that New York State wheat sold in Savannah for less than wheat from central Georgia. Philadelphians awoke to discover that the cheapest route to Pittsburgh was up the Hudson, across the Erie Canal and south from Lake Erie by canal or wagon. As world markets opened wide to America’s interior beyond the Appalachians, east-west commerce in other goods also took off at an astonishing pace. Between 1836 and 1860, total tonnage on the Erie Canal multiplied thirty-one-fold.
The Erie Canal’s catalytic impact was even more dramatic than its opulent profitability. Over 100 new canal projects were launched across America within a year of its opening. By the late 1840s, a full-fledged canal boom had produced more than 3,000 miles of canals—three-quarters, following Erie’s lead, financed with public funds—to connect America’s navigable rivers into an integrated, inexpensive highway extending from New York to the Gulf of Mexico. Canals joined the Great Lakes to the Mississippi via the Illinois River in the west and via the Ohio River in the east. In the 1830s a canal spur also joined Erie to the head of the Chesapeake Bay, while early steam railroads linked canals across terrain that canals didn’t traverse. Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh became bustling inland port cities. The marriage of steamboats and canal-linked rivers quickened farming and burgeoning industrial activity throughout the Midwest.
While the Erie-ignited canal boom had many parallels with England’s forty-year canal craze following 1761 that transformed the Midlands and northern England into the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, its dynamic impact was more fittingly compared to that of the Grand Canal upon medieval China. Like the Grand Canal, America’s Erie-inspired waterway network united a continental-sized nation-state challenged by splintering regional divisions, geographical impediments, slow travel and communication, and divergent economic and social organization. Inland navigation routes supplanted each country’s reliance on coastal sea commerce, extended the reach of the central government, tightened webs of mutual economic interest, and spread common political and cultural discourse over a wide landscape. As the Grand Canal invigorated China with a stronger south-north orientation, Erie and its offspring reoriented America from its traditional north-south axis toward the more unifying east-west continental destiny envisioned by Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin. With a traversable route through the Appalachians, settlers began to pour into the western lands. By 1840 two out of five Americans lived west of the mountain barrier. National economic growth accelerated notably after Erie’s opening. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the economy expanded on average about 2.8 percent per year; from 1825 to 1850, 4.8 percent annually—the fastest growth spurt in all of U.S. history. By the 1840s the inland transportation infrastructure, influx of immigrant labor, and large accumulations of domestic capital had structurally transformed America into a nation that was ready to embark upon its great economic takeoff.
The Erie Canal boom also created the platform for the frenzy of steam railroad building that succeeded it. The speedy, all-sea
son railroads effectively extended the waterway network, and finally surpassed it as America’s leading freight hauler after midcentury. Like the medieval Islamic camel caravans, the steam and iron railroads ultimately provided the means for crossing the expansive desert and mountain frontiers of America’s Far West and fusing its resources with the mass production industrial economy of its temperate, eastern half. Steamships carrying iron ore from the western Great Lakes met up with railroad and canal barge shipments of coal to mass-produce various shapes of carbonless iron, or steel, at huge steel mills from the 1870s. As iron improved upon weaker wood, incredibly strong yet resilient steel improved upon iron that tended to bend and snap. Steel—which used water prodigiously for cooling—became the basic building material of the most dynamic industries and cities of the new era. Steel cable wires were used to support the landmark 1883 Brooklyn Bridge, then the world’s longest suspension bridge. In combination with energy harnessed from petroleum, which began to be drilled in significant volumes from the 1860s, and the electric dynamo, steel provided one of the core technologies of America’s rise to world economic leadership in the second great phase of the Industrial Revolution.
The transportation revolution ignited by the Erie Canal also shaped the urban hierarchy of the nation. As the main commercial gateway between the world and the fertile, huge U.S. interior, New York became America’s leading city. Its port, which had ranked fourth in tonnage in the colonial era behind Philadelphia, Boston, and Charleston, swelled with traffic equal to all other U.S. ports combined by the mid-nineteenth century. Likewise, its small capital market of brokers—24 of whom had formalized a trading agreement among themselves in 1792 under a buttonwood tree on the street where the city’s Dutch founders had erected a protective wall in 1653 and had continued to meet in various local taverns until 1817—formed the forerunner of the New York Stock Exchange, and in 1825 moved into a fixed location. The post-Erie fever in canal and railroad securities made it America’s premier center of finance. Between 1815 and 1840, the city’s population tripled to 300,000, then more than doubled to about 700,000 by 1850.
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