and, most significantly for this story, the building of canals. *
It was a fascination that became an obsession, for both the duke and his country. “Canal mania,” the national mood was called—and it was all begun by this strangely unpleasant man. In 1759 the duke of Bridgewater had completed a forty-two-mile stretch of artificial waterway, complete with locks, allowing him to ship coal from his own mines at Worsley, in Lancashire, directly into the heart of Manchester and then onward to the river Mersey. Since most of the price of coal was the cost of transporting it across country, the use of a canal slashed prices by as much as 50 percent. Smelling the prospect of limitless profits, every investor with spare change promptly jumped onto what seemed an unstoppable bandwagon.
Every bank, every entrepreneur, every developer, every engineer in England suddenly seemed to believe that the canal was the highway of the future. The owners of the turnpike roads howled their dismay. Farmers, angry that their land would be torn up, raised all manner of objections. But, one by one, Parliament passed canal acts and navigation acts at a staggering rate. Small armies of navvies—workers on the inland navigations—descended on the hills and valleys to carve and cement these revolutionary new trade routes into place.
Grand plans were conceived for connecting the whole country, Carlisle to Cornwall, Dover to Dumfries, with a network of waterways. The great existing trade rivers of England, the Thames, the Severn, the Mersey, and the Trent, were all to be linked. Maybe, one overambitious inventor suggested, the English Midlands could have their own canal that followed the contour lines and so did not need the costly and cumbersome mechanism of locks. (Since this canal would have been hundreds of miles long, requiring a horse to drag its barge the equivalent of a transatlantic crossing merely to go down to London, the plan was quietly dropped.)
Almost overnight, extraordinary economic miracles were realized. A brewer in Burton who previously could reckon to be able to sell his ales within a radius of only five or ten miles, found he could now load his barrels onto a horse-drawn canal boat and two days later have them delivered in London. No longer did Josiah Wedgwood have to hear how his fragile porcelains had been smashed to smithereens during their transit on the potholed public roads; now they could pass along the waterways, in the steady tranquillity of the floating world, and be safely in the shops of Liverpool and Oxford and Edinburgh in a matter of days. Exporters based in Birmingham no longer needed to route all their wares through agents in London: They could send their goods to the United States directly, by canal boat from the factory straight to the clipper ships waiting at the docks. And for the ordinary public, too, canals became immediate sources ofbetterment: No longer did coal double in price in the aftermath of heavy rains—now it was always cheap, and except in times of thick, canal-choking ice, bad weather scarcely ever affected its price, or the speed of its delivery, again.
The duke was quite right to foresee that indeed in those early, heady days the greatest canal cargo of all was to be coal. One horse, plodding quietly along ahead of a fully laden coal barge, could haul eighty times more than if it were leading a wagon down a muddy road—could take four hundred times as much as a single pack-horse. All of a sudden anyone with a coal mine, anywhere in England, now wanted a canal—so that his anthracite and his steam coal could be carried quickly and cheaply to the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.
I t has long been said that the people of England could never be poor, since they lived on an island made of coal and surrounded by fish. There had been an English coal-mining industry of sorts—via shafts and adits and opencut workings only—since the thirteenth century (though the Romans had known of
It was a fascination that became an obsession, for both the duke and his country. “Canal mania,” the national mood was called—and it was all begun by this strangely unpleasant man. In 1759 the duke of Bridgewater had completed a forty-two-mile stretch of artificial waterway, complete with locks, allowing him to ship coal from his own mines at Worsley, in Lancashire, directly into the heart of Manchester and then onward to the river Mersey. Since most of the price of coal was the cost of transporting it across country, the use of a canal slashed prices by as much as 50 percent. Smelling the prospect of limitless profits, every investor with spare change promptly jumped onto what seemed an unstoppable bandwagon.
Every bank, every entrepreneur, every developer, every engineer in England suddenly seemed to believe that the canal was the highway of the future. The owners of the turnpike roads howled their dismay. Farmers, angry that their land would be torn up, raised all manner of objections. But, one by one, Parliament passed canal acts and navigation acts at a staggering rate. Small armies of navvies—workers on the inland navigations—descended on the hills and valleys to carve and cement these revolutionary new trade routes into place.
Grand plans were conceived for connecting the whole country, Carlisle to Cornwall, Dover to Dumfries, with a network of waterways. The great existing trade rivers of England, the Thames, the Severn, the Mersey, and the Trent, were all to be linked. Maybe, one overambitious inventor suggested, the English Midlands could have their own canal that followed the contour lines and so did not need the costly and cumbersome mechanism of locks. (Since this canal would have been hundreds of miles long, requiring a horse to drag its barge the equivalent of a transatlantic crossing merely to go down to London, the plan was quietly dropped.)
Almost overnight, extraordinary economic miracles were realized. A brewer in Burton who previously could reckon to be able to sell his ales within a radius of only five or ten miles, found he could now load his barrels onto a horse-drawn canal boat and two days later have them delivered in London. No longer did Josiah Wedgwood have to hear how his fragile porcelains had been smashed to smithereens during their transit on the potholed public roads; now they could pass along the waterways, in the steady tranquillity of the floating world, and be safely in the shops of Liverpool and Oxford and Edinburgh in a matter of days. Exporters based in Birmingham no longer needed to route all their wares through agents in London: They could send their goods to the United States directly, by canal boat from the factory straight to the clipper ships waiting at the docks. And for the ordinary public, too, canals became immediate sources ofbetterment: No longer did coal double in price in the aftermath of heavy rains—now it was always cheap, and except in times of thick, canal-choking ice, bad weather scarcely ever affected its price, or the speed of its delivery, again.
The duke was quite right to foresee that indeed in those early, heady days the greatest canal cargo of all was to be coal. One horse, plodding quietly along ahead of a fully laden coal barge, could haul eighty times more than if it were leading a wagon down a muddy road—could take four hundred times as much as a single pack-horse. All of a sudden anyone with a coal mine, anywhere in England, now wanted a canal—so that his anthracite and his steam coal could be carried quickly and cheaply to the furnaces of the Industrial Revolution.
I t has long been said that the people of England could never be poor, since they lived on an island made of coal and surrounded by fish. There had been an English coal-mining industry of sorts—via shafts and adits and opencut workings only—since the thirteenth century (though the Romans had known of
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