The Panama Canal now uses the best modern machinery, and the Nicaragua Canal, if built, will apply still better methods, developed on the Chicago drainage canal, where material was handled at a less cost than has ever been done before.
Russia is better supplied with internal waterways than any other country. Her rivers rise near each other, and have long been connected by canals. It is stated that she has over 60,000 miles of internal navigation, and is now preparing the construction of canals to connect the Caspian with the Baltic Sea.
The Erie Canal was one of very small cost, but its influence has been surpassed by none. The “winning of the West” was hastened many years by the construction of this work in the first quarter of the century. Two horses were just able to draw a ton of goods at the speed of two miles an hour over the wretched roads of those days. When the canal was made these two horses could draw a boat carrying 150 tons four miles an hour. Mud, or, in other words, friction, is the great enemy of civilization, and canals were the first things to diminish it, and after that railways.
The Erie Canal was made by engineers, but it had to make its own engineers first, as there were none available in this country at that time. These self-taught men, some of them land surveyors and others lawyers, showed themselves the equals of the Englishmen Brindley and Smeaton, when they located a water route through the wilderness, having a uniform descent from Lake Erie to the Hudson, and which would have been so built if there had been enough money.
The question now is whether to enlarge the capacity of this canal by enlarging its prism and locks, or to increase speed and move more boats in a season by electrical appliances. The last method seems more in line with those of the present day.
There should be a waterway from the Hudson to Lake Erie large enough for vessels able to navigate the lakes and the ocean. A draft of twenty-one feet can be had at a cost estimated at $200,000,000.
The deepening of the Chicago drainage canal to the Mississippi River, and the deepening of the Mississippi itself to the Gulf of Mexico, is a logical sequence of the first project. The Nicaragua Canal would then form one part of a great line of navigation, by which the products of the interior of the continent could reach either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean.
The cost would be small compared with the resulting benefits, and some day this navigation will be built by the government of the United States.
The deepening of the Southwest Pass of the Mississippi River from six to thirty feet by James B. Eads was a great engineering achievement. It was the first application of the jetty system on a large scale. This is merely confining the flow of a river, and thus increasing its velocity so that it secures a deeper channel for itself.
The improvement of harbors follows closely the increased size of ocean and lake vessels. The approach to New York harbor is now being deepened to forty feet, a thing impossible to be done without the largest application of steam machinery in a suction dredge boat.