Oh, that’s great! Because when the DATA centres grind to a halt, you can send all the contruction workers and civil engineers to finish up your canal projects!
Honestly it’s kind of insane to hear that america doesn’t have many canals. European countries are full of canals which we absolutely needed in the 1800s-1900s to lug everything around the country. And they’re great, really classy.
Canals were really the technology of the 18th century. In 1827 the Baltimore and Ohio was opened as the first passenger and freight railroad and railroads started popping up extrenely rapidly, initially chartered by basically every city to be built along existing roads, then later built with their own right of way.
West of Appalachia, the land is relatively flat and the existing permanent native American settlements were sparse since their population had collapsed from disease brought by colonists centuries earlier. Railroads engaged in real estate speculation platting out and selling land in cities every 10-20 miles (because the early steam locomotives needed water every 10-20 miles, so might as well have them take on passengers/freight too!) and the federal government was practically paying railroads to take land to better establish the United States’ claim to the land. This rail building boom peaked around the 1860s around which point consolidation started reducing the quantity of rails as railroads consolidated and began building more focused trunks out of their existing right of way.
In fact, because of how the land grants were written most railroads built a single track in a straight line as fast as possible between their start and end, then once they’d secured the grant for connecting the two points by the extremely aggressive deadline, only then would they start actually rebuilding the track so that it would actually be usable for real rail service.
So in short, it was a combination of lack of existing (white) cities, land grants by a new government trying to secure its land claims that it believed were it’s manifest destiny, plus innovations in steam engines to make steam locomotives truly viable right at the time when the flegling nation had its feet under it and was ready to start investing heavily into itself.
TL;DR Right place, right time, right legal environment and right technology
Also should acknowledge that the Great Lakes and Mississippi River (and major tributaries) made for efficient water shipping to a lot of the major cities of 19th century America. Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee all have ports.
And yeah, as you say, there just weren’t major settlements of European Americans anywhere else yet except in the plantation south. California wound up aggressively settled before transcontinental rail, but even there was largely along the coasts. Our national population remains pretty coastal alongside density in the great lakes and major tributaries of the Mississippi.
Hilariously I forgot about the natural waterways like the Mississippi despite working directly next to the Mississippi and spending my lunches at a park by it for a full year (and that was in a French colonial city from the 17th century)
Native Americans did in fact have permanent cities, like notably Cahokia in what’s now Illinois. There were also some earlier colonial settlements along major waterways like the Mississippi. It’s likely there were quite a few permanent cities that were lost to time because they weren’t built with materials that would last centuries of abandonment. Notably there are thousands of effigy mounds dotted across the landscape of basically the entire Midwest, which is a very permanent sign of long term habitation or at least locations returned to frequently enough to be worth creating such a monument
The US has so many large natural waterways and so much coastal land that canals were largely unnecessary and only really dug where it would be beneficial to avoid detours and dangerous areas like rapids or shoals. Plus much of the early US economy (in the colonial era, at least) was focused on the export of exotic goods to Europe, so colonies that became major cities like NYC were often built at the mouth of a river where river barges could unload valuable goods like beaver pelts right next to boats getting ready to make their way across the Atlantic.
The Mississippi River, the second largest river in the US, is over 3,765 km long, stretching almost from Canada all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Why build a canal when nature has already done the work for you?
Oh yes that’s true isn’t it, i remember hearing it several times before. That is the best case scenario anyway, probably less of a strain on environment or water supplies - and canals here go from one city to the next, which isn’t as feasible on a continental scale.
Usually the canals use a rivers water and run alongside the river, so if a lot of them are at the point of evaporating we’re in much bigger trouble than you presuppose and the Earth will be in it’s death throes.
But also, i think more evaporation of water leads to more rain and then flooding, so it all balances out ultimately. Just not in a aay that benefits humans at all
Oh, that’s great! Because when the DATA centres grind to a halt, you can send all the contruction workers and civil engineers to finish up your canal projects!
I mean those would be great for the sail boats we need to fix the climate crisis
In the 1800s canal boats were pulled by horses and people, sailing is pretty impractical for a straight narrow waterway
Honestly it’s kind of insane to hear that america doesn’t have many canals. European countries are full of canals which we absolutely needed in the 1800s-1900s to lug everything around the country. And they’re great, really classy.
Canals were really the technology of the 18th century. In 1827 the Baltimore and Ohio was opened as the first passenger and freight railroad and railroads started popping up extrenely rapidly, initially chartered by basically every city to be built along existing roads, then later built with their own right of way.
West of Appalachia, the land is relatively flat and the existing permanent native American settlements were sparse since their population had collapsed from disease brought by colonists centuries earlier. Railroads engaged in real estate speculation platting out and selling land in cities every 10-20 miles (because the early steam locomotives needed water every 10-20 miles, so might as well have them take on passengers/freight too!) and the federal government was practically paying railroads to take land to better establish the United States’ claim to the land. This rail building boom peaked around the 1860s around which point consolidation started reducing the quantity of rails as railroads consolidated and began building more focused trunks out of their existing right of way.
In fact, because of how the land grants were written most railroads built a single track in a straight line as fast as possible between their start and end, then once they’d secured the grant for connecting the two points by the extremely aggressive deadline, only then would they start actually rebuilding the track so that it would actually be usable for real rail service.
So in short, it was a combination of lack of existing (white) cities, land grants by a new government trying to secure its land claims that it believed were it’s manifest destiny, plus innovations in steam engines to make steam locomotives truly viable right at the time when the flegling nation had its feet under it and was ready to start investing heavily into itself.
TL;DR Right place, right time, right legal environment and right technology
Also should acknowledge that the Great Lakes and Mississippi River (and major tributaries) made for efficient water shipping to a lot of the major cities of 19th century America. Cincinnati, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee all have ports.
And yeah, as you say, there just weren’t major settlements of European Americans anywhere else yet except in the plantation south. California wound up aggressively settled before transcontinental rail, but even there was largely along the coasts. Our national population remains pretty coastal alongside density in the great lakes and major tributaries of the Mississippi.
Hilariously I forgot about the natural waterways like the Mississippi despite working directly next to the Mississippi and spending my lunches at a park by it for a full year (and that was in a French colonial city from the 17th century)
Wait - did native Americans have cities of their own, within the territory of modern USA? Or do you just mean settlements in general
Native Americans did in fact have permanent cities, like notably Cahokia in what’s now Illinois. There were also some earlier colonial settlements along major waterways like the Mississippi. It’s likely there were quite a few permanent cities that were lost to time because they weren’t built with materials that would last centuries of abandonment. Notably there are thousands of effigy mounds dotted across the landscape of basically the entire Midwest, which is a very permanent sign of long term habitation or at least locations returned to frequently enough to be worth creating such a monument
The US has so many large natural waterways and so much coastal land that canals were largely unnecessary and only really dug where it would be beneficial to avoid detours and dangerous areas like rapids or shoals. Plus much of the early US economy (in the colonial era, at least) was focused on the export of exotic goods to Europe, so colonies that became major cities like NYC were often built at the mouth of a river where river barges could unload valuable goods like beaver pelts right next to boats getting ready to make their way across the Atlantic.
The Mississippi River, the second largest river in the US, is over 3,765 km long, stretching almost from Canada all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Why build a canal when nature has already done the work for you?
Oh yes that’s true isn’t it, i remember hearing it several times before. That is the best case scenario anyway, probably less of a strain on environment or water supplies - and canals here go from one city to the next, which isn’t as feasible on a continental scale.
I wonder how the local climate would change with a national canal network… All that water evaporating will change some things.
Usually the canals use a rivers water and run alongside the river, so if a lot of them are at the point of evaporating we’re in much bigger trouble than you presuppose and the Earth will be in it’s death throes.
But also, i think more evaporation of water leads to more rain and then flooding, so it all balances out ultimately. Just not in a aay that benefits humans at all