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Last Notes

2024-09-22 18:52:37 UTC

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the first canals in britain were before we had hydrocarbon propulsion. Before that people used rivers as ways to get into landmasses because resources are generally more plentiful inland, but that's constrained by how far inland the river is navigable. Part of the reason london is the capital is because of how far up the thames it is, so too the success of manchester leeds birmingham edinburgh glasgow cardiff. You can trade with people from any coast that can reach you, sails never get tired and cost little resources (your crew can take breaks while in transit). Crucially, because water has minimal friction you get more propulsion efficiency than wheeled vehicles, so a little push (from the wind, an oar, or from towing) sends you much further on water than land... so it makes sense to do that inland but rowing is hard, low bridges snag sails and it's hard to get enough wind on a narrow canal and hey what if we attached a horse to this boat to pull it instead? Horse big pull hard not get tired much. and then as sidereal pointed out... what if we dug cuts between the rivers so you can get directly between resource/trade centres on different rivers instead of having to circle the island? The first ones were near manchester, I forget exactly why but probably for ironworks, where a little cut made it MUCH easier and more profitable to move big heavy things a short distance, but then you have projects like the grand junction/grand union that joined birmingham to the thames at increasingly direct points (it took a long time for engineering to be good enough to get it as direct as it is now, the original path led down through oxford but then they figured out eg how to build huge iron aqueducts to carry heavy laden boats over the more hilly terrain near what's now milton keynes). of course the big problem they were having is that gorjas are bad at horses and nomadism, enter bargees (pejoratively "river g*psies") who have pretty much always been at the heart of the british canals (and possibly also the Fen People who were displaced with the draining of the fens but who used to live on and navigate the fens by boat in what's now east anglia) who took care of a lot of the actual process of canal boat hauling even once canals resulted in industrialisation and coal/petrol engines. there's still weird horse propulsion artifacts on the canals here. My boat is 6ft wide and the locks are minimum 69(nice)ft long because a fully laden 6x69ft boat is the largest boat a horse can pull and keeping the width narrow saves on the amount of canal you have to cut. We bred horses that can pull more (stock/shire horse?). A disordered list of british inland waterways facts.