The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

More than 1 billion people do not have access to clean drinking water.  Australia has suffered a decade-long, continent-wide drought.  Even seemingly water rich places, like Atlanta, Georgia, can’t get enough water.  Many are talking of a global water crisis.  Except, as Charles Fishman aptly states it in The Big Thirst, “There is no global water crisis, there are a thousand water crises, each distinct.”

I think the story of Atlanta and Lake Lanier, as told recounted by Fishman, is especially instructive.  Lake Lanier on the Chatahoochee River is the source of 75 percent of the water used by Atlanta, 5 million gallons a day.  A drought in 2007-2008 brought the level of the lake dangerously low, prompting downstream states to sue over the amount of water Atlanta was taking.  The federal court declared that Atlanta had been illegally receiving water from the lake and had to find another source.  Atlanta has a lot of resources, barely tapped conservation efforts, reuse, and alternative supplies, but with a lack of political will, leadership, and vision, it leaders threw up their hands in impotent defiance of the court and whined they must have Lake Lanier water.  When the lake was built, Atlanta passed on paying for a piece of it thinking it would never be needed, and now they think they can’t live without it.

Part of the point Fishman makes it that water crises are more often than not political crises.  There is a lack of political will and sense of necessity, even though the problems can be plain and the solutions within reach.  The Big Thirst includes examples from around the world (the United States, India, and especially Australia) where people are facing water problems.  Happily, many of them have taken a more realistic and reasonable approach than Atlanta.

Fishman is going for something deeper, though.  Our political and economic stumbling in the area of water management stems for our cultural relationship with water.  It is obviously necessary for life.  We also consider it beautiful, it is part of our landscape, and in some places it has important religious significance.  Even so, we have difficulty understanding the value of water, comparing one use to another, assigning responsibility for its distribution and quality, acknowledging the infrastructure needed to have water when and where it is needed.  It the West, where for the last century we have enjoyed incredible access to abundant water, we hardly ever think about water unless we have some professional connection to it.

We can’t continue to be mindless of water.  The systems of water abundance we built in the last century aren’t sustainable without major ongoing investment.  In light of climate change, they may be altogether unsustainable.  Even without climate change, much of our water policy dates to a time of unusual water abundance.

Fishman encourages water mindfulness.  We need to reconnect to water.  In part, this reconnecting means understanding what it means to have water in our homes and in our streams.  It is also connecting to how critical water is to food, energy, commerce, health, and almost every aspect of life.  Our decisions about water need to be rooted in reality.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Elixir by Brian Fagan

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

I’ve also written about Atlanta and Lake Lanier at Infrastructure Watch:

Courts Could Affect Uses of Lake Lanier

Georgia Appeals Lake Lanier Decision

Georgia Loses Lake Lanier Battle

Judge Winnows Down Central Question in Lake Lanier Case

Fishman, Charles.  The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water.  New York: Free Press, 2011.

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Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Barnett, Cynthia.  Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2011.

America has a problem.  We’re a thirsty nation.  Actually, it’s more like we’re addicted to water, abusing it.  We subsidize its use on a grand scale in industries that use it inefficiently, even wastefully, and in locations where it is naturally hard to come by.  We allocate it based on facts that are no longer true, and were doubtful or changing even as we made our policies.  In our sometimes blind enthusiasm, we overreached and now we are mire in unintended consequences.  To top it off, we rarely change our ways until a crisis is already upon us.

Cynthia Barnett describes these problems in her book Blue Revolution.  She also looks around the country and the world for solutions.  Her essential solution is a water ethic.

At one time, people were intimately connected to water.  Farmers watched for rain.  Children fetched pails of it from the stream or worked a pump handle.  Communities were built around watermills where people brought in grain or carried away flour. 

Of course, water is no less essential to modern life.  We depend on it for drinking, cleaning, sanitation and green lawns.  It is essential or the energy that light and cools our homes and powers our computers.  The abundance of food in our groceries stores is partly a testament to the abundance of water used to irrigate fields that don’t get enough rainfall for the crops we grow.

What is different is the way we view water.  For most of us it is cheap, nearly free in comparison to other utilities and services we use in our homes.   We can get as much as we want whenever we want by opening a valve.  Water is something we hold back with dams, divert with canals, and pump through pipes.  It bends to our will—except when it doesn’t.

Our water policies and technologies have often had unintended consequences.  We turned deserts into productive fields, but much of the water is lost to evaporation.  We moved water great distances to supply cities, but it encouraged profligacy that threatens those distant, expensive supplies.  Dams that were engineering marvels may soon stand at the ends of empty lakes.

Sure, changes in technology and policy are needed to stop, and hopefully reverse, these problems.  Barnett doesn’t stop there.  Our approach to water arises from the way we value it, think about it, and relate to it.  Our present state came from valuing water little, thinking about it little unless it was our job, and relating to it little except for those who intensely depended on a highly subsidized supply.

The water ethic Barnett proposes would value water, both in the sense of personal appreciation and economic cost and opportunity.  It would seek the best use of the water we have, especially what is locally available.  It creates opportunities for people to contact water and understand where it comes from and how it is affected by use.  It is something that spreads organically from person to person, neighborhood to neighborhood, business to business, and city to city.

It is an ethic that is within reach, too.  Barnett describes how places that have long had extreme relationships with extreme water environments, like the Netherlands, Singapore and Australia, have changed their relationship with water.  These are not just policy shifts, they are cultural changes.  Even in the United States, there are places where a new water ethic is taking hold and people understand how important and fragile water is.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Elixir by Brian Fagan

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

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Water by Marq de Villiers

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about civil infrastructure, the environment and other matters of technology.

de Villiers, Marq. Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. 1999. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Marq de Villiers serves as a guide on a tour of water problems, conflicts and occasional solutions around the world. Though he is not an alarmist, his book seems to indicate that the problems have so far greatly outpaced the solutions.

There are several aspects of water problems and conflicts that de Villiers considers: natural, technological and political. In each area, he provides specific examples of water in or nearing crisis.

The natural distribution of fresh water in the world is uneven. That may be the fundamental aspect of water problems: even where it’s seemingly abundant, it doesn’t occur where and when people want it to make use of it. In parts of the world, this is a dire situation.

The technological solutions people have applied to correct this distribution have resulted in some amazing works of engineering since early in human history. It has also had many unintended consequences. Irrigation that made marginal land productive has made some of that land useless, even desert, through increased salinity. Dams, drainage and transfers have created ill effects in regional climates. Water mining, pollution and other human activity are also threatening the quantity and quality of water even in developed nations. There is hope in the technological area in that much of this harm may be reversible and the human ingenuity that created these technologies might also create sustainable solutions to our water needs.

Political considerations are very important to water issues, particularly when considering the possibility of conflict, even outright war, because of water scarcity. The Middle East and North Africa come to mind as hot spots where water is a critical issue; de Villiers enlightens both the current situation and history of these regions. Though mistrust runs deep between the nations in this region, even seemingly friendly ones, there is hope for solutions to their water problems. North America has its water problems to, and the problems on the Colorado River are surprisingly similar to those on the Nile. The differences in water availability in the United States, Mexico and Canada also makes for interesting relations between these close and usually friendly neighbors. China may present the largest political problems related to water and it’s food production and population that threatens to push it into crisis.

The book closes with four general strategies for dealing with the world’s water problems. First, get more water by either bringing it in from elsewhere or making it (i.e. desalination). Next is conservation and pricing to reduce demand and encourage using water in the most valuable ways. Third is population control; de Villiers seems relieved that world populations have been growing more slowly without major intervention. Finally, you can steal water from others. Since 40 percent people worldwide live in watersheds that cross national boundaries, it becomes a complicated matter of who has what right to the water and this is a potential source of water conflict, though not insurmountable.

Order this book here.

P.S., here is a little something extra for those of you interested in China, especially the probably fictional Emperor Yu the Engineer.

Life's Matrix by Philip Ball

Water is a chemical essential to human life and culture, and it is possibly the oddest common substance. Physicist and science writer Philip Ball describes the nature of water, both scientific and cultural, in Life’s Matrix (originally published in the United Kingdom as H2O: A Biography of Water).

Ball begins at the very beginning—the big bang. Hydrogen, the simplest atom and most abundant element in the universe, appeared early in the universe. Oxygen is forged in stars and has become the third most abundant element. There is water in space. Ice seems to be common in the far reaches of the solar system. It has been found on the moon and stars and a few molecules appear in the cooler spots on the sun.

We have found no worlds yet that have as much liquid water as ours. The water cycle has shaped Earth. Our weather comes largely from the interplay of water and energy. Even the water locked up in the ice of our poles and glaciers shape the land, influence the weather, and affect the movement of heat, water and salt in ocean currents.

Ball tackles all phases of water, including a few exotic forms that only occur in extreme conditions created in laboratories. That water exists as vapor, liquid, and solid within the fairly narrow range of temperatures that are common on Earth make it unique. This is just one of its unusual properties. The structure of the water molecule is described in the book along with the physics that explain its behavior, to the degree that such things are even known.

Our understanding of water as a compound of hydrogen and oxygen is a relatively recent thing. For a long time, water was thought of as an irreducible element. This makes sense on some level. Water is essential to life as we know it. It is irreplaceable. From the perspective of living creatures, and in almost every culture, water is a fundamental material.

In the final chapter, Ball moves away from the hard sciences to culture, economics and policy. Water of the quality needed for drinking, and even the lesser quality needed for other things, is scarce and unevenly distributed on the planet. To take a serious look at water is to be drawn to issues of health and wealth. Growing population and changing climate will put increased demands on the available fresh water, and we need to consider how we are going to manage it. Ball takes a look at some of the hot spots.

The book is intended for a broad audience. I think it is probably more accessible to someone with some education in the sciences, especially chemistry or physics, but someone had a high-school level class in these subjects they should be able to follow along.

In addition, the book is 16 years old, so necessarily out of date in some respects. I suspect that much of the physics, chemistry and biology described is still sound. Similarly, there is unlikely to be discoveries in history that would seriously outdate the book, even in the interesting section on dead ends and “pathology” in water science.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Big Necessity by Rose George

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Blue Revolution by Cynthia Barnett

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Elixir by Brian Fagan

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

Ball, Philip. Life’s Matrix: A Biography of Water. 1999. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Elixir by Brian Fagan (245)

Fagan, Brian.  Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind.  New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Unlike other authors of books about water, Brian Fagan in Elixir gives much more attention to the culture, as one might expect of an anthropologist.  In most of the cultures he discusses in his book, water is closely associated with ritual, often considered sacred.  Fagan’s interested in the human relationship with water goes beyond ritual and religion and includes politics and technology.

Fagan describes three phases of the human relationship with water.  In the first stage, water is an unreliable, often scarce, and highly valued resource.  This value is reflected in the careful management, ritual, and even sacred reverence of water.  In the second stage, from the Industrial Revolution to our own day, water is a commodity, little considered and treated as if it were superabundant.  In the emerging stage, water is a finite resource we need to conserve.

*

Most of the book is covers the first stage.  He discusses the historic relationship and management of water from around the world.  Some of these were famous for their extensive management of water, sometimes with equally extensive infrastructure, such as the Egyptian and Romans.  Others are lesser known, like the highly ritualistic and religious Balinese system that is still operating.  Some we know relatively little about in spite of their antiquity, such as the pre-Columbian Mayan and Andean cultures.

Because of this approach, Elixir is also a work of cultural and physical geography.  The reader can, in imagination, travel the world and see how civilizations are shaped by the sometimes harsh realities of the environment and how humans shape their environment.

The commodity stage is covered much more briefly.  To be fair, it is only a few hundred years old.  It is our age, when technology has allowed us to reach ever more difficult and remote sources of water.  Even in the industrial era, not everyplace has had truly abundant water.  Fagan points to arid and semiarid regions of Africa and Asia as locations poised on exhausting their water.  This is an issue in the United States, too, especially in the southwest, where politics and unrealistic optimism have trumped wisdom and reality for more than a century.

For the stage we are entering, the issue becomes conservation and sustainability.  Acknowledging that we are using our fresh water supply faster than it is regenerated, especially in some parts of the world, and making changes to our practices an technology, will require another cultural shift if we are to have sustainable water supplies.

When it comes to sustainability, I was surprised how much faith Fagan expressed in technology and human ingenuity.  Even so, he implies that we should look to our past.

In the early stage of our relationship with water, we valued it, even reverenced it, immensely.  It is time to place a high value on water again, even without religious aspects.  Also, in the past water management was a very local affair, and surprisingly democratic.  Though few of the governments Fagan discusses were democracies, they had mechanisms for hearing and considering the needs of everyone in the community.  Even in empires with powerful central governments that built and managed extensive waterworks, community-based water management operated alongside, and often it was the food surpluses of these local, village-managed operations that made empire-building possible.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Water by Marq de Villiers

Water by Steven Solomon

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

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Water by Steven Solomon (204)

Solomon, Steven. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. New York: Harper, 2010.
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Steven Solomon’s Water is an epic history of civilization from its roots to modern time. Solomon’s thesis is that inventively mastered their water resources have risen and those that have outpaced their available water or innovations have declined. There are lessons in this history for us who live in an age where some nations already experience serious water scarcity and even relatively water rich nations are squandering their natural fortune.

The book generally follows sequences of technology, geography, and politics. In technology, it moves through waters many uses from irrigation to transportation, energy and sanitation. The geographic motion of the book is from east to west, starting the early innovations of Asia, sliding to Europe, then jumping the Atlantic to North America. The political trend begins with ancient, totalitarian hydraulic societies and moves on to gradually democratizing nations and the splintered, competitive, yet surprisingly workable and cooperative, market-oriented Western republics.

In the final chapters of the book, Solomon deals with the threat of water scarcity. Some parts of the world, particularly in Africa and Asia, are already facing water shortages. Those fortunate enough to have other sources of wealth, like oil, are importing virtual water, especially in the form of food. Control of water resources is becoming a matter of international diplomacy, national security, and possible war in much the way oil was in the last century. This is especially true in the arid, populous Middle East and South Asia. Many of the water poor live in lands that are highly populated, arid, unstable politically, and have long-standing enmities with neighboring countries.

Relatively water rich nations, like the United States, have problems, too. Much of it stems from using water inefficiently and for less productive activities. This is especially problematic in the dry western states, where long-standing, vested interests have sought to protect their subsidized access to water while others, sometimes more efficient and high value users, pay great premiums for the limited remaining available water. This isn’t strictly a western problem; eastern cities are also droughts, growing populations, industrialization, intensive agriculture, and aging infrastructure that strain their water resources.

While the problems are serious, Solomon seems hopeful that, as in the past, we may be able to develop technological, organizational, and political solutions to these issues. He objectively discusses national and international efforts to solve the looming water crisis. He seems to have more faith that workable solutions well arise in the more water rich, democratic West, where a combination of government regulation, free markets, substantial local control, and varied regional solutions are giving rise to innovation.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury
Exodus
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
The Great Stink by Clare Clark
Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark
Water by Marq de Villiers
When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about infrastructure and the environment.

Pearce, Fred. When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century. Boston: Beacon, 2006.

Mankind’s attempts to harness rivers have had unintended consequences. Schemes to make land more productive have created deserts. Crops on drained land have produced less food and value than the swamps they displaced. Rivers hemmed in to prevent flooding have flooded more frequently and worse than before.

Pearce isn’t against technology. He sometimes expresses admiration for the dams, canals and other engineering feats about which he writes. However, he’s not impressed when this technology deprives people of the water and wealth it was intended to provide.

Water and wealth is a connection Pearce often makes. For all the lip service paid to the social benefits of grand water schemes, the water tends to go where the money is.

Overall, the world has become more water poor. The poorest have generally lost the most.

In spite of the history, Peace sees hope in the potential of technology that works with the water cycle instead of against it. It is already happening on a small scale where ancient where people are reviving ancient methods of capturing rainwater. Indian farmers are adapting dessert containers for use as a cheap, and more efficient, drip irrigation pipe. On the large scale, river engineers are cutting levees, restoring wetlands and allow river to return to curvy courses. In agriculture, the biggest user and waster of water in much of the world, there is a move to crops that are more appropriate to the locally available rainfall and less dependent on irrigation. Even in Los Angeles, a city known for the lengths it has gone to in order to quench its great thirst in a dry land, activist are seeking to create a more porous city that captures and uses the water that falls there naturally.

To illustrate his points, Pearce travels the world to see the disastrous results of bad water management, the extreme example being the disappearing Aral Sea. He also points out what works, like a restored qanat in Iraq.

You can order this book here.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in Water by Marq de Villiers.

The Johnstown Flood by David McCollough

On Memorial Day 1889, a storm struck western Pennsylvania. Floods were common enough in the mountain community of Johnstown and the surrounding villages. This one was extraordinary. Upstream the valley sat a structure that was poised to make the flood much worse, the dam at South Fork Reservoir.

David McCullough describes the flood and the devastating dam break in The Johnstown Flood. It was the worst disaster in the United States up until its time with more than 2,000 people killed by the huge wave that swept down the valley, with more killed by fire and disease in the aftermath.

The dam had originally built by the State of Pennsylvania too supply water for a canal. Within a few years the canal was closed because the railroad provided freight and passenger transportation through the area. The dam changed hands several times after that. I fell into disrepair. Somewhere along the line someone salvaged the pipes that allowed one to control the water level behind the dam; though in it partly collapsed state it no longer held much water.

This changed when developers bought the dam and surrounding property to build a resort for the wealthy industrialists of Pittsburgh. The dam was rebuilt with indifference to materials and methods. The drain pipes were never restored. The spillway was obstructed by a grate (to keep the fish in the stocked lake from disappearing downstream) and low bridge. By the time of the flood, perhaps since it was repaired, there was a slight dip in the center of the dam, creating an unknown, unprotected second spillway. This dip was hard to see with the eye on the large dam, but a survey to measure the elevations would have turned it up.

The dam filled and the lake became quite large. The vacationers sailed ships on it. The water level was commonly within a couple of feet of the spillway, and there was no practical way for the dam operators to control that water level. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Many of the people of Johnstown expressed concern that the dam was a danger to the city. However, the prevailing view was that the wealthy elite of Pittsburgh would have it built right; very few endeavored to assess it for themselves. Similarly, the members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, including such prominences as Andrew Carnegie, had faith that the developer did the work right, and they put no effort into checking it out.

When the floodwaters overtopped the earthen dam, it collapsed quickly, unleashing a deadly wave of possibly 20 million tons of water. It is hard to imagine the devastation caused by the wave, even 15 miles downstream in Johnstown. McCullough describes it, sometimes in great detail, based on reports from the time. The rolling wall of water seems awesome at first, but as it begins to destroy homes and injure and kill people, it becomes sickening as well.

The people of that valley recovered with admirable speed and took over the cleanup and restoration of their town the very next day. Soon aid came from across the country, and especially from elsewhere in Pennsylvania, including the National Guard and a still young American Red Cross.

As the initial terror of the event subsided, attention turned to the club at South Fork. Though the press, including the Engineering News, laid blame on the club and the shoddy, unprofessional work done to rebuild the dam, the courts never held the club or its members accountable. The courts, mostly in Pittsburgh where club members held sway, accepted that it was an act of God. It’s clear to more objective observers that a properly built dam would probably have survived the flood, or at the very least would have had a much less damaging failure. Though McCullough suggests the residents of Johnstown and the members of the club were too trusting, he does not shy away from the negligence of those who rebuilt the dam in a way that would almost surely lead to the disaster that came.

David McCollough also wrote

The Great Bridge

The Wright Brothers

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Genesis

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

On the Mainlines by William B. Claycomb

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

McCullough, David. The Johnstown Flood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Fowler, Christopher. The Water Room. 2004. New York: Bantam, 2008.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit handles cases that, because of political sensitivity, unlikelihood of success or just weirdness, have little appeal to the Metropolitan Police. The Water Room is part of a series of books about the PCU, so there is a lot of water under the bridge by the time it starts.

It is the water under London that plays a key role in the detective story, which is what attracted me to the book. A series of murders on a seemingly ordinary street attracts the attention of the PCU, which discovers a connection to the flooding Fleet, one of London’s several long buried rivers, the myths connected to it and the art it has inspired.

Toward the end of the book, the detectives that lead the PCU discuss how they became interested in crime. One of them mentions reading Agatha Christie and how complicated her stories were, with solutions depending on particulars, and occurring in a world of old-fashioned high society. The character thought real crimes were mostly by more common people for more common reasons and would be more solvable.

This reference to Christie did not make me think of the contrast between her books and Fowler’s, but the many points of comparison. The Water Room is very much in the mode of a cozy English mystery, except the setting is mostly lower middle-class and Hercule Poirot would never resort to entering a sewer.

I enjoy these kinds of stories, though, and Fowler does a good job of telling an interesting and original tale, even if it does fit a type. There are enough clues throughout the book, one very telling, for a reader guess the culprit and a multitude of red herring. There are secrets held to the last chapters, particularly related to motivation, but this is also typical of this kind of story and handled well by Fowler.

Though part of a series, one needn’t read the previous books to enjoy this one. There are enough allusions to the earlier books to explain the relationships between the recurring characters, but they don’t get in the way of the present adventure.

Order this book here.

If your interested in this book, you might also be interested in The Great Stink by Clare Clark.

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Harris, Robert. Canals and Their Architecture. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969.

Water has always been an important part of human life. Drinking water is a necessity, but that is only the beginning of our uses of it. Water is also an element in agriculture, industry, transportation and commerce.

It is water’s role in transportation and commerce that Robert Harris focused on in Canals and Their Architecture. At times, artificial or modified waterways have been major means of transporting products in bulk.

Harris mentions canals from continental Europe and North America, especially the United States, but his book is mainly about the canals of Britain. This is an appropriate focus because the canal boom in Britain both fed and was fed by the Industrial Revolution that started there.

The boom began with the Duke of Bridgewater’s famous canal, construction of which began in 1760. The duke owned coalmines and wanted a cheaper way get coal to the mills and factories in Manchester. The canal was by no means an easy or inexpensive project, but it was greatly successful and the wealth put into it was regains many times over.

Bridgewater recognized the talents of millwright James Brindley, who went on to become the most prominent canal engineer of his day. Harris discussed the works of several British engineers who were successors of Brindley including Thomas Telford, John Rennie, and William Edwards.

As the title of the book suggests, it is organized mainly by the types of structures found on canals. In addition to the canal cut, Harris wrote about bridges and auqueducts, locks , tunnels, boats, buildings and unique ways of handling elevation changes on a canal route. Early canals followed the contours of the land to avoid the use of expensive and complex equipment and, where needed, were crossed by utilitarian bridges of wood or brick. As canals became straighter, and more lucrative, they added locks and other mechanisms for raising and lowering boats. The materials became more varied and complex, including stone and iron. Spectacular aqueducts carried canals over low lands. Tunnels were well-made features of canals early on because the technology for building them was readily adapted from mining.

The older canals are impressive in that so much was done with manpower and simple tools. As canals aided other industries, the improvements those industries spawned, especially in iron construction and railroads, returned to canals and the way they were made. The construction of modern canals is the work of enormous equipment.



Canals and Their Architecture includes many illustrations and photographs. These are very helpful for the laymen to see the types of structures discussed in the text, though even an engineer familiar with the terms will likely appreciate the images.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury
Water by Marq de Villiers

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