The British canal network

Assembled from 23 blocks · 1 evidence · 26 related

1. Story
2. The transport system that made bulk coal cheap inland, and the one that is routinely under-credited because the railways arrived so soon after it. The physics is the whole argument: a horse that can pull a ton or two in a cart on a made road can pull thirty or more in a boat on still water, so cutting a canal changed the delivered price of coal, lime, stone, clay and grain by a multiple rather than a margin. Britain built the network between the 1760s and about 1830, in a private, piecemeal, Act-by-Act way that produced no common standard — narrow and broad locks, different gauges of boat, competing companies refusing through traffic — which is exactly the inheritance that would later make the network hard to defend against a competitor with a single technology. Canals also created the first industrial engineering profession, the first large civil-engineering labour force, and the first experience for British investors of putting capital into a fixed asset that returns nothing for years and then a great deal.
3. Knowledge
4. Coal
5. The British canal network
6. Connections
7. Coal
8. The Bridgewater Canal
9. The British railway network
10. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
11. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
12. The organic economy and its ceiling
13. The Newcomen atmospheric engine
14. Coke smelting of iron
15. The British canal network
16. Industrial child labour
17. The first commercially successful steam engine begins pumping
18. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
19. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens
20. Women and young boys are barred from working underground
21. The main-line steam locomotive
22. Evidence
23. Supports the high-wage-economy explanation of why mechanisation was profitable in Britain first, the sequence of textile bottlenecks, and the dating and interpretation of the Engels pause. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — outbound HTTP to research domains is blocked by the environment's egress proxy and the session's WebSearch budget was exhausted before this pack began. The book is a real and widely held title, but nothing attributed to it here was read from it.