Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  human longevity to leap: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 199–200. U.S. life expectancies for white males rose from 56 to 75 between 1920 and 1990, up from a mere 30 to 40 years before the sanitary awakening, when infant mortality was so high. Worldwide average life spans leaped from 36 years in 1900 to over 65 in 1995.

  Infant mortality plunged, falling to half of 1 percent: Cameron, 328; Economist staff, Pocket World in Figures, 2009 Edition, 83. Japan achieved the most spectacular improvement of any advanced nation, with a more than thirtyfold drop in infant mortality to the world’s lowest absolute levels.

  20-mile-long sewage storage tunnel: “My Sewer Runneth Over,” Economist, March 22, 2007.

  municipality-run water supply: Smith, Man and Water, 127. In heavily wood-constructed U.S. cities, firefighting was another important motivating factor in the early evolution of public water systems. New York City launched a board of health in 1866 directly modeled on the British prototype and driven by the same cholera fears.

  waterborne disease fell sharply in America: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 196.

  cleaner than the water in the Thames: Halliday, 107. Leftover liquids from the sludge were aerated to promote microbacterial activity that eliminated further impurities.

  Moscow River received untreated nearly all the sewage: Ponting, 356.

  Chapter Eleven: Water Frontiers and the Emergence of the United States

  two froze to death marching: Morison, 243–244.

  take control of the strategic Hudson waterway: They were to rendezvous at Albany. Both sides considered that the critical strategic spot for controlling the unbridged Hudson was West Point, south of Albany, because the river was wide enough for sailing ships to navigate up to that point, but not beyond, without the help of rowed tugs. To defend West Point, the colonials built a ring of forts buttressed by a chain they laid nearby across the Hudson.

  personal entourage some three miles long: Wood, 33.

  King George III’s bid to reassert monarchal authority: Trevelyan, 389–390.

  Only seven rivers carried a greater volume of water: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 183.

  encompassed over two-fifths of the continental United States: Barry, 21.

  unusual feature of the lower Mississippi: Ibid., 38–39.

  17 million acres of surrounding wetlands: Clarke and King, 70.

  inveigled, to obtain U.S. domain over the lands: At the crucial moment, the Americans infuriated their French ally by contravening the spirit, though not the letter, of the Franco-American alliance by secretly negotiating separately with England to preempt the possibility that France and Spain might try to secure Gibraltar in exchange for England’s right to the lands west of the Appalachians.

  in 1794 signed a controversial treaty: Despite losing the Revolutionary War, Great Britain did not give up on on its hope of winning the Mississippi for itself and British Canada until after the War of 1812. Its strategy was to try to hem in the United States to the east by creating native Indian buffer states west of the Appalachians.

  feared ulterior American and British designs: Spain had good reason to worry. Alexander Hamilton was lobbying in Washington to personally lead an invasion force to seize Louisiana and Florida from militarily vulnerable Spain by arms.

  “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans”: Thomas Jefferson to Robert Livingston, April 18, 1802, quoted in Tindall, 338.

  “What would you give for the whole”: Talleyrand, quoted in Morison, 366.

  he raised capital from private investors: Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters, 70–71; Achenbach, 19–20.

  one-third of Britain’s fleet: Heilbroner and Singer, 43. See also Pacey, 114.

  producing more total pig and bar iron than England: Heilbroner and Singer, 63–64.

  Britain vigorously enforced sanctions: Some U.S. states offered bounties to anyone who smuggled out the sanctioned technology.

  1,200 automated factories: Groner, 60.

  interchangeable parts: In 1801, to demonstrate the effectiveness of his innovation, Whitney famously produced 10 muskets that he disassembled, put into piles, and then reassembled before the eyes of President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson.

  1,200 factories with 2.25 million spindles: Morison, 483. A parallel celebrated woolen manufacturing city evolved, somewhat more slowly, on the same river in Lawrence.

  turbines capable of 190 horsepower: Smith, Man and Water, 179. This was Uriah Boyden’s turbine for the Appleton Company of Lowell, starting in 1844. Pioneering breakthroughs in turbine design had been made in the 1820s by French engineers Jean-Victor Poncelet and Benoit Fourneyron.

  Francis turbine: Ibid., 179–180, 185.

  electricity could be produced: Man’s awareness of electricity dated at least to the sixth century BC to the father of Greek philosophy, Thales of Miletus, who observed static electricity’s effects after rubbing amber on light objects.

  generating hydroelectricity from 5,500 horsepower Francis turbines: Smith, Man and Water, 185, 187.

  consuming more electricity: Heilbroner and Singer, 262.

  John Fitch: Williams, 100. See also Groner, 87.

  western river steamboats were carrying freight: Groner, 88; Heilbroner and Singer, 97.

  “when the United States shall be bound together”: Robert Fulton, “Mr. Fulton’s Communication.” Fulton made a similar point in a much-earlier letter (February 5, 1797) to President George Washington, who had just received a copy of Fulton’s Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation (1796). Advocating the benefits of canals over investments in land or river transport in general, and a business proposal for a canal between Philadelphia and Lake Erie in particular, Fulton wrote that such canals “would penetrate the Interior Country And bind the Whole In the bonds of Social Intercourse.” Fulton, “Letter from Robert Fulton to President George Washington.”

  “It is little short of madness”: Thomas Jefferson, quoted in “Claims of Joshua Forman,” in Hosack, Memoir of De Witt Clinton, Appendix Note U. Reminded years later of his comment in a letter from DeWitt Clinton, Jefferson mused in his late 1822 reply upon what marvelous qualities they were that enabled the state to execute such a great enterprise that “anticipated, by a full century, the ordinary progress of improvement.”

  New York state limestone that acted like waterproof Roman cement: Chittenango cement, as it was called, was found near Syracuse.

  foreigners held over half: Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters, 235.

  through seven miles of solid rock face: Ibid., 280–284. Lockport, as the nearby town was called, later used the canal’s surplus water as an important electricity producer. The normal locks were eight feet, four inches.

  symbolic wedding of the waters: Ibid., 319. This ritual wedding of the waters was reminiscent of how Venetians tossed rings into their city’s canal to symbolize its marriage to the sea.

  slashed freight transportation costs by 90 percent: Heilbroner and Singer, 94.

  cheapest route to Pittsburgh: Morison, 478.

  more than 3,000 miles of canals: Cameron, 230.

  economy expanded on average about 2.8 percent per year: Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters, 347.

  100 gallons of water per day: Koeppel, 287. Other main sources used in this section are Galusha and Grann.

  specially written “Croton Ode”: Koeppel, 280–283.

  “Nothing is talked of or thought of”: “Croton Water: October 12, 1842,” in Hone, 130–131.

  surge in per capita consumption: Galusha, 35. Daily consumption rose from 12 million gallons per day to 40 million in the eight years from 1842 to 1850.

  authorities used high-handed land appropriations: In the same period, Los Angeles was constructing its aqueduct (completed 1913) from ruthlessly acquired water rights to the Owens River 250 miles away.

  first deep, high-pressure subterranean conduit: Galusha, 113; Grann, 93.

  “equitable apportionment without quibbling”: Oliver Wende
ll Holmes, Supreme Court of the United States, No. 16, State of New Jersey v. State of New York and City of New York, May 4, 1931, cited in Galusha, 113.

  1.3 billion gallons to 9 million people: Galusha, 265. About 50 percent of the water came from the Delaware Aqueduct, 40 percent from the Catskills, and 10 percent from the nineteenth-century Croton system. In addition to the central water tunnels, the system included 6,200 miles of water mains that helped distribute water to end users.

  Its sewerage counterpart: Chicago’s water system also featured one of engineering history’s innovative and culturally indicative early twentieth-century marvels. In contrast to New York, Chicago drew its freshwater from the huge natural reservoir at its doorstep, Lake Michigan. In the nineteenth century, the lake also was the sewage dump of the Chicago River. Disease plagued the city until 1867, when it built a drinking-water intake tunnel two miles out into the lake. But population growth overtook it. In 1885 a heavy storm flushed the increased volume of sewage discharge out beyond the intake valves. The epidemics returned. Chicago responded with an innovative, ambitious civil-engineering project—the reversal of the flow of the Chicago River. By 1900 the 28-mile-long Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal diverted the river southward to dilute and drain into the Mississippi watershed instead of into Lake Michigan. Not everyone hailed the largest earthmoving civil-engineering project until the Panama Canal, however. The state of Missouri, complaining about increased pollution on the Mississippi at St. Louis, pursued litigation. The earthmoving technology used on the Chicago River project was soon applied in building the monumental Panama Canal.

  Sutter’s new waterwheel-powered sawmill: Bernstein, Power of Gold, 223–225.

  San Francisco swelled into a booming city: Morison, 569.

  hurdy-gurdy wheels: Smith, Man and Water, 182. Bernstein, The Power of Gold, 14.

  drew 300,000 to California by 1860: Worster, 65.

  speedier, full-rigged clippers: Morison, 583.

  the Panama railway: McCullough, 36.

  set himself up as Nicaragua’s president: Morison, 580–581.

  Chapter Twelve: The Canal to America’s Century

  John Paul Jones’s heroic sea victories: Love, 1:22–24.

  U.S. Navy earned the respect: Morison, 350–351.

  one-fifth of America’s annual government revenue: Morison, 363–364.

  give up its long-term designs on the Mississippi: Napoléon’s abdication in April 1814 allowed England to concentrate on invading the United States, which it planned to do in three places in succession—Niagara, Lake Champlain, and New Orleans—while raiding the Chesapeake. While the Chesapeake raid led to the torching of the White House and the bombardment of Baltimore that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the other battles were determinative. The dramatic naval victories were Captain Oliver Hazard Perry’s victories on Lake Erie and the U.S. victory at Niagara Falls, and, even more dramatically, Captain Thomas Macdonough’s victory at Plattsburg on Lake Champlain, which halted the British plan to take the Hudson and sever the United States, as it had tried to do in the War of Independence. The navy assisted in the defense of New Orleans, where Andrew Jackson made his fame.

  America’s special sphere of influence: In the 1830s U.S. military ships also began around-the-world explorative expeditions.

  rapid growth in demand for U.S. manufactured goods: Heilbroner and Singer, 180–181, note that U.S. exports tripled from 1870 to 1900 and that manufacturing’s share doubled from 15 percent to 32 percent. Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 245, writes that from 1860 to 1914 U.S. exports grew sevenfold while imports rose only fivefold.

  “The seaboard of a country is one of its frontiers”: Mahan, 35.

  “the Caribbean would be changed from a terminus”: Ibid., 33.

  excite America’s “aggressive impulse”: Ibid., 26.

  wrote a glowing review of it: McCullough, 252.

  “There is a homely adage”: Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in Morison, 823.

  “Remember the Maine!”: Love, 1:388–389; Morison, 800–801.

  Naval investment that totaled 6.9 percent: Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 247. In absolute dollars, naval spending rose almost sevenfold, from $22 million in 1890 to $139 million in 1914.

  Several locations were considered: De Witt Clinton, impresario of the Erie Canal, gave his blessing to a canal at Nicaragua; celebrated British engineer Thomas Telford, who had designed Scotland’s pioneering, lock-based Caledonian Canal, also studied a water passage near Darien in southern Panama.

  excited the whole French nation: De Lesseps got off to a dazzling start. When the major French and international financial institutions eschewed his company’s initial public offering, he broke new ground in French capitalism by launching the venture with funds raised from the savings of 80,000 small investors, most purchasing one to five shares each.

  20,000 workers and managers died: McCullough, 235.

  de Lesseps was convicted of fraud: De Lesseps was sentenced to five years, but due to age was excused from prison. His son, Charles, who had overseen the day-to-day operation, was convicted, too, and served jail time.

  U.S. interoceanic canal commission: McCullough, 264–265.

  Panama was indeed the superior technical route: Ibid., 326–327.

  backed by powerful Wall Street bankers: The backroom Panama lobby had been influential enough to get McKinley to appoint a second interoceanic commission with several new members after the first had ruled in favor of Nicaragua, but not enough to get it to change its recommendation.

  nation’s own one centavo stamp: McCullough, 323–324.

  Roosevelt tacitly signaled his support: Ibid., 338, 340, 382; Morison, 824–825.

  the uprising had not yet occurred: Morison, 825; McCullough, 364–367.

  “Colombia was hit by the big stick”: Morison, 826.

  “by far the most important action I took”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 512.

  “I took the Isthmus”: Roosevelt, “Charter Day Address,” Theodore Roosevelt Cyclopedia, 407.

  “Tell them that I am going to make the dirt fly!”: Roosevelt, quoted in Nation, November 23, 1905, cited in McCullough, 408. See also Morison, 826.

  33,000 to 40,000 annually: Panama Canal Authority—Canal History, “Panama Canal History—workforce,” www.pancanal.com/eng/history/index.html.

  26 million gallons of fresh lake water: Cornelia Dean, “To Save Its Canal, Panama Fights for Its Forests,” New York Times, May 24, 2005.

  By 1970, over 15,000 ships: McCullough, 611–612. In 1955 Suez had 14,555 ships. Morison, 1,093.

  shipping revolution: The revolution had transformed the world’s ports. No longer were cargo ships unloaded at docks. Instead, intermodal containers were lifted directly onto waiting trains and trucks to be transported directly to their final destinations.

  “The fifty miles between the oceans”: McCullough, 613–614.

  American naval history’s three eras: Love, 1:xiii.

  United States entered World War I: The March 1917 sinking of three U.S. merchantmen, with heavy loss of life, as well as the interception of the Zimmermann telegram suggesting a German-Mexican alliance that could threaten U.S. security, were proximate causes.

  Midway was the first sea battle: Howarth, 152–163. No U.S. aircraft carriers had been destroyed at Pearl. The intelligence breakthrough that tipped the Americans off to Japan’s secret intention to attack the Midway atolls occurred when U.S. radio signalers purposely sent out a bogus, uncoded message that the water distillation plant on American-controlled Midway had broken down, and then later intercepted Japanese radio operators relaying the message, in Japanese code, that Midway was without water.

  combined power of the world’s next nine leading military nations: Kennedy, “Eagle Has Landed,” I, III; Kennedy, “Has the U.S. Lost Its Way?” Some estimates have the United States spending as much on its armed forces as the world’s next nine biggest military powers combined.

  Chapter Thirteen:
Giant Dams, Water Abundance, and the Rise of Global Society

  Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado increased by more than 1 million: Smith, Virgin Land, 174, 184.

  depopulated by one-fourth to one-half: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 107.

  “When the arid lands”: Turner, 258. Turner also wrote, “No longer is it a question of how to avoid or cross the Great Plains and the arid desert. It is a question of how to conquer those rejected lands…It is a problem of how to bring precious rills of water to the alkali and sage brush.” Ibid., 294.

  expanded their irrigated cropland fifteenfold: Worster, 77.

  unleashed a flood that killed 2,200: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 107–108.

  1.25 million small farmers to cultivate 100 million acres: Worster, 132–139; Smith, Virgin Land, 196–198; Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 45–50. By careful management of water rights, Powell argued, small farms of only 80 acres—half the Homestead Act size of 160 acres for dry farms—could be viable.

  “In the arid region it is water”: T. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Message, December 3, 1901,” http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/sotu1.html.

  “The forest and water problems”: Ibid.

  over half of irrigation project farmers were defaulting: Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 116.

  1920s, the U.S. agricultural sector: Two of the main causes of the agricultural depression were a decline in foreign export demand from war-recovering Europe and a fall in commodity prices due to increased productivity from farm mechanization; as a result, four out of 10 of the 7 million U.S. farmers were tenants, not freeholders, in 1929.

  might well have vanished at that point: Instead, in 1923 the Reclamation Service was purged, its leader replaced, and renamed the Bureau of Reclamation.

  few dams had surpassed 150 feet: A Roman dam at Subiaco was about 130 feet, and was hardly surpassed for 1,500 years. In Persia, the Mongols of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries built the 190-foot Kurit Dam, which was the tallest on Earth for 500 years. Smith, History of Dams, 32, 235, 236; Billington et al., 50.