Morris Canal climbed 1,674 feet on water-powered inclined planes, not 300 locks

In the 1820s New York's wood supply was exhausted and anthracite coal lay behind New Jersey's steep highlands. A canal from the Delaware to the Hudson would have to climb 760 feet to its Hopatcong feeder, then drop 914 feet to tidewater — a gradient that would need a six-foot lock every couple of miles, roughly 300 locks in all, each one gulping water the summit ridge could not spare. The Morris Canal & Banking Company, chartered in 1824, took the problem anyway.

Columbia professor James Renwick designed the answer: the first canal inclined planes in the United States. Instead of staircases of locks, boats floated into open cradle cars on rail slopes, and water wheels wound the chains that hauled them uphill — Renwick's original sketch had counterweighted cradles balancing each other, needing no power at all. Engineer David Bates Douglass standardized and completed the planes; the canal opened to Newark in 1831 and reached Jersey City by 1836.

The compromise worked. Mule-drawn boats carrying up to 70 tons crossed the state in about five days; between 1848 and 1860 water turbines replaced the old wheels, and busy planes worked from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. In 1866 the canal moved 889,220 tons of freight — nearly 13,000 boatloads.

Boats ride a water-powered rollercoaster over the hills

One plane lifted up to 100 feet, doing the work of a staircase of locks.

The cradle carries its own water, so planes sip the summit supply that locks would gulp.

Counterweighted double-track cradles let a descending boat help pull the next one up.

Water wheels and later turbines turned the canal's own flow into lifting power.

When terrain makes the standard mechanism unaffordable, replace the mechanism, not the route. Build machines that recycle what is scarce — water and time — instead of consuming it every cycle.

Traffic peaked at 889,220 tons in 1866, but railroads could cross the same hills without cradles and took the coal trade. The canal slid into decline and was abandoned in 1924. Its planes were the first in the United States and remained among the boldest answer ever built to a canal's oldest problem: height without water.