In 1824, construction began on New Jersey’s Morris Canal, where 23 inclined planes carried boats up and down hills; some lifts spanned up to 100 feet

Imagine floating down the river in the 1830s. When you hit a steep incline instead of a barrier, your boat climbs right up. There's no need to offload cargo or wait for a set of portages. The boat carrying passengers and freight just casually climbs the hillside on a set of rails, its journey powered by water, and glides back into the canal on the other side as though the hill was never there. That's not a scene from a steampunk novel, but rather the Morris Canal, found scattered across the hills of northern New Jersey. This forgotten engineering feat was abandoned decades after its construction, and for most residents of New Jersey, the canal might as well not exist.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Morris Canal's innovative use of a hydraulic inclined plane made it possible for boats to traverse up to a hundred feet in elevation on the other side of an artificial water barrier within just fifteen minutes. For the residents of the United States, who largely knew canals through the Erie Canal, a 363-mile waterway that relied on a system of 83 conventional locks to climb more than 500 feet of elevation, the Morris Canal is the embodiment of the forgotten wonders of American engineering.

A canal, built on the very edge of navigability


Canals built before the 1800s were largely built along the contours of the land, following the broad rivers that provided the water needed to float one's vessel. The land in New Jersey, however, did not grant such luxury to the would-be builders of the Morris Canal. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the canal's builders had to engineer a route that would carry boats from the Delaware River at Phillipsburg to the larger port cities of Newark and Jersey City. To do this, they had to make a path that would carve through the highlands of New Jersey rather than around them. Theirs was a commercial enterprise that sought to make the rich anthracite coal from Pennsylvania accessible to the iron works of New Jersey, while the railroads were still a developing technology.

Thus, the canal was built from 1824, officially opened for navigation in 1831, and traversed 102 miles of the state. What's remarkable about this distance, however, is the almost 1,674 ft of vertical ascent and descent between the Delaware River and the tidewater near Newark. Of this height difference, 760 ft was reserved for the climb up the Morris Canal to the level of Lake Hopatcong, with another 914 ft reserved for the descent on the other side. Using the traditional locks, which could only manage eight to fifteen ft of vertical difference, would have required dozens of individual lock chambers along the canal's length, a far more expensive and time-consuming undertaking than the project already was.

Twenty-three machines that made the hills disappear

The solution to the challenge of the vertical difference and the limitations of the traditional lock came in the form of an inclined plane. This innovation allowed the canal to reach far beyond the vertical capabilities of the traditional lock while keeping the construction costs down. The 23 planes were constructed alongside 23 regular locks, according to a Library of Congress Historic American Engineering Record article, which also notes the Morris Canal was the first in the country to utilize such a design. The record goes on to describe how those who saw the engineering feat of the Morris Canal were suitably impressed that a similar design was later implemented in Poland for the Elbląg Canal.

The hydraulic planes used the power of water to push their boats along the rails, lifting their vessels, along with whatever cargo they brought with them, out of the water and onto the rails. Water diverted from the canal drove a turbine at the top of each plane, which turned a drum and pulled a cable to haul the rail-mounted cradle, and the boat resting in it, up or down the incline. Once the boat floated off the cradle and back into the watered section of canal, mules waiting on the towpath took over again and continued hauling it along.

The journey from one end of the canal to the other took about five days to complete, and that figure already accounts for passing through all 23 inclined planes along the way; since each plane crossing took only around ten to twenty minutes, the full set of them added a matter of hours to the trip, not an extra day. The boat could carry up to 70 tons of cargo. Mules could traverse the canal with their boats while being harnessed to the canal's towpath.

How the wonder of engineering became forgotten

The sad part about the story of the Morris Canal is that no matter how impressive it was, the canal fell out of use as New Jersey's transportation needs moved on. The advent of the railroads, which were much faster and more reliable than the canal boats and required much less infrastructure to function, diminished the need for the construction of canals. New Jersey's legislature authorized the state to take over the canal in 1922, the state formally took possession on March 1, 1923, and the canal was shut down and officially abandoned in 1924. The remnants of the towpaths are used nowadays as the Morris Canal Greenway, and the National Register of Historic Places keeps track of the canal's status as a historic landmark. However, for the average person, the Morris Canal, with all its intricacies and wonders, might as well not have existed in the first place. After all, for any resident of New Jersey, the mention of the Morris Canal might as well be the mention of the local abandoned amusement park.