To get to the Internet, you need a steam shovel
Or, from the Erie Canal to cyberspace
The Erie Canal opened for business in 1825, cutting the time to transport people and goods from Western New York State to New York City from 2 weeks to 4 days. The canal was funded by tolls charged to the boats that used it. The income from the tolls was enough to pay off the entire construction costs within ten years.
The wildly successful canal accelerated the settling of western New York, giving rise to cities such as Buffalo, Syracuse, and Utica. The canal provided a direct waterway route between New York City and Lake Erie. It was a key factor in driving greater expansion of the population and commerce in the Midwest.
That's the good news. The bad news is that the 363-mile waterway, 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep, was built using human and draft animal labor. Mules, horses, and oxen pulled plows that loosened the earth along the intended route of the canal. Humans shoveled the earth into wheelbarrows and carts that moved the dirt off-site. In areas where the ground was too hard to plow, workmen used explosives, pickaxes, and shovels to do the job. About 1,000 of the 50,000 men who worked on the canal died due to disease and poor working conditions. It was grueling work that was not much different than the toil it took to build the roads and aqueducts of ancient Rome or the Great Wall of China.
But this was about to change.
Otis’s Crane-Evacuator
In 1839, fourteen years after the canal's completion, William Smith Otis, cousin to Elisha Graves Otis of Otis Elevator fame, received a patent for his design of the steam shovel, formally called the Crane-Excavator for Excavating and Removing Earth. The machine could move approximately 380 cubic meters of earth per day, which was far more dirt than a man with a shovel could move.
To say that the steam shovel was a game-changer in civil construction is an understatement.
The first use of Otis’s steam shovel was building the Western Railroad in Massachusetts that, by 1841, connected Springfield, Massachusetts, to Albany, New York. Once reaching Albany, passengers and goods could proceed onto the Great Lakes using the Erie Canal. By 1842, the New York Central Railroad system, privately owned by industrialist Erastus Corning, later to become Mayor of Albany, NY, provided faster service between Albany and Buffalo, NY, making the railroad the preferred method of passenger travel. However, the publicly owned Erie Canal still outpaced the railroad when it came to moving freight.
Excavators, the generic name for machinery such as steam shovels, became a critical technology in civil and commercial construction. The first skyscraper in the US, the Home Insurance Building in Chicago, built in 1885, relied upon a mechanical excavator to dig the foundation hole. Construction of the Panama Canal, which started in 1881 but was not completed until 1914, used excavators extensively. The 60-story Woolworth Building in New York City, built in 1910, required digging a hole 100 feet deep to house the caissons that supported the structure. This hole, and others like it, could not have been dug in a timely manner without the aid of a steam shovel. Later, in 1920, a Marion Steam Shovel, a mechanical descendant of the type used to build the Panama Canal, was used to build the Holland Tunnel that connected New York City to New Jersey.
Warren A. Bechtel, a cattle farmer turned construction entrepreneur, founded the present-day Bechtel Corporation and invested in the first major capital expenditure: a Marion Model 20 excavator.
Bechtel used the machine to help build the Western Pacific Railroad. He painted "W.A. Bechtel Co." on the side of this steam shovel as an advertisement, letting those around the construction site know about a company that would grow to become one of the biggest international construction conglomerates on the planet, building everything from atomic reactors to subway systems.
A Marion Steam Shovel cost between $10,000 and $20,000 in 1900, which is the equivalent of $375,586.90 to $751,173.81 today. The CAT 349F Excavator that dug the foundation of a residential building going up near me in Los Angeles goes for $189,500 used.
Excavator technology evolved to include not only digging the ditches necessary for canals, railroads, and multi-story buildings but also, starting in the 1960s, tearing up city streets to lay the wiring needed to support the emerging cable TV industry. Excavators were also used to install the underground fiber optic cables that increased the speed at which data travels, at a rate far exceeding that of coaxial cable transmission.
Which brings us to the Internet.
The luxurious abstraction
Today, every piece of information that travels over the Internet runs through a coaxial or fiber optic cable at some point. These cables are connected to a data center somewhere on the planet. Many, if not most, of these cables, were the result of using an excavator to lay the cable or build the data center that processes the information they deliver. When you think about it, there is a significant relationship between the machine invented by William Smith Otis back in 1839 and the information-soaked world we live in today. If there were no physical excavators used somewhere, at some time, there would be no Internet as we know it today. Nor would there be the on-demand electricity or petroleum that powers modern life. To build, you have to dig.
As our daily lives become more embedded in the digital world, the hardware that makes cyberspace possible – from power plants to data centers – recedes into the background of our awareness, due in no small part because, unless disaster strikes, it all simply works.
Today, hardware has become a luxurious abstraction. Yet, despite all the hoopla about the importance of data in our modern information age, hardware is the thing that has pushed civilization forward, from the printing press in the 15th century to the GPU processors that are driving artificial intelligence technology today. Software is just the story we apply to some hardware. After all, if there were no bats and balls, there would be no baseball. And, as history has demonstrated, if not for the cables laid with the assistance of the descendants of a steam shovel, there would be no Internet. In other words, to get to the Internet, you need a steam shovel.