For thousands of years, people have transported heavy goods along waterways. The first canals were probably built to join existing navigable rivers. In the fifteenth century, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan had a sophisticated series of canals, providing transport for goods and people. Venice, in Italy, although a smaller city, was also built on a system of canals rather than roads. However, the golden age of canal-building probably came with the Industrial Revolution, when there was an enormous need for cheap and easy ways to carry the goods made in factories to the nearest port. Canal boats, powered at first by a horse on the towpath and later by coal-fired steam engines, could carry enormous loads much more conveniently than horse drawn carts on bumpy roads.
The British canal system of water transport played a vital role in the United Kingdom’s Industrial Revolution at a time when roads were only just emerging from the medieval mud and long trains of packhorses were the only means of “mass” transit by road of raw materials and finished products. The UK was the first country to develop a nationwide canal network.
The canal system dates to Roman Britain, but was largely used for irrigation or to Link Rivers. The navigable water network in the British Isles grew as the demand for industrial transport increased. It grew rapidly at first, and became an almost completely connected network covering the south, Midlands, and parts of the North of England and Wales. There were canals in Scotland, but they were not connected to the English canals or, generally, to each other (the main exception being the Monkland Canal, the Union Canal and the Forth and Clyde Canal which connected the River Clyde and Glasgow to the River Forth and Edinburgh). As building techniques improved, older canals were improved by straightening, Embankments, cuttings, tunnels, aqueducts, inclined planes, and boat lifts, which together snipped many miles and locks, and therefore hours and cost, from journeys. However, there was often fierce opposition to the building.
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