The First Canals

Canal construction is an interesting branch of both engineering and project management:

• From the engineering perspective, planning a route that works (water flows in the right direction at the right speed), retaining the water within the canal, and overcoming natural obstacles indicates the need for a degree of design sophistication.
• From a management perspective organising the 100s, or 1000s of people needed for the work and ensuring the work is done correctly is a significant exercise in organisation, logistics and control. As with most early projects, there’s scant information on how this was accomplished, but the results are self-evident.

Canals have been excavated and used for drainage and irrigation for thousands of years. But for most of this time, the use of canals was restricted to relatively flat areas with good water supply. It was the advances in technology in the Middle Ages that allowed canals and navigations to overcome the problem of hills, resulting in canals becoming a major form of transport. The First Canals is the final paper in a series looking at early transport projects.

The full set of papers in this series are:

The First Canals. This article looks at the early development of canals across the world from 4000 BCE through to the European medieval canal revival between the 12th and 16th centuries.

Early Canals, The Evolution of the Technology. Canals have been excavated for drainage and irrigation for thousands of years and once built, the larger of the canals were undoubtedly used for trade. However, for several thousand years canals were restricted to areas where the land was relatively flat. This article looks at the development of the technologies that allowed canals to traverse hills and valleys.

Early Canal Projects in the UK. Until the introduction of efficient steam-powered railways, canals were the driving force behind the industrial revolution in Britain.  This paper looks at the development of canals in the UK from Roman times through to the start of the ‘canal mania’ in the 1790s, and seek to identify where possible the contractual and management processes used in their construction.

Cost Overruns on Early Canal & Railway Projects. The difficulties in determining a realistic cost for a new class of project are understandable. But, transport projects in the United Kingdom (UK) predate the industrial revolution by several centuries. This suggests that in addition to the lack of empirical cost information, the problem with the cost estimates identified in The Origins and History of Cost Engineering may have been caused by various combinations of poor governance, questionable ethics, and optimism bias. The same set of issues that continue to plague many modern mega-projects.

A similar set of papers look at the development of the railways (see more).

See more on early transport projects at: https://mosaicprojects.com.au/PMKI-ZSY-005.php#Process2