With the opening of Telford’s canal and the Erie Canal, both in the 1820’s, reasonable men also felt justified in projecting comparable works across the map of Central America. “Neptune’s Staircase,” the spectacular system of locks on the Caledonian Canal, could lift seagoing ships—could lift a thirty-two-gun frigate, for example—a hundred feet up from the level of the sea. The Erie Canal, though built for shallow-draft canal barges, was nonetheless the longest canal in the world, and its locks overcame an elevation en route of nearly seven hundred feet.
