Description:

Canal Erie


Steamboat and Erie Canal Archive


The archive consists of an ALS, a telegram, an invitation, and a first edition booklet called “The Edward Backus Method for Propelling Canal Boats by Steam”, Curtis, Morey & Co., Rochester, NY, 1868. ALS is a single sheet of cream blue lined paper inscribed in black ink and signed “E Backus,” measuring 5” x 8”. Telegram is partly handwritten and printed measuring 5” x 7.5”. Invitation is printed on cream paper measuring 5.375” x 8.375”. Booklet measuring 5.5” x 8.875” is encased in waxed pale pink covers with some discoloration to front.


The ALS, written from Newark, NJ on September 23, 1868, is addressed to an unknown “Dear Friend” and offers us the nineteenth-century equivalent of a flustered traveler’s musings while waiting at the airport. Backus complains: “I am here waiting for the lock behind fifty boats, and there are as many more behind me. I passed thru this fore noon and around here about noon inspect to get through the lock about midnight.” Backus appears to be writing from onboard his own vessel, as he later adds: “I had to stop & fix my boiler the next morning after I saw you … have not got a steerman but I guess I can find one.”


The November 29, 1867 telegraph was sent to Edward Backus’s business partner J.N. Child, whose name also appears on the August 22, 1868 invitation to view the “Exhibition Trip of the New Steam Canal Boat, ‘Edward Backus’”. The vessel was outfitted with the new Backus propeller wheel, a “driving or traction sub-aqueous wheel, eight feet in diameter and one foot in thickness, which … rested upon the solid bottom of the canal, and revolving on the ground, by its friction propelled the boat” (page 4 of aforesaid booklet). Backus proposed to harness the “slip” or momentum lost when other ways of propulsion, like horse or mule drawing, were used. The booklet acts as a publicity plug, providing potential investors and consumers with an overview of the “Edward Backus Method”. It contains press excerpts from major upstate New York periodicals as well as testimonials.


The major advantage of the “Edward Backus Method” was its reduction of coal use, yet this was negated by consequently increased travel time. The September 23, 1868 issue of the Scientific American tells us that the “Edward Backus” delivered 200 tons of coal on its exhibition trip at an average rate of speed of 2 miles an hour from Ithaca to Buffalo. “This rate hardly proves the superiority of this mode of propulsion over that of horses on the score of speed,” the journalist snarkily remarked.


This archive testifies to the vital importance of the canal system in American commerce, and also gives us the historical context in which to consider Edward Backus’s cost-saving invention of steam-propelled canal boats. The Erie Canal system connected New York City to the Great Lakes via 363 miles of canals and locks after 1808. At its peak around 1855, 33,000 vessels used the canal to transport goods. Very little is known about Edward Backus, but he continued inventing well into the 1880s, when he patented a modification of brakes.


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