The full development of an art has always required two types of invention. No new thing under the sun ever came full fledged into being, and the pioneers in every art have necessarily left their inventions in sketchy form, the detailed arrangements which made them really practical being filled in by later comers.

“Here and there in Ohio, Indiana and the Eastern States,” says Alvin F. Harlow in his book, Old Towpaths, “the pedestrian… may sometimes notice the faint indication of an embankment or a shallow depression, weed-grown but stretching away with such regularity of line as to rouse his belief that it may be an artificial work.… If he will inquire in the neighborhood he may find some white-bearded ancient who remembers that these poor ruins are all that is left of what was once a great internal improvement, the pride of the locality and the State — a canal.”

William Dean Howells writes that canals in 1837 were a greater achievement than railroads were in 1897. Before the railroad came, there was an elaborate system of them, built with characteristic American enthusiasm and enterprise, by men who were not professional engineers, many of whom had never seen a canal. The Erie gave New York her start toward becoming the American metropolis, and Pennsylvania had a system of state canals, supplemented by short railroads, which connected Philadelphia with Pittsburgh.

The thought of how short a time we have been modern is brought to mind by remembering that less than a century ago mail stages were running in Massachusetts. The Indian Tavern, Bromfield Street, was the starting point for lines to Newport, New Bedford and Bristol, and until 1840 they furnished the regular mode of conveying mail to those towns and intermediate points. The mail was still carried by private contractors, and the elements of chance and whim on the part of drivers still entered into its delivery, on time and in good order.

The time when Hudson River steamboating was an experiment and an adventure is brought to mind by an old advertisement of the “splendid safety barges ‘Lady Clinton’ and ‘Lady Van Rensselaer,’ towed by steamboats of great power,” operating between New York and Albany in 1826. After the Supreme Court decision in 1824 that the New York laws prohibiting vessels licensed according to the laws of the United States from navigating the waters of the State of New York by means of fire and steam, are repugnant to the… constitution, [of the United States,] and void,” steam vessels had increased and multiplied on the Hudson, and opposition lines sprung up to share the business of Livingston and Fulton's old North River line.