Following the Erie Canal, we wound up, as did its earliest passengers, at Niagara Falls.

NPR: Excerpt: 'Inventing Niagara'

Politicking nonetheless bedevilled the Erie Canal from its conception in 1807 to its completion 18 years later.

ECONOMIST: American canal building

For excitement, instead of whitewater rafting down the Colorado River, he takes his family on a houseboat ride through the Erie Canal.

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Back home Morris was a key promoter of the Erie Canal, which made New York the commercial center of the new nation--and indeed of the world.

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Even once impregnable mainstays like daily newspapers wonder whether the Web will do to them what railroads did to the Erie Canal more than 150 years ago.

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First the Erie Canal--built straight through town in the 1820s--and then the railroads gave Syracuse the ability to make things and ship them out cheaply to faraway markets.

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If we look at any major infrastructure project, whether the Erie Canal, the interstate highway system, even NASA, we see that it was a new technology that solved old problems.

WHITEHOUSE: A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships

In 1825, the Erie Canal opened to traffic.

CNN: Sunday,

Rise early the next morning and paddle 17 miles southeast to Waterloo village, located on a section of the Cayuga-Seneca Canal that links two of the state's Finger Lakes -- Cayuga and Seneca -- to the Erie Canal.

BBC: Exploring New York��s Erie Canal

When the Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the shores of Red Hook via the Hudson River in 1825, a new shipping centre was born, and by 1848 more than 800 homes, workers' boarding houses and warehouses had sprung up by the bustling docks.

BBC: A remote hook in New York��s harbour