It was an
extraordinary achievement, considering that Brindley was quite
uneducated and knew no mathematics, and up to the last remained
illiterate. Most of his problems were solved without writings or
drawings, and when anything difficult had to be considered, he would go
to bed and think it out there. At the Worsley end it involved tunnelling
to the seams of coal where the colliers were at work so that they could
load the coal directly into the boats. He constructed from ten to
thirteen miles of underground canals on two different levels, with an
ingeniously constructed connection between the two. After this he made
the great Bridgewater Canal, forty miles in length, from Manchester to
Runcorn, which obtained a fall of one foot per mile by following a
circuitous route without a lock or a tunnel in the whole of its course
until it reached its terminus at the River Mersey. In places where a
brook or a small valley had to be crossed the canal was carried on
artificially raised banks, and to provide against a burst in any of
these, which would have caused the water to run out of the canal, it was
narrowed at each end of the embankment so that only one boat could pass
through at a time, this narrow passage being known as a "stop place.
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