Engineering Innovation Boat Tour
What is engineering? According to Wikipedia, engineering is “science, skill, and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and also build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes.” What does this mean? I think it means that an engineer uses science and innovation to make society a better place.
I went on the Engineering Innovation Boat Tour. As I am a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering major, I decided that this tour was the most interesting to me out of all the tours offered. But it only started there. When I got there, I was greeted by a young ranger who was probably at most only a couple of years older than me. He greeted us, and then proceeded to tell us about the development of Lowell as a mill city, using plenty of pictures and diagrams.
He told us about how the city started centered around the Merrimack River. Native Americans would use the river, namely the section of the river called Pawtucket Falls, to catch fish to eat. But when the Europeans came, they wanted to use the river for transportation. Pawtucket Falls proved to be a problem however. So, they built the Pawtucket Canal, a canal that could be used to circumvent the falls and still use the river for transportation. But the Europeans didn’t stop there. As people settled in this area, they had to make clothes themselves. It took months just to make a shirt. So some wealthy entrepreneurs thought of a business plan unheard of in the US at the time: mass production of clothing that people could buy for very cheap prices, resulting in huge profits. Around this time, the Industrial Revolution was flourishing in England. Then, Francis Cabot Lowell brought the designs to the US. For his work in the mills in Waltham, his partners built a mill city at the Merrimack River, and named it after their visionary partner. Thus Lowell was born.
I went on the Engineering Innovation Boat Tour. As I am a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering major, I decided that this tour was the most interesting to me out of all the tours offered. But it only started there. When I got there, I was greeted by a young ranger who was probably at most only a couple of years older than me. He greeted us, and then proceeded to tell us about the development of Lowell as a mill city, using plenty of pictures and diagrams.
He told us about how the city started centered around the Merrimack River. Native Americans would use the river, namely the section of the river called Pawtucket Falls, to catch fish to eat. But when the Europeans came, they wanted to use the river for transportation. Pawtucket Falls proved to be a problem however. So, they built the Pawtucket Canal, a canal that could be used to circumvent the falls and still use the river for transportation. But the Europeans didn’t stop there. As people settled in this area, they had to make clothes themselves. It took months just to make a shirt. So some wealthy entrepreneurs thought of a business plan unheard of in the US at the time: mass production of clothing that people could buy for very cheap prices, resulting in huge profits. Around this time, the Industrial Revolution was flourishing in England. Then, Francis Cabot Lowell brought the designs to the US. For his work in the mills in Waltham, his partners built a mill city at the Merrimack River, and named it after their visionary partner. Thus Lowell was born.
In the watery part of the tour, we boarded a boat at the Swamp Locks dock, shown above. We then rode the boat down the Pawtucket Canal, until we reached the Guard Locks, along with the Francis Gate, named after James B. Francis, not Francis Cabot Lowell. Our tour guide didn’t talk about the Francis Gate on our first trip to the Guard Locks, but he told us how the locks, and in fact all the locks, worked. To raise a boat up to the required height, water would be drained from the higher basin into the lock, but not by opening the large doors. Instead, the people working the locks would open two smaller doors that were submerged. These doors, embedded in the larger doors, would slowly equalize the water levels in the lock chamber and the path ahead of us. We rose up to the correct water level, and then the big doors glided open, opening up our passage. We then proceeded forward to the main body of the Merrimack River. We docked the boat near the Pawtucket Gatehouse and got off the boat. Inside the Pawtucket Gatehouse, which controls the water flow into the Northern Canal, the largest canal, we saw nothing but large unused machines and lots of spiders. The air was musty to the point that I had to step outside into the fresh air just to focus on our guide. Once our guide spoke about the turbine and driveshaft system of power, he told us that each machine had two leather belt systems: one for forward, and one for reverse. In other words, one would close the gates letting water in, while the other would open them. He then showed us the dam that drastically changed the Merrimack beyond the Pawtucket Gate. I guess this is why the river underneath the bridge between UMass Lowell East and North campuses is so low. It is being dammed upstream. This dam is designed to fail on purpose. The bottom two-thirds is made of granite, and is solid. It would hold in the event of a flood of the Merrimack. The top third is made of wood and iron rods. In the event of flood, water pressure against the top of the wood would bend the iron rods, and let this water flow down the dam into the Merrimack River, rather than into the downtown area, where the mills are located.
We then turned around and returned to the Gate Locks, shown above. This time, our guide pointed out the Francis Gate. James B. Francis foresaw the possibility of the river flooding, and so he wanted to safeguard the downtown area from flooding with a device that would stop water dead in its tracks. He came up with the idea for the Francis Gate, placed at the Guard Locks. This gate was built like a guillotine. The top two-thirds were stored in a building above the locks. If the gate had to be dropped, someone with a hammer and chisel would climb up to the top of the gate, and break the iron shackle holding the whole 20 ton gate in place. Fortunately for Lowell, this gate was finished in 1851, because in 1852, the winter was particularly snowy, both here and at the lakes in NH that constitute the source of the Merrimack River. At 3:30 AM one day the following spring, the call went out to drop the gate. One man climbed to the top, broke the shackle, and for the first time, the Francis Gate was dropped successfully. At 7 AM that day, the floods came. But this water never reached the downtown area, thanks to the gate. After the floods were averted, and the gate was raised again, 80 years passed. In 1936, once again the winter was very snowy, both here and in NH. But the snow was worse in 1936 than in 1852. The gate was dropped again, and all was well. Our guide showed us the water level marks for 1852 and 1936. In 1852, the water level was up to a little below the bottom of the building, in other words, the top of the canal. In 1936, the water level was much higher. It was above the top of the canal, a little ways up the building that stored the Francis Gate. Today however, metal doors are used to stop the floods, and the Francis Gate, due to arson damage, just sits in place as a monument to Lowell’s past. Performing such a task in the days of only wood and metal is truly an engineering marvel, and as such, James B. Francis has earned his place as the namesake of the UMass Lowell College of Engineering. Pictures of this gate are below.
From there we returned to the Swamp Locks, and then to the Visitor Center. But throughout this tour, I learned something. I learned about ingenuity. I learned that sometimes a solution so simple that it seems stupid is actually the best solution. The Swamp Locks Gatehouse works in the following simple manner. To let water through, a person inside reaches through a hole in the floor and pulls up some wooden boards, unblocking the flow of the canals, and to stop the water, a person reaches through a hole in the floor and adds boards, blocking the flow of the canals. The Francis Gate was simply a giant 20 ton block of wood that dropped into the canal, blocking the water. In summary, I didn’t know what to expect on this tour to begin with. But I was pleasantly surprised by the level of innovation presented by both the builders of the city of Lowell, and by people in the present, constantly adding to the city, like Chancellor Marty Meehan, who is constantly reimagining Lowell by adding to its university, and as such attracting new diversity to the city. Lowell has been a pioneer since the Industrial Revolution, and its engineering certainly stays true to this name.