View from the Pennines: Euler Gets Kinky

By 1807 the scale of the task the Huddersfield Canal Company had taken on must have been painfully evident. The canal involved the construction of the longest man-made tunnel of the time, but this was only one of the problems faced by the canal company as costs spiralled and a mixture of poor workmanship and the harsh conditions of the Pennine moorlands created additional delays. Construction had started in 1794 following and Act of Parliament passed in the same year. The engineer in charge was initially Benjamin Outram, a protegé of William Jessop (one of the most influential engineers of the age of the canal and secretary of the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers for twenty years), and co-founder with Jessop of the Butterley ironworks, but Outram was over committed and left the project in 1802; his career ended early and in tragedy. A third Act to raise finance was passed in 1806, and Thomas Telford was brought in to report on the condition and prospects for the canal. His report of January 1807 was generally up-beat and characteristically detailed. Despite further disasters such as the Black Flood, where a reservoir dam embankment burst with the loss of five lives, the canal was completed in 1811. It never made the profits promised in the early days of the canal boom, but as a monument to the stubborn pigheadedness of early industrial Britain it has few equals. The Standedge Tunnel itself was completed in 1809, having cost over fifty lives and £124,000, about a quarter of the entire costs of construction. It was 5,477 yards long, though alterations mean that it is now a little longer. By 1846 further tunnels had been created alongside the canal tunnel to carry the railroads which rapidly out-competed the riven canal network. The tunnel re-opened in 2001 as a tourist attraction rather than as part of the industrial transport network it had originally been intended to serve. 1807 was, of course, the centenary of Euler’s birth. This year is the tercentenary. The world moves quickly, but I am sure that the engineers of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal would have benefitted from the clear thinking which is so evident in Euler’s work. They may even have