Gateways to Commerce: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' 9-Foot Channel Project on the Upper Mississippi River
O'Brien WP, Rathbun MY, O'Bannon P. 1992. Gateways to Commerce: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' 9-Foot Channel Project on the Upper Mississippi River. National Park Service; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Denver, Coloardo
'Now at least 50 years old, the locks and dams of the Upper Mississippi River 9-Foot Channel Project are showing their age. In their day, however, they represented technological breakthroughs in navigation engineering. The locks and dams that comprise the project constitute seminal developments in the technological history of American river navigation. With the 9-Foot Channel Project, the Corps of Engineers inaugurated a new era in slack-water navigation in the U.S.: the adoption of non-navigable dams that incorporated both roller and Tainter gates. Ironically, the Upper Mississippi River 9-Foot Channel Project also resulted in the obsolescence, by the project's end, of combination roller and Tainter gate dams. Technological advances resulting from the research and development incidental to the design and construction of the project's lock and dam systems enabled the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop both submersible and non-submersible Tainter gates that nearly matched the capabilities of the roller gates, and which were less expensive and more easily operated. The Corps' creation of a new dam type, and its subsequent obsolescence during the course of a single project, dramatically illuminate the evolutionary nature of American engineering. Dam gates that were state-of-the-art at the beginning of the 9-Foot Channel Project were passe' before the project's end.'