Conception
In the years following the American Revolutionary War, the young United States began a period of economic expansion away from the coast. Because of extremely poor roads, the cost of bringing goods such as lumber and fur to the coast could be quite high. Up and down the Atlantic coast, companies were formed to develop canals as comparatively inexpensive means to bring goods from the interior of the country to the coast, and to send imported goods into the interior.
In Massachusetts several ideas were proposed for bringing goods to the principal port of Boston. A group of leading Massachusetts businessmen and politicians proposed a connection from the Merrimack River to Boston Harbor in 1793. The Middlesex Canal Corporation was chartered on June 22, 1793 with a signature by Governor John Hancock. Hancock was also among the investors who purchased shares, along with other luminaries such as John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Sullivan, and Christopher Gore. Sullivan was chosen company president, and its vice president and eventual chief engineer was Loammi Baldwin, a native of Woburn who had attended science lectures at Harvard College and was a friend of physicist Benjamin Thompson.
Read more about this topic: Middlesex Canal
Famous quotes containing the word conception:
“The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Belief is nothing but a more vivid, lively, forcible, firm, steady conception of an object, than what the imagination alone is ever able to attain.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“[M]y conception of liberty does not permit an individual citizen or a group of citizens to commit acts of depredation against nature in such a way as to harm their neighbors and especially to harm the future generations of Americans. If many years ago we had had the necessary knowledge, and especially the necessary willingness on the part of the Federal Government, we would have saved a sum, a sum of money which has cost the taxpayers of America two billion dollars.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)