High above the city, near the small town of South Fork, the South Fork Dam was originally built between 1838 and 1853 by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as part of a canal system to be used as a reservoir for a canal basin in Johnstown.

With the coming-of-age of railroads superseding canal barge transport, the lake was abandoned by the Commonwealth, sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad, and sold again to private interests and eventually came to be owned by the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in 1881.

At first there was no passenger service, for south of the station was the Akihabara cargo docks, where goods from all over the world would flow into Kanda by river and be hauled up the east bank of the canal to be ticketed at the central cargo transport window.

Later, navigation was stopped in 1904 and the canal has since then, been exclusively used for irrigation purposes only.

At present the canal does not flow in district Gurgaon, but only in Faridabad, which was earlier a part of Gurgaon.

In other cases, water pumped from mines was used to feed the canal.

By far the longest canal was the Grand Canal of China, still the longest canal in the world today, and the oldest extant one.

The project began in 605 and was completed in 609, although much of the work combined older canals, the oldest section of the canal existing since at least 486 BC.

The first artificial canal in Christian Europe was the Fossa Carolina built at the end of the 8th century under personal supervision of Charlemagne.

It was constructed in 1639 to provide water power for mills. In Russia, the Volga-Baltic Waterway, a nationwide canal system connecting the Baltic and Caspian seas via the Neva and Volga rivers, was opened in 1718.

The most notable power canal was built in 1862 for the Niagara Falls Hydraulic Power and Manufacturing Company.

In France, a steady linking of all the river systems — Rhine, Rhône, Saône and Seine — and the North Sea was boosted in 1879 by the establishment of the Freycinet gauge, which specified the minimum size of locks so that canal traffic doubled in the first decades of the 20th century.

Among these was a large canal leading from the Rhine to the sea, as well as a road from Italy to Germany — both begun by his father, Drusus.

The canal was featured on Ripley's Believe It or Not in the 1970s due to the phenomenon that in winter the canal freezes before the lakes and then after the lakes freeze, the canal thaws and remains unfrozen for the rest of the winter.

In their first major use at the Battle of Cambrai ( 1917 ), the plan was for a cavalry division to follow behind the tanks, however they were not able to cross a canal because a tank had broken the only bridge.

The canal was mooted in classical times and an abortive effort was made to build it in the 1st century AD.

In the 19th century, it was connected by a canal to the Berezina and Dnieper rivers ( canal is currently not functioning ).

On a typical day, three convoys transit the canal, two southbound and one northbound.

In order to allow the passage of masted ships iron swing bridges were fitted to the Chichester and Portsea sections rather than the more typical hump back canal bridge.

The city plan, as is typical of many older Chinese cities, is of a central city with a roughly circular plan, crisscrossed with older canals, the main canal still seeing heavy barge traffic.

In patients with unilateral pudendal entrapment in the Alcock's canal, it is typical to see asymmetric swelling and hyperintensity affecting the pudendal neurovascular bundle.

* Numerous typical canal scenes at http :// images. google. com / imgres? imgurl = http :// www. akronhistory. org / images / SCAN0458canal. JPG & imgrefurl = http :// www. akronhistory. org / canals. htm & usg = __2_uYe6jIxRkGcfhIrOY3aV6ZqZQ =& h = 712 & w = 1000 & sz = 122 & hl = en & start = 40 & tbnid = RTY0S8GOks4jPM :& tbnh = 106 & tbnw = 149 & prev =/ images % 3Fq % 3D19th % 2Bcentury % 2Bcanal % 2Bboat % 26ndsp % 3D18 % 26hl % 3Den % 26rlz % 3D1T4GGIT_en % 26sa % 3DN % 26start % 3D36

Emperor Hadrian ( 117-138 ) ordered the construction of a " canopus " in his villa in Tivoli with typical imperial grandeur: an immense rectangular tank representing a canal, 119 m long by 18 m wide was surrounded by porticoes and statues, leading the way to a Serapeum.

The Venetian aristocracy used to cruise along the canal on a type of typical boat known as Burchiello.

Also typical are, among other features, that the dorsal vertebrae have a neural arch more than twice as high as the centrum, and completely occupied by the extremely spacious neural canal.

Nowadays, the canal network is mainly used for recreation and is different to typical holiday locations, which are usually based in coastal or rural areas, because canals are inland and often pass through many former historical, industrial, urban areas.

The South Vietnamese M-113s had no problem crossing the streams and rivers typical of the Mekong Delta, but the heavy 10-ton M-113s bogged down in the Cong Ba Ky Canal, forcing the crews and the infantry company on board to cut down brush and trees and fill the canal until it was shallow enough for the M-113s to cross.

* September 30 – James Brindley, British canal builder ( b. 1716 )

The plan of a canal connection from the Mersey to the Trent (" The Grand Trunk ") came from canal engineer James Brindley.

James Brindley, the engineer behind many of the canals in England, did his first canal work on the Trent and Mersey, though his first job in charge of construction was on the Bridgewater Canal.

In the 1900s, the Brindley tunnel was closed due to severe subsidence, but the Telford Tunnel-although also prone to the same problems-remains in use, and is the fourth-longest navigable canal tunnel in the United Kingdom.

James Brindley was the chief engineer of the canal, which was part of his Grand Cross plan for waterways connecting Hull, Liverpool and Bristol.

The canal essentially follows river valleys, shadowing the course of tributaries, to break through the watershed between the Trent and Severn north-west of Wolverhampton, at the Aldersley Gap, a minor glacial feature turned to advantage by Brindley.

The Smestow actually crosses the canal via the Dunstall Water Bridge, a small aqueduct planned by Brindley to preserve the flow of the river, before dropping into the valley and running alongside it.

Leek was the home of James Brindley, the 18th century canal engineer.

Brindley was commissioned as the consulting engineer and, although he has often been credited as the genius behind the construction of the canal, it is now thought that the main designers were Sir Thomas Egerton himself, who had some engineering training, and the resident engineer John Gilbert.

At this time Brindley had never built a lock and he first built an experimental lock in the grounds of Turnhurst, a house he had bought near the summit, and this determined the design of the narrow canal lock which characterized most of the canals in the Midlands, with a single upper gate and double mitre lower gates.

He is remembered in Birmingham by Brindley Drive ( on the site of former canal yards ), the Brindleyplace mixed-use development and a pub, The James Brindley ( both being canal-side features ), and the James Brindley School for children in Birmingham's hospitals ; in Leek with the James Brindley Mill ; and by numerous other streets in the areas in which he worked.

The route of the canal was surveyed by James Brindley and John Varley, who estimated the cost at £ 94, 908 17s.

Brindley died in 1772 but Simcock took over and completed the canal.

He commissioned the engineer James Brindley to build a canal to do just that.

The standard for the dimensions of narrow canal locks was set by Brindley with his first canal locks, those on the Trent and Mersey Canal in 1776.

James Brindley was commissioned to build the canal, and work started on it in December that year.

Due to the high standards of construction demanded by Brindley, the canal company ran out of money by the time the canal had reached Atherstone in 1769, and Brindley was replaced by Thomas Yeoman.