Poor Christopher Colles: An Innovator's Obstacles in Early America

It is July 1775, and Christopher Colles is busy in New York organizing a grand project, a reservoir for the city. Land has been acquired, timber has been ordered for pipes, a well is being dug, and a steam engine has been designed and built to raise the water to distribute to the streets and homes of New Yorkers. Colles is in charge of it all, given the authority and funding by the New York City Common Council. Engineer, inventor, and geographer, he had come to America in 1771 from Ireland hoping to find scope for his talent. The work on New York's water supply is one of the most ambitious infrastructure improvements undertaken in colonial America. His move seems to have worked. Now jump ahead to 1816. Colles dies destitute in New York and is buried there in an unmarked spot in an old graveyard (Ristow, A Survey 4). He is eulogized fondly, but mainly as an endearing failure rather than the man of purpose he appeared to be in 1775. As New York lawyer, politician, and man of letters Gulian Verplanck wrote, There lived for a time my old acquaintance Collies [sic], a mathematician, a geographer, and a mechanician of no mean note . .. Forty years ago, his mind was teeming with plans of western canals, steam-boats, rail-roads, and other public enterprises, which in more fortunate and judicious hands have since proved fruitful of wealth to the community, and merited honor to those who carried them through. Poor Collies [sic] had neither capital to undertake them himself, nor plausibility to recommend them to others, nor public character and station to give weight and authority to his opinion. So he schemed and toiled and calculated all his life, and died at eighty without having gained either wealth for himself, or gratitude from the public. (348)1 Colles is credited with numerous firsts that, once undertaken, would underlie national integration: the first proposal for what became the Erie Canal in 1785, the first American road atlas in 1789, the first national telegraph system in 1813. Yet Colles's life path to poverty seems a familiar story, shared with inventors like John Kay, an Englishman whose flying shuttle paved the "way for power looms, or Samuel Crompton, whose spinning mule innovations allowed replacement of skilled weavers with unskilled ones. And it is a familiar American story as well. Automobile innovator Preston Tucker also died poor. Or take John Boyd, who transformed fighter pilot training during the Korean War but was retired as only a colonel, his contributions remembered by a small few (Coram 4-10). A land of opportunity offers both success and failure. Colles is an early example of a particular sort: one whose ambitions are as much for the public interest as for himself, who fails while attempting to do well and to do good. Colles's work on the New York City reservoir indicates that he was able to move projects as well as dream and tinker. His long-term failure was not just a result of his own constitution, as Verplanck suggested. He found himself sidelined, his ideas temporarily derailed, as the nation worked out its own nature and its own constitution. As the United States emerged, Colles was especially concerned with ways of weaving the new entity into a connected territory by building transportation and communication systems. The new nation needed to strengthen its linkages. The colonies began as distinct entities with little to tie them to each other, and more to tie them to Britain. A letter traveling from one colony to another, for example, went by way of England for much of the colonial period. Spatial links -intercolony roads and routes -gradually improved throughout the colonial period, but they remained weak and unsystematic (Taylor 302; Meinig 258-59). The United States needed to become a system, both physical and procedural. Its potential physical and mental links are precisely what engaged Colles. His broadsides and pamphlets were filled with possible new lines (straightened waterways across New York) and informational ones (his road atlas). …