Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highways Transport Committee Council of National DefenseUnited States. Council of National Defense. Highways Transport Committee
History
Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highways Transport Committee Council of National Defense
United States. Council of National Defense. Highways Transport Committee
Roads; Transportation, Automotive; Trucking
So the railway came along and since the mechanical engine fitted so
perfectly into the American temperament and the national needs, the
railway and the tool for the railway developed together side by side.
Still with the coming of the railroad we thought of transportation as
a unity. Highways did not amount to very much. Men went by horseback
often, because they had to, not always because they wanted to. And
after the railroad came, the waterway was all but destroyed, because
we thought of transportation as a unity of railroads. Up to a very few
years ago all of us who are not far-seeing would have thought of
public transportation as meaning essentially the railroads. Yet so
rapidly in the last five years has the law of transportation been
developed that it is a little bit difficult for us to keep up with the
rush of this movement.
There came into the world a new tool--the internal-combustion
engine--destined to work almost as great a change in the human life as
the steam engine in its time, making possible a tool for the waterway
that the waterway had never had before, making it possible to use for
the highway what the highway had never had before, making necessary
the alteration of the highway to suit the new tool built for it. It
has never been true until now; it has just now become true that the
waterway and highway have been, as regards the tools for their use, on
a technical and scientific level with the railway. The Government is
just putting in operation this month the first great barges for the
Mississippi River intended to carry ore south and coal north, made
possible because of the internal-combustion engine. The tool has come,
the internal-combustion engine is altering the face of the marine
world. So that we do not really need but over 6 feet of water in the
northern Mississippi to carry 1,800 tons of ore in one boat. We look
upon the development of the New York State barge canal with a
certainty of its profitable use for the Nation, for with a 12-foot
draft we know we can carry 2,500 tons in any vessel constructed for
the purpose, driven by internal-combustion engines. The tool for the
job and the way made ready for the tool.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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