The very first efforts toward transportation development lay in the canal works. Canals had already proved their success in England and within Continental Europe, and their introduction into the United States established their value from the beginning. Some of the earliest of these were built in New England before the Revolution. After the close of that conflict many others were planned and built. The great enterprise of the State of New York in planning and building the Erie, or Grand Canal, as it was at first called, from Albany to Buffalo--from Atlantic tidewater to the navigable Great Lakes was a tremendous stimulus to similar enterprises along the entire seaboard. Canals were built for many hundreds of miles, and in nearly every case they proved their worth at the outset. Canals were also projected for many, many hundreds of additional miles, for the success of the earliest of these ditches was a great encouragement to other investments of the sort, even where there existed far less necessity for their construction. Then there was a halt to canal-building for a little time. The invention of the steamboat just a century ago was an incentive indirectly to canal growth but there were other things that halted the minds of farsighted and conservative men. Canals were fearfully expensive things; likewise, they were delicate works, in need of constant and expensive repairs to keep them in order. Moreover, there were many winter months in which they were frozen and useless. It was quite clear to these farsighted men from the outset that the canal was not the real solution of the transportation problem upon which rested the internal development of the United States. They turned their attention to roads. But, while roads were comparatively easy to maintain and were possible routes of communication the entire year round, they could not begin to compare with the canals in point of tonnage capacity, because of the limitations of the drawing power of animals. Some visionary souls experimented with sail wagons, but of course with no practical results.