Canal mania
After 1770, canals began to snake their way through much of England. Engineers like Brindley planned the routes, with all their locks and tunnels. Men with picks and shovels did the digging. They were called "navigators" (or "navvies") because they dug the "navigations". The work was hard, but the wages were good.
Canals were expensive to build. The men who invested money in them had to be rich. They hoped that canals would make them big profits, and some of them were right. The profits came from the tolls paid by the firms whose barges used the canals. For many investors, canals also meant cheap transport for their own goods (e.g. coal, cloth, or corn).
Owners of coal-mines, cotton-mills, and iron-works used canals because they were far cheaper than the roads. (One horse could pull a canal barge loaded with 50 tons of coal. A horse could draw only two tons of coal by road.) The great potter Josiah Wedgwood was both a canal-user and an investor. (Smooth canals were far better for his wares then bumpy roads.)
In the 1790s there was a mad rush to invest in new canals. It was the time of "canal-mania". Too many canals were built, and a lot of investors lost money. But good schemes still made profits. The Leeds to Liverpool canal, finished in 1816, was a great success. Then traffic began to decline as the railways spread in the 1830s and 1840s. In some areas, though, canal barges continued to carry coal until well after 1900.
Walter Robson: Britain 1750 - 1900; Oxford University Press, 1993, page 26