I saw it on the show World's Strangest on the Science Channel. It replaces locks that took a whole day to move a boat from one level to the next. It takes just a few minutes now. The thing that got my attention was the inventor got the idea when playing with his daughter's toys. There's a diagram here:
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It doesn't take much power to turn it no matter the size of the boats. The two gondolas will weight the same due to a principle which name I forget. It has its own website, YouTube videos etc.
Not to argue with the Science Channel. No one on this ng would ever argue with anyone, but did it say where it took a whole day to go up one level?
I've been throught the old Panama Canal on a sailboat, and it only took maybe 30 minutes for each lock. We used the same locks that the big freighters used. I think there were 5 sets of locks, 3 up and 2 down or vice versa, and we left the Atlantic coast around noon and go to the Pacific coast around 6 PM.
BTW, the Panama Canal uses no pumps. Water flows from the lake to fill the locks, and from the locks to the river below or the ocean to empty them.
I'd be surprised if they built the new canal to take more time than the existing one. Even though the locks are bigger, making the water supply bigger is easier than other stuff they have to do. (I don't understand the drawing well enough to know if it's limited by the water supply or not, but I would think so.)
The Suez Canal ony has one or two locks. It doesn't have to climb a mountain range, only iirc adjust for the difference in water level between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea/Indian Ocean.
There are other canals, the Potomac, the C & O, the Erie, and many many other rivers were paralleled by canals that no longer work. The St. Lawrence Seaway has locks.
The
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takes 11 hours between Erie and Ontario. That would answer my question, but it uses 8 locks.
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If you zoom in at the Welland Canal, the satellite view gets dark, but two or three levesl from closest it gets very visible again. You can see how a highway goes under the canal!
" The two canals served by the wheel were previously connected by a series of 11 locks.[1][2] With a 35-metre (115 ft) difference in height, it required 3,500 tonnes (3,400 long tons; 3,900 short tons) of water per run and took most of a day to pass through the flight."
The original locks had fallen into disuse in the 1930s.
Oh, that's the thread name. That didnt' occur to me. That was my main question, where?... I've never heard of any of this. Wow. It's much bigger than I realized, but it's complicated too, and I'll have to read it tomorrow. Thanks.
I should have been more clear. Because I didn't realize the subject line had anything to do with the location, I didn't know the location and brought up all those other canals.
After I looked at this wiki page for a while I started to remember seeing this once before. It's very impressive.
Both the video and the panoramic view at the bottom of the wiki article makes it look, to me at least, like there is just some small round pond to run around in, but when you take the latitude and longitude numbers given and click on them and then go to, say, google satellite view, you can see that there is an outlet to the pond that goes to one of the canals.
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