The Staircase Nobody Optimized

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We live, we are frequently told, in an age of unprecedented connectivity.

Platforms connect us. Networks connect us. A man in Copenhagen can, in a matter of a splitsecond, reach a man in Sao Paulo even though he might not have anything particular urgent to say.

This is considered progress and a part of modernity.

But Rita and I had yesterday the occasion in the Burgundian village Rogny-les-Sept-Ecluses to stand next to a staircase of stone and water which showed that we moderns have of course not invented the idea of connecting stuff.

Someone back in the 17th century dreamt of connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel by making a passageway from the Loire river to the Seine.

And here on this hill in Burgundy, at the watershed between the two mighty rivers, is the result of that thought.
 

By building seven locks pressed together in a staircase up a hillside in Rogny, the boats could ascend the twenty-four metres up from the Loire valley.
 
Twelve thousand workers were toiling for years  on the mighty locks at Rogny and as the works were violently opposed by local landlords, the workers were protected by 6.000 soldiers.


When the locks were finally finished they were operated for more than 200 years until the waterway was eventually bypassed by a newer route in 1880.

The locks were not replaced because they failed, but because boats got bigger. The old staircase was simply too narrow for the new world, and it became obsolete in the way that a perfectly good argument becomes obsolete: not because it was wrong, but because the terms of the debate changed.

 

After walking for an hour up and down the locks, we sat at a small café terrace next to the newer canal - the one that made the seven locks redundant, the one the 19th century built in the name of progress.

We ordered lunch.

In front of us, a captain navigated his narrowboat along the canal with the quiet self-satisfaction of someone who has nowhere particular to be.

Above us, somewhere up the hill, twelve thousand men's worth of stone was doing nothing at all.

And it was doing it well!


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