Surfacing Underwater Work--the Ambrose Canal Dredging Measured in Woolworth Buildings (1913)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Another great example of the artistic display of information using alternative comparison, and this just hours after finding/writing  about another example in this area.  This morning's find uses several different types of comparisons, the first of which--like last night's---is using a comparable entity to value the expression of quantity. And again, like last night's, this short article (from Scientific American for 15 March 1913) uses the newly crowned Woolworth Building to illustrate how much dirt was removed in the dredging of the Ambrose Channel in NYC.  (The Ambrose Channel is in the entrance to NYC harbor, and it seems as though the dredging the author is talking about lies in the lower NYC harbor out past the Narrows.¹)

What was weighing on the mind of the writer was that this project removed  a very considerable amount of soil and was in some high fraction a comparable to the excavation of the Panama Canal, except that you couldn't see any of the Ambrose project given that it was all taking place underwater. This effort in the SciAm was made to give some surfaceable form to the work going on  under the water in the Narrows. 

There was a very considerable amount of earth removed, no doubt--difficult work, but not exactly an engineering feat like the Panama Canal that it was being compared to. Nevertheless the interesting minds of SciAm showed what the invisible channel would look like if it was dredging a 40'x15' by multi-mile section of Manhattan, which is an excavation that would stretch from downtown to north of Central Park.  

In any event, this reporting job must have been a good bit of fun (and it shows), and was a fairly elegant and memorable means of communicating some big numbers of an invisible project. 

Notes:

1. “Ambrose Channel is the only shipping channel in and out of the Port of New York and New Jersey. The channel is considered to be part of Lower New York Bay and is located several miles off the coasts of Sandy Hook, New Jersey, and Breezy Point, New York. Ambrose Channel terminates at Ambrose Anchorage, just south of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the gateway to New York Harbor, where it becomes known as the Anchorage Channel.”--Wikipedia