201 years ago today, a cannon fired in Buffalo, New York. A few miles down the line, another cannon heard it and fired. Then another, and another, all the way across the state and down the Hudson. About an hour and a half later, the boom reached New York City, more than 500 miles away. The Erie Canal was open. Almost nobody thought it could be done. Thomas Jefferson called the idea "little short of madness." Critics mocked it as "Clinton's Ditch," after Governor DeWitt Clinton, who bet his career on it. The problem was enormous. The land rises about 600 feet between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. And America had no trained civil engineers. The men who laid out the route were judges. One had used a surveying instrument for only a few hours before the job began. So they learned as they dug. Irish laborers and German stonemasons cut through forest, swamp and solid rock with shovels, horses and muscle. At Lockport they carved a staircase of locks straight up the Niagara Escarpment. Eight years later, it stretched 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo. Clinton boarded a boat called the Seneca Chief and rode the whole way to New York. Ten days later, in New York Harbor, he poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the sea. They called it the Wedding of the Waters. A keg of ocean water went back the other way and was poured into the lake. Before the canal, Buffalo to New York took two weeks by stagecoach. Now goods could float the whole way. Tolls paid off the construction debt within the first year, and New York became the busiest port in the country. The "ditch" built a nation's front door. Would you have bet on Clinton's Ditch? Disclaimer: Based on historical accounts of the 1825 opening. Timing of the cannon relay and some figures vary by source. Photos: Anthony Imbert (New York celebration, 1825); National Museum of American History (DeWitt Clinton engraving); Herrmann J. Meyer (Lockport lithograph, c.1855); Arthur B. Davies (Along the Erie Canal, 1890); all public domain via Wikimedia Commons