Christopher Colles

[1][2] In certain quarters he was described contemptuously as a "visionary projector," yet he was also credited with being one of the first to conceive a waterway to the West that would ultimately be achieved by the Erie Canal.

Thinking that a favourable word from the scientific establishment might help him garner funds for a more powerful engine, Colles sought a review from David Rittenhouse and the American Philosophical Society.

In 1774, Colles left Philadelphia for New York, and there he began his career in earnest, conceiving and designing the projects which would ultimately become his biography.

Colles's sympathies during this period were with the Americans and perhaps owing to this and to his friendship with John Lamb, he thought it prudent to extract his family from the now British-controlled city.

Owing to the "present juvenile state of the Country…and the want of resources," Washington concluded, "it appears to me that this is too early a day for accomplishing such great undertakings."

In his pamphlet entitled the Proposal for the Speedy Settlement of the Waste and Unappropriated Lands on the Western Frontiers of the State of New York, Colles proposed that a series of canals and locks be constructed along the Mohawk River and Wood Creek that once completed, would connect the Hudson River and Lake Ontario, effectively uniting by water passage the Atlantic Ocean to the interior of North America.

[14] He presented the plan to the New York State legislature, which allowed for the idea so long as it was privately funded, but when Colles could not raise sufficient capital, he abandoned the project.

[15] In 1789, Colles published A Survey of Roads of the United States, a set of strip maps, three to a page, of major routes between New England and Virginia.

Colles proposed selling the atlas by means of subscription to travellers—really a way of raising capital to complete the project—and he made it convenient by allowing subscribers to purchase only those strips of the map that were needed for whatever route the traveller was interested in.

Its title was suggested by its search mechanism, that through the use of the index and references, "the situation of places can be found as speedily as a merchant can find any particular account in his ledger.

[21][22] During the War of 1812 Colles established and supervised an optical telegraph system to keep New York City protected from British Attacks.

Colles spent his last years in New York City, where he proposed one last scheme: a semaphore telegraph system to be strung along the Atlantic seaboard from Passamaquoddy Bay (Maine) to New Orleans.

In 1816, his friend and sometime benefactor, John Pintard, offered him a post as custodian of the old almshouse building which was to house various New York scientific and arts institutions.

[24] What is known of Colles comes mostly through reminiscences of friends and rivals, through scattered tributes to his ideas over the years; and not least through his many pamphlets, which were always detailed, sometimes plaintive, occasionally poetic and prophetic.

In a rueful self-assessment he made to his friend and earliest biographer, John Wakefield Francis, Colles allowed that "Had I been brought up a hatter, people would have come into the world without heads.