“Kathy Hochul showed up at VICE’s Brooklyn headquarters on Tuesday and asked if anyone had heard of the Erie Canal. As New York State’s lieutenant governor explained, the navigable water route was originally the idea of a Geneva flour merchant stuck in debtor’s prison. While he was locked up, the man wrote a series of detailed essays for a local newspaper about how commercial transportation might be improved. A politician who later became governor, DeWitt Clinton, took an interest in these ideas, and a decade after the articles’ publication, construction began on what was then one of the most ambitious projects in American history.”