Boat Lift

A boat lift is a machine that moves boats between stretches of water at different elevations, built as an alternative to the canal lock where a large change in height would otherwise need an impractical number of lock chambers. Designs vary: some lifts move a water-filled caisson straight up and down, as at the Anderton Boat Lift in England; some rotate, as at the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland; and others carry boats up an inclined plane, as at Ronquieres in Belgium. Erasmus Darwin sketched an early balance-caisson concept in his commonplace book of 1777 to 1778, but the tub boat lifts on England Grand Western Canal, working by 1835, are considered the first non-experimental boat lifts built, predating the more famous Anderton lift by roughly four decades; modern examples include Canada's gravity-powered Peterborough Lift Lock of 1904 and China's Three Gorges ship lift, opened in 2016, which raises vessels of up to 3,000 tons a height of 113 meters.