Canal Lock Engineering

The pound lock, a walled chamber with gates at both ends that can be sealed and then flooded or drained, raises or lowers a boat between two stretches of water at different levels, and is the method that made canal transport practical over varied terrain. Pound locks appear in China by the tenth century and were independently developed or reintroduced in Europe by the late fourteenth century, becoming the standard method of canal engineering worldwide, used at its largest scale in the Panama Canal, whose locks lift oceangoing ships over the continental divide between the Atlantic and Pacific. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/