History
Written reports of rough fishways date to 17th-century France, where bundles of branches were used to create steps in steep channels to bypass obstructions. A version was patented in 1837 by Richard McFarlan of Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada, who designed a fishway to bypass a dam at his water-powered lumber mill. In 1852–1854, the Ballisodare Fish Pass was built in County Sligo in Ireland to draw salmon into a river that had not supported a fishery. In 1880, the first fish ladder was built in Rhode Island, United States, on the Pawtuxet Falls Dam. The ladder was removed in 1924, when the City of Providence replaced the wood dam with a concrete one. Concrete ladders are not always an improvement – the electric field-sensitive organs of the paddlefish are overloaded in the proximity of the rebar and other metal used in concrete construction, preventing them from gaining access to their spawning grounds and contributing to a catastrophic decline in their numbers.
As the Industrial Age advanced, dams and other river obstructions became larger and more common, leading to the need for effective fish by-passes.
Read more about this topic: Fish Ladder
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“It’s not the sentiments of men which make history but their actions.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)