Science: Cliff Climbing Ships

Citizens of Sao Paulo, world’s greatest coffee market, traveled out to see a great bastion last week, important concrete step in an engineering project that will soon connect Sao Paulo with Santos harbor, 50 miles away on the coast, and make a seaport of a city 2,400 ft. above sea level.

A. W. K. Billings, Canadian financier, is sponsor and backer of the project.

Engineers discovered that by cutting a canal only two and a half miles long through one of the mountain ridges separating Sao Paulo from the coast, water from various inland rivers could be diverted to fill an enormous reservoir. This reservoir would float ships on part of the 50-mile journey, its main purpose creating power. The dam and power station, whose skeleton is now rising, will generate a million horsepower, store two billion kilowatt hours of electricity.

Using this enormous force, the canal builders will disregard cumberous hydraulic locks. Giant cradles will seize the canal vessels, pull them out of the water and carry them on an incline railway half a mile into the air up the face of a cliff. After crossing the proposed reservoir, a second smaller set of electric elevators will raise the vessels to the level of Sao Paulo.

Their imaginations fired by visions of cliff-climbing ships, Brazilian commentators were prone to overlook last week an important by-product of the same development, an aerial cable railway that will carry a ton of Brazilian coffee every 46 seconds from the top of the cliff down to Santos harbor.