The humble barge gave English the word embark and a famous idiom
To embark literally means to board a barque, a word that traces back through Latin and Greek to an Egyptian term for a basket-shaped boat. Barges gave English another phrase too: the long poles bargemen used to push off from wharves and other vessels inspired the saying about not touching something with a barge pole.
A barge is usually a flat-bottomed boat with no engine of its own, and for centuries that meant sails, oars, poles, tides or horses. The word barge appears in English from about 1300 and originally meant any small boat. By the 1890s its local meanings had multiplied: on the Mersey people spoke of flats, on the Humber of keels, and on the Thames of lighters, which carried no mast at all. The term dumb barge arose partly to cut through the confusion.
Britain's canal boom from 1750 created its own specialist. Many smaller canals had locks, bridges and tunnels only about 2.1 metres wide, so builders developed the narrowboat, a couple of inches slimmer, hauled by horses walking along towpaths. Narrowboats were once called barges too, but on British canals the word no longer applies to them, and today they mostly carry holidaymakers under engine power.
The modern barge arrived with iron hulls towed by steam tugs, first used for grain and other bulk goods. Between about 1840 and 1870 the combination spread to the Rhine, Danube and Don and to rivers in Egypt, India and Australia, many of the barges built in Britain. By 1880 British rivers and canals relied heavily on tugs, although plenty of Thames barges still worked with poles, oars and the tide. In Europe barges are generally towed, while in America they are generally pushed.
Barges remain the cheapest way to move bulky, low-value cargo. A typical American barge measures about 59 by 11 metres and carries up to roughly 1,400 tonnes. In 2006 one delivered a fully assembled 513-tonne refinery reactor from Oklahoma to Mississippi. A Texas A&M study found barges emit 43 percent less greenhouse gas per ton than rail.
Source: Barge
