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Cable-suspended, stream-gaging car used in measuring velocity of streams. Arkansas River near Canyon City, Fremont County, Colorado.

U.S. Geological Survey · 1890 · U.S. Geological Survey

Two men in hats sit in a small open car slung from a cable above a wide river, one working a reel over the side, with a scrub-covered canyon slope behind.
From the archive · U.S. Geological Survey · 1890 Cable-suspended, stream-gaging car used in measuring velocity of streams. Arkansas River near Canyon City, Fremont County, Colorado. U.S. Geological Survey

U.S. Geological Survey, USGS Library Photographic Collection U.S. government work; public domain. Archive record ↗ · Rights

Source Archival record · verify at U.S. Geological Survey ↗

This is what a discharge measurement WAS. Two men in a box on a wire over the Arkansas near Canon City, lowering a current meter and counting. Every trend this site computes rests on a century of people doing exactly this.

Shows: The physical act behind the numbers -- a cableway gaging car in use on a Colorado river in 1890.

What this does not let you conclude: Any reading. What the meter said that day is in a Water-Supply Paper, not in the frame, and the digital record these pages compute from starts decades later. Published as Plate 1-B of Water-Supply Paper no. 56, 1901; the album dates the exposure to 1890.

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The archive’s record did not answer our check on 2026-10-12 (refused automated check, HTTP 403). Our copy above is unaffected; the credit stands. A person will look.

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