the city's financial centre, defraying the many Baroque palaces built during the era, and into a major traffic junction, serving both an increasing number of ships, the citizens of Stockholm who increased from 9,000 to 47,000 people 1611–1675. Lock of Polhem Following the death of Charles XII in 1718, and the defeat in the Great Northern War (1700–1721) the Swedish capital was a city in despair, preparing for a Russian attack and encamped by impoverished, refugees, and idle soldiers. The southern lock of the city was approaching a century in age, a bottleneck in a state of decay, inadequate for both the larger shipping vessels of the era and the increasing traffic load. While Göran Josuæ Adelcrantz (1668–1739), the pupil and successor of Tessin the Younger, was mostly occupied by the construction works of the new Royal Palace, in 1622 he accomplished an emergency repair of the old lock; workers wading between the temporary embankments filling cracks with clay, straw, and muck, while loose and missing planks were put back in place. These measure not only ended much more expensive than intended but also proved completely insufficient, and as the decay had obviously made the old lock impossible to repair properly, Christopher Polhem (1661–1751), "the father of Swedish mechanics", was consulted for a new construction. The proposal of Adelcrantz for a new construction, estimated to cost 32,741 riksdaler in silver coins, was passed over by a suggested repair of the old lock by Johan Eberhard Carlberg (1683–1773) in 1726, limited in cost to 30,000 rikdaler while implying widening the canal from 6,5 to 8,2 meters, a proposal to the taste of the city's building board which subsequently had Adelcrantz replaced by Carlberg. The latter, however, was a daring man and he quickly produced a proposal for a new lock south of the old, a proposal which implied not only the demolition of the city's brewery, but also the discontinuation of the bar iron deposit next to the lock (the biggest in Europe, representing about 40% of the global market at the time). By 1728, however, the city had accepted the need for a new construction, and, as Carlberg was busy with other undertakings, finally assigned Polhem for the project in 1729. The proposal for a wooden construction he produced the following year didn't please the board which had anticipated a more lasting construction in stone, and as the whole affair