Undeterred, Prussia, newly rich and powerful, had their own designs for the river. During the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, Prussia consolidated some of the southern German states into its empire. During the Franco-Prussian War in the early 1870s Prussia took Alsace-Lorraine and with it, the controlling stake of the Rhine on both banks from the Swiss border all the way to the border with Holland. Suddenly, instead of having to ratify twelve treaties before making modifications to the river, they could act almost unilaterally.

Enter Adolph Eduard Nobiling, a seasoned hydro-engineer who had done work on almost all the other major German rivers. Valuing navigational ease above flood control, he made several more Tulla-like cuts and invented a new type of wing dam, which were like jetties coming out from the banks of the river and which directed the flow to the center of the river so that the river would cut a deep, fast-flowing central channel deep enough for modern boats.

He cut a large hole in the underwater quartz vein near the Lorelei that had so long sent sailors to their deaths- decreasing the effectiveness of the siren's song.

Throughout the century the Dutch had been wriggling their way out of the treaties they'd signed promising to make the Rhine navigable "jusqu'au mer" (to the sea) by interpreting this part of the treaty to say, "until the sea"... so they ended their improvements of the delta just shy of the sea. In another phrase, they promised to make the river navigable "au bouche" to the mouth of the river. Since the Rhine splits into several tributaries and therefore has several "mouths", they chose one of the lesser mouths to improve, again stopping German traffic from reaching the sea. They did this because they had long served as middlemen between Germany and the Rhine basin and they didn't want to give up their rights. Their insolence set an example for the rest of the nations, who repeatedly violated the treaty and cited the Dutch examples as precendents. The city of Mannheim posed a particular problem because they had been enjoying their status as the farthest city that could be reached on the Rhine. They were also part of the state of Baden, who had just built a wide rail network and was eager to use this network as a monopoly on the Swiss transport of goods, since the Swiss had no direct access to the sea. Finally, when the Dutch saw what they had to gain by opening the free trade developing on the Rhine, and the rise of the railroad as competition for shipping began to seriously affect business on the river, everyone resolved these conflicts and, with a series of dams, barrages, wing dams, weir dams and cuts, the engineers opened the river up for year-round shipping all the way from the Swiss city of Basel to the North Sea, turning Switzerland into a sea faring nation and Rotterdam into a world class harbor.

These improvements weren't without their problems, however. Unwittingly, the engineers had changed the pattern of peak river discharge. Normally precipitation would fall over the whole region in the winter or spring and the low-land tributaries would swell and feed into the Rhine and be carried out to sea. The precipitation that fell on the Alps would fall as snow and be stored during the winter and spring and come into the rivers in the summer when it melted, meaning that the peak discharge would always come after that of the Black Forest and Alsace-Lorraine tributaries. If a warm spring melted the snow too early, the upper valleys of the Rhine would flood and hold the water temporarily before it went downstream. After the dikes were built to protect this upstream area from flooding it no longer held water and instead it went straight downstream-- faster than ever before because of the steepened river channel and absence of meanders. Thus instead of taking 2.5 days for the swell to go downriver, it took less than 24 hours. Now instead of peaking in turn, the peaks from the upper and lower tributaries met in the same place at the same time and combined, forming a massive peak of water that slammed into the downstream German cities like Cologne, killing people and destroying property at a level never before seen in history. The river bed was constantly eroding, and people started supplying it with gravel to mediate the erosion.

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