The Panama Canal: America’s Greatest Feat of Engineering

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. The Panama Canal’s story is one of an age-old dream fulfilled through French failure and American success, marked by engineering marvels along with immense human costs. Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast. Also contributing to this story is the late, great historian David McCullough. Let’s take a listen.

The Panama Canal was begun in the 1880s, and had it been built somewhere else, somewhere safe and convenient in Ohio, say, it still would have been the engineering marvel of the age. Its magnet food was so great, its ingenuity so remarkable. But here was the place to join the oceans, Panama, and Panama then was one of the most difficult and deadly terrains anywhere on Earth. And it’s this, quite apart from its importance as a world thoroughfare, that makes the Panama Canal such an extraordinary story.

Rising eighty-five feet above the surface of one ocean and then descending again to be gently floated onto another one. Ships that traverse the Panama Canal shave nearly 8,000 miles off their voyage to the other side by investing a long workday climbing up and then going back down the Isthmus of Panama, made possible by a handful of locks, despite the extreme expense for commercial vehicles to traverse it. About five percent of all the trade in the entire world passes through this early 20th-century engineering marvel where the canal sits. The Isthmus of Panama is a mere fifty-one miles cross compared with the Suez Canal, which was twice that length when first constructed in the modern era in 1869. The shorter Panama Canal was expected to be relatively easy to build when first envisioned in 1879, and since those visionaries had successfully completed the sea-level Suez Canal, they planned on making the man-made waterway that would join the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the same manner, i.e., at sea level. Sea-level canals are precisely what the name implies. The channels are dug sufficiently deep that their water surfaces are the same level as that of the bodies of water they want to join, and to accomplish this, a great deal of earth is removed. In the construction of the sea-level Suez Canal, approximately 600 million cubic feet of stuff was removed from the land, and more was dredged from the adjoining bodies of water. With that French-dug channel that joins the Mediterranean and the Red Seas taking only ten years to complete. In the middle of the 19th century, many thought a similar channel across the far smaller Central American peninsula would be a snap. While in one of the greatest examples of hubris in the Western world, they could not have been more wrong. Diplomat and engineer Vicomte Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps was instrumental in building the Suez Canal, and he led the initial work on the Panama Canal as well.

He had defied the experts who said the task at Suez was too big, and he succeeded with an unobstructed 105-mile passage dug through the Egyptian sand at sea level. He was also married a second time that same year of 1869, to a beautiful young woman who produced twelve children, an achievement considered in some circles more remarkable even than his Suez Canal. At an international conference at the Associated Geography in Paris, he revealed his plan. He will give the world another canal, complete the circle begun at Suez with a canal through Colombia’s Isthmian province of Panama. On a voyage from New York to San Francisco, it will save 8,000 miles compared to rounding the Horn of South America. His route will follow the Little Panama Railroad, just fifty miles from sea to sea.

Disease and construction delays hampered the project, and after nearly seven years, only a few of the hundreds of feet of excavation necessary had been accomplished, and this was just from one part of the channel. Yet even with these dramatic failures, it still took Lesseps another two years before he agreed to consider the construction of locks to help solve the increasing elevation in the middle, thus reducing the amount of excavation needed between the two sea-level sides. But even then, the locks were intended to be a mere temporary solution, while the digging of the sea-level passage continued. Interestingly, the person chosen to construct the locks was none other than Gustave Eiffel. He built a tower in Paris the next year for the 1889 wells Fat bus Well. It was already too late for the Central American projects. Compagnie Nouvelle, the company funding the work, went bankrupt in 1888, and de Lesseps died in disgrace shortly after that.

The French were ten years in Panama, during which they lost 20,000 lives, perhaps even more than that. But the death toll was not what stopped them. The money ran out. The size of the task was simply too great for private financing. Had de Lesseps not insisted on a sea-level canal, maybe things might have turned out differently. But he tried to repeat his success at Suez under conditions that were entirely different. He ignored his best advisors. He discounted reality. Late in the summer of 1901, twelve years after the bankruptcy of the French canal, an assassin’s bullet ended the life of President William McKinley. All at once America had a new leader. “Theodore Roosevelt,” said Senator Mark Hanna, “that damned cowboy is president of the United States!” Roosevelt, the youngest chief executive ever, had much he wanted to do. He believed in sea power as a ruling force in history. He dreamed of an American navy commanding two seas, with an American canal in between. American engineers had already achieved amazing results with the building of the Western railroads, the Brooklyn Bridge, and skyscrapers like New York’s popular Flatiron Building. Once the Senate authorized the president to take up where the French had left off at Panama, Roosevelt could hardly contain himself.

Understanding the immense value such a canal would have to the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt committed to the construction of the canal, and in 1903 negotiated the Hay–Herrán Treaty with Colombia, which owned the Canal Zone at the time. Wisely, the Colombian Senate feared the United States would use the opportunity to seize even greater political power in the country, and they refused to ratify it. Undeterred, the U.S. then aided a Panamanian nationalist rebellion, including stopping American-owned railroads from transporting Colombian troops and sending the Nashville, a U.S. warship, to protect the rebels. On November 6, 1903, the United States recognized the Republic of Panama. Two days later, a new treaty, the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, was signed and granted the U.S. permanent and exclusive possession of the zone in exchange for a $10 million signing bonus, which is worth about $255 million today, and $250,000 annually beginning nine years later.

The first year of the American effort was a fiasco. There was no organization, nobody had a plan, nobody seemed to know what to do. The food was bad, morale was terrible. When yellow fever broke out, hundreds fled for their lives. Nor was their attitude helped much when the new chief engineer arrived on the scene. He was an American named John Findley Wallace. He came with his wife, and they brought with them two metal caskets. Within about a year, during which almost nothing of any value happened, John Findley Wallace quit, which was the best thing he could have done, because it meant the appointment of a new chief engineer. He was John Stevens, a big, hard-driving man with a blunt frontier manner and a reputation at age fifty-two as the finest railroad engineer in America. He had built the Great Northern through the Rockies. He told the men he wanted all excavations stopped. The first step was to make it a fit place to live. They liked him at once. In less than two years, he worked something of a miracle on the Isthmus and saved the canal from almost certain disaster. To army doctor William Gorgas, Stevens was an act of providence. Unlike the French, Gorgas now knew that yellow fever and malaria are carried by mosquitoes. He had proved the point by eradicating the yellow fever mosquito in Havana after the Spanish-American War, working with Dr. Walter Reed.

And you’ve been listening to Simon Whistler, and you’ve also been listening to David McCullough. This audio is taken from his talk, “A Man, A Plan, A Canal: Panama!” McCullough is also the author of The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, one of his very best books. And what a story he’s telling about! First, the failure, the initial failure by the French. In steps Teddy Roosevelt, in steps some of the great engineers and also some of the great health experts to help move the project forward. When we come back, more of the story of the building, the making, the creation of the Panama Canal, after these messages here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of the Panama Canal, as told by Simon Whistler and the late, great David McCullough. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

Work was slow going over the next few years, with efforts focused on revamping the sixty-year-old railroad and improving working and living conditions.

Orders went out for 1,000 brooms, 4,000 buckets, carbolic acid, mercurial chloride, 8,000 pounds of common soap, 120 tons of insecticide. Stevens personally signed requisitions for $90,000 worth of wire screens. By December 1905, Gorgas was able to announce there was no more yellow fever on the Isthmus. It was hard to believe but true. The year after, Stevens had 24,000 men at work, and Theodore Roosevelt decided to come look things over. He came in November, the peak of the rainy season, because he told reporters he wanted to see conditions at their worst. It was the first time a president had ever left the country while in office, and Roosevelt loved every minute. He wanted to know everything about everything, to hear what the men had to say. He told them, “You are doing the biggest thing of the kind that’s ever been done, and I wanted to see how you were doing it.”

The locks were begun in August of 1909 with the construction of Gatun Locks on the Atlantic side.

It was John Stevens who saw the real lesson of the French experience, the futility of trying to dig all the way down to sea level. It was John Stevens who best explained to Theodore Roosevelt how a lock-and-lake canal would bridge the Isthmus and make a virtue of Panama’s phenomenal rainfall by damming the Chagres River and creating a man-made.

Lake, consisting of over 3 million cubic yards of concrete. At Gatun, there are three sets of paired locks. The canal is actually two parallel channels that, in principle, would allow two ships to pass in opposing directions at the same time. Each lock is 1,050 feet long and 110 feet wide, and together they are placed consecutively like watery stair steps to ultimately raise or lower ships the eighty-five feet between the highest points on land and the ocean’s surface.

Roosevelt could now picture how a ship would be lifted up to the lake through a series of locks, like steps. The system was brilliant because it was so simple. Each chamber would fill by a flow of water from the lake above. That one force at work was simple gravity. No pumps were required. Roosevelt might have insisted on a sea-level canal; it was what many in Washington wanted, but he listened to Stevens, and well he did. Had the United States tried to build a sea-level canal, the project almost certainly would have failed. All at once, something entirely unexpected happened: John Stevens quit. In any event, an extremely angry Theodore Roosevelt, determined to have no more chief engineers walking off the job, appointed a man who couldn’t quit: an army officer, Colonel George Washington Goethals. Goethals’s value was enormous. He ran things magnificently. He and the other army engineers had built locks and dams before on American rivers. Their professional background could not have been more appropriate with the work. At full blast, the United States was digging the equivalent of a Suez Canal every three years. In any one day, there were 50 to 60 steam shovels in the cut. Along the entire line, about 200 train loads a day were being hauled to the dumps.

As a ship enters a lock, 25 million gallons of water are added to raise the boats to a level sufficient to allow it to enter the next lock. Walls that are anywhere from forty-five to fifty-five feet thick at the base and tapering to just eight feet at the top hold all of this water. This process repeats twice on either side until the ship reaches the plateau, where it sails across the isthmus towards the other set of locks to repeat the process, but obviously it does this in reverse. Water is drained, and the ship is lowered at each step. On the Pacific side, there is a single lock near the apex of the Gatun Lake, called the Pedro Miguel. Then there are two others down to the ocean at Miraflores.

The volume of concrete poured for the Gatun Locks alone, somebody figured, was enough to build a wall eight feet thick, twelve feet high, and 133 miles long. With an overall length of 1,000 feet and a width of 110 feet, each lock was considerably bigger than a ship the size of the Titanic. In fact, a single lock chamber, if stood on end, would have been the tallest structure in the world.

Ship center via two pairs of large, yet relatively lightweight and buoyant, seven-feet-thick gates that vary in size depending on the conditions. The heaviest and tallest gates, 662 tons and eighty-two feet high, are at Miraflores, where the tidal range varies greatly. In fact, there the difference between extreme high and low tide is so great that, depending on conditions, a boat may need to be lifted or lowered as much as 64.5 feet or as little as 43 feet. The remaining Pacific lift at the Pedro Miguel lock is consistently 31 feet. Likewise, on the Atlantic side, the lift of the three Gatun Locks remains relatively stable, at 85 feet in total. Remarkably, ships require only two feet of clearance on each side of the canal, such that in the 110-foot-wide area, about 106 feet across may traverse, although not necessarily without a bit of anxiety. The maximum length of a ship allowed in the canal is nigh on 165 feet, and the maximum draft is 39.5 feet. Together, these maximum specs are known as the Panamax.

And with the end of the task now so nearly in sight, Panama became a number-one attraction for tourists. They came by the thousands. One was ten-year-old Charles Lindbergh Jr., traveling with his mother. Remembering his excitement years later, Lindbergh would write, “The very name America made one think of miracles. We had conquered a continent; we had abolished slavery; we had developed the automobile; we had invented the airplane; and now we were building the Panama Canal.” The passage of American battleships from sea to sea left no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt’s dream had come true.

This is pretty small by today’s standards of commercial ships. Since although some massive ocean vessels routinely carry 18,000 containers, the largest that can through the canal will hold less than 5,000. Completed in 2016, the new canal has a set of locks which are 180 feet wide and 1,400 feet long. This new size means ships as big as the largest that could traverse the Suez Canal can now travel through the Panama Canal. They can hold about 13,000 containers. Interestingly, due to currents and other such factors, the Pacific around Panama is, on average, about eight inches (that’s 20 centimeters) higher than the Atlantic, meaning that if a sea-level system was dug, there would be a significant current flowing from the Pacific side to the Atlantic side. Tidal currents would also present something of a problem for ships in this case. If you’re wondering how much it costs to go through the Panama Canal, this varies greatly depending on what you’re hauling and the size and type of your ship. But for reference, if you are a commercial ship carrying around 5,000 containers, you can expect to pay a bit under $500,000 when all the fees are added up. This does vary, though, depending on several factors. On the other hand, if you’re a cruise ship holding, say, 1,000 passengers, the cruise company is going to be paying close to $150,000 for the shortcut. However, if you’re just out there on your little private boat, you could expect to pay somewhere between $1,000 to $3,000 to go from one side to the other.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler and a special thanks to Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, The B.