Ferdinand de Lesseps had already performed one miracle. The charismatic French diplomat had driven the Suez Canal to completion in 1869, and when he turned to Panama in 1881 investors threw money at him. Suez, though, had been a sea-level ditch through flat desert. Panama was mountainous jungle with torrential rains, catastrophic landslides, a river that flooded violently — and diseases nobody yet understood. De Lesseps insisted on a sea-level canal anyway. Over eight years his company chewed through vast sums of money while yellow fever and malaria killed workers at a horrifying rate; estimates put the French-era death toll at around 22,000. The company collapsed in 1889, wiping out the savings of hundreds of thousands of French investors, and the ensuing bribery scandal disgraced politicians and broke de Lesseps, who died a few years later. Gustave Eiffel, engaged to design locks in the project's late, desperate phase, was caught up in the scandal too.
The United States picked up the wreckage — after some geopolitical theatre. Washington's first choice had long been a canal through Nicaragua, and the route through Panama required a treaty with Colombia, which then owned the isthmus. When the Colombian senate rejected the terms in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt made no secret of his sympathy for Panamanian separatists. Panama declared independence in November 1903 with a US warship conveniently offshore, and the brand-new republic — represented in Washington by a Frenchman from the old canal company, Philippe Bunau-Varilla — promptly signed a treaty granting the United States control of a canal zone. Roosevelt later boasted, in effect, that he took the isthmus and let Congress debate afterwards.
Kill the mosquito, move the dirt
The Americans succeeded because they solved two problems the French had failed to solve. The first was disease. Building on the work of Cuban physician Carlos Finlay and US army researcher Walter Reed, who had shown that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever, army doctor William Gorgas waged systematic war on the insects: draining and oiling standing water, fumigating buildings, screening windows and isolating patients. Yellow fever was effectively eliminated from the canal zone within a couple of years and malaria was beaten back, turning a graveyard into a workable construction site — though the American decade still cost around 5,600 lives, the majority of them West Indian labourers who did the hardest work.
The second problem was conceptual. Chief engineer John Stevens, a railroad man, grasped that Panama was above all an earthmoving and logistics problem, rebuilt the Panama Railroad into a vast dirt-hauling machine, and championed the decisive design change: abandon the sea-level dream in favour of a lock-and-lake canal. The Chagres River, the French project's tormentor, became the solution — dammed at Gatún to create what was then the largest artificial lake in the world, lifting ships 26 metres above the sea across most of the isthmus. When Stevens resigned in 1907, Roosevelt replaced him with an army engineer who could not quit, George Washington Goethals, who drove the project home. The bitterest fight was the Culebra Cut through the continental divide, where steam shovels battled landslides that repeatedly buried months of work.
The canal's mechanics remain elegant. Ships are raised and lowered through three sets of locks entirely by gravity — water flowing from Gatún Lake, no pumps — while electric locomotives called mules steady them in the chambers. The original lock chambers, 110 feet wide and 1,000 feet long, defined the "Panamax" ship dimensions that constrained world shipbuilding for a century, until a wider third set of locks opened in 2016. And a detail that wins pub quizzes: because of the isthmus's S-shape, the canal runs roughly northwest to southeast, and the Pacific entrance lies east of the Atlantic entrance.
An anticlimactic opening, a long goodbye
The canal opened on 15 August 1914, with the cargo ship SS Ancon making the first official transit — and almost nobody paying attention, because the First World War had erupted in Europe weeks earlier. The 50-mile crossing spared ships the roughly 8,000-mile voyage around Cape Horn. Tolls are charged by vessel type and size; the cheapest on record was paid in 1928 by the adventurer Richard Halliburton, who swam the canal and was charged 36 cents. The United States controlled the waterway until the treaties negotiated by Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos in 1977 set a handover date: at noon on 31 December 1999, the canal passed to Panama, which has run it — and expanded it — ever since.
Quiz nuggets
- Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of Suez, led the failed French attempt of 1881–1889; disease killed around 22,000 workers.
- William Gorgas's mosquito-control campaign against yellow fever and malaria made American construction possible.
- The canal opened on 15 August 1914; SS Ancon made the first official transit.
- The locks work by gravity using water from Gatún Lake, and the Pacific entrance lies east of the Atlantic entrance.
- Panama took full control of the canal at noon on 31 December 1999 under the Torrijos–Carter treaties.