Excerpt
The idea of carving a giant path through the middle of a continent to connect two oceans might sound like something out of a wild adventure story. But that’s exactly what people set out to do when they built the Panama Canal. Ships no longer had to take the long and dangerous trip around the southern tip of South America. Instead, they could cut right through the middle of Panama, saving thousands of miles and weeks of travel. It completely changed the way the world moved goods, people, and ideas. But getting there was anything but easy.
Building the Panama Canal wasn’t just about digging a really big ditch. It was about problem-solving on a massive scale. The jungle was thick and wild. The land wasn’t flat, so engineers couldn’t just dig straight through it. There were deadly diseases that made workers sick. And the weather? Brutal. Rain poured down for months at a time, turning dirt into thick, sticky mud that swallowed up tools and slowed everything down.
The first people who tried to build the canal didn’t make it very far. A French team, led by an engineer named Ferdinand de Lesseps, had already built the Suez Canal in Egypt—a straight waterway through desert sand. They thought they could do the same thing in Panama, but they were in for a harsh lesson. The jungle wasn’t like the desert. It was alive, filled with swarms of mosquitoes that carried deadly diseases. Workers collapsed from yellow fever and malaria, two sicknesses that people didn’t fully understand at the time. The heat was unbearable. The rains turned construction sites into disaster zones. The French effort was a complete failure.
Years later, the United States took over the project, determined to finish what had been started. This time, things would be different. Scientists had figured out that mosquitoes were the real culprits behind malaria and yellow fever, and doctors like William Gorgas led a massive effort to get rid of them. Swamps were drained, standing water was removed, and mosquito populations dropped. Fewer workers got sick, which meant more could stay on the job.
That still didn’t solve the biggest problem—how to move huge ships across land that wasn’t flat. The plan to dig straight through Panama had already failed once. A new approach was needed. Instead of cutting through all that rock and earth, engineers decided to lift ships up and down using giant water-filled chambers called locks. Instead of fighting against nature, they worked with it. A massive man-made lake, Gatun Lake, was created in the middle of the canal. Ships would enter the locks, get raised up to the level of the lake, sail across, and then be lowered back down to the ocean on the other side.
Even with this new plan, construction wasn’t easy. Machines broke. Landslides buried entire work sites. The heat and humidity made every task harder. But workers kept going, and after years of effort, the canal was finally ready. On August 15, 1914, the first official ship, the SS Ancon, made the historic journey from one ocean to the other. The impossible had been made possible.
The canal changed everything. Trade became faster. Travel became easier. The world felt a little smaller. But even today, more than a hundred years later, the canal is still a work in progress. Ships have gotten bigger, and the canal has had to grow with them. In 2016, a massive expansion was completed to allow even larger ships to pass through.
Building the Panama Canal wasn’t just about digging a really big ditch. It was about problem-solving on a massive scale. The jungle was thick and wild. The land wasn’t flat, so engineers couldn’t just dig straight through it. There were deadly diseases that made workers sick. And the weather? Brutal. Rain poured down for months at a time, turning dirt into thick, sticky mud that swallowed up tools and slowed everything down.
The first people who tried to build the canal didn’t make it very far. A French team, led by an engineer named Ferdinand de Lesseps, had already built the Suez Canal in Egypt—a straight waterway through desert sand. They thought they could do the same thing in Panama, but they were in for a harsh lesson. The jungle wasn’t like the desert. It was alive, filled with swarms of mosquitoes that carried deadly diseases. Workers collapsed from yellow fever and malaria, two sicknesses that people didn’t fully understand at the time. The heat was unbearable. The rains turned construction sites into disaster zones. The French effort was a complete failure.
Years later, the United States took over the project, determined to finish what had been started. This time, things would be different. Scientists had figured out that mosquitoes were the real culprits behind malaria and yellow fever, and doctors like William Gorgas led a massive effort to get rid of them. Swamps were drained, standing water was removed, and mosquito populations dropped. Fewer workers got sick, which meant more could stay on the job.
That still didn’t solve the biggest problem—how to move huge ships across land that wasn’t flat. The plan to dig straight through Panama had already failed once. A new approach was needed. Instead of cutting through all that rock and earth, engineers decided to lift ships up and down using giant water-filled chambers called locks. Instead of fighting against nature, they worked with it. A massive man-made lake, Gatun Lake, was created in the middle of the canal. Ships would enter the locks, get raised up to the level of the lake, sail across, and then be lowered back down to the ocean on the other side.
Even with this new plan, construction wasn’t easy. Machines broke. Landslides buried entire work sites. The heat and humidity made every task harder. But workers kept going, and after years of effort, the canal was finally ready. On August 15, 1914, the first official ship, the SS Ancon, made the historic journey from one ocean to the other. The impossible had been made possible.
The canal changed everything. Trade became faster. Travel became easier. The world felt a little smaller. But even today, more than a hundred years later, the canal is still a work in progress. Ships have gotten bigger, and the canal has had to grow with them. In 2016, a massive expansion was completed to allow even larger ships to pass through.