Why Is the Panama Canal a Modern Wonder of the World?

The Panama Canal makes ships float uphill between oceans -- and creating it took solving an epidemic, moving millions of tons of earth, and inciting a revolution just to start out. Learn more about the Panama Canal in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://science.howstuffworks.com/engineering/structural/panama-canal.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Bohlbaum.
Here in the hot jungles of Central America in the
early nineteen hundreds, but thousands of workers toiled in the
rain and mud trying to cleave Panama in half in
order to join the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

(00:24):
The difficult, dirty work involved more than digging and dynamiting,
though working on the Panama Canal in the early days
was about simply surviving. Thousands of workers Perhaps his money
is twenty two thousand died while the French first tried
to dig the canal. Yellow fever was rampant, as was malaria.

(00:45):
On the job accidents killed and maimed. Close to eighty
percent of the workforce was fleeing what Americans took over
the job in nineteen oh three. When famed engineer John
Frank Stevens arrived in nineteen oh five, First's job was
to stop the carnage, and that meant accepting the new
idea that controlling mosquitoes would prevent the spread of disease.

(01:09):
We talked about this a bit in our recent episode
about Hispanic scientists who changed the world Carlos Juan Finlay
had been saying since the eighteen eighties that mosquitoes were
the carrier of yellow fever, but this theory was only
just then around the turn of the century. Catching on
for the article this episode is based on how Stuff Work.
Spoke with Jay David Rogers, a professor of geological engineering

(01:32):
at Missouri University of Science and Technology. He said, men
of that era couldn't conceive of a mosquito being able
to kill a strong man. They just couldn't respect that.
The thing you had to conquer to make that project
work was the sanitation issues. Under the guidance of US
Army physician William Crawford Gorges, Stevens had the local swamplands

(01:55):
drained and grassland's cut to control the mosquitoes. They employed inicides,
screened in workers quarters, and trapped adult mosquitos wherever they could.
The workers were given quinine and anti malarial. The result,
yellow fever in the area was all but eradicated, and
deaths from malaria in the local population were reduced by

(02:16):
over eighty percent. The Panama Canal is considered a marvel
of engineering, one of the seven Modern Wonders of the world.
But it's debatable whether these medical feats were even more impressive.
But okay, let's back up a bit. Oh, why were
we going to all this trouble in the first place.

(02:38):
Egypt's sUAS Canal, connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean
had opened in eighteen sixty nine, revolutionizing water travel from
Europe to Asia. After seeing this success, America envisioned a
shortcut through Central America as a way of strengthening its
global position. Before the Panama Canal opened, the ships had
to travel all the way around South America to get

(03:01):
from the US's Atlantic coast to its Pacific coast. At
the time, the trip took over sixty days and some
eight thousand miles. That's nearly thirteen thousand kilometers of travel,
not ideal if you wanted to move goods or naval
ships in any kind of a hurry. For years, the
US had been considering building a canal through Nicaragua, but

(03:22):
engineering concerns, not to mention worries about active volcanoes in
the area prompted President Teddy Roosevelt to continue with the
failed French site in Panama instead. In nineteen oh three,
he agreed to pay the French forty million dollars to
assume control of the project, worth the equivalent of about
one point three billion in today's dollars. It'd take more

(03:44):
than a decade to complete. The French had helped build
the Suez Canal in Egypt, but the Panama project was
a different animal, immense and complex. As the Americans took control,
the building of the Panama Canal became an audacious example
of American ingenuity and know how and a loose sense
of physical responsibility. By the end, the US had shelled

(04:07):
out some three hundred and seventy five million dollars, somewhere
close to eleven billion today. The project came in at
about four hundred and forty four percent over budget. Rogers
said it was a national pride project. We'd just kept
writing checks. Besides the deadly diseases that plagued the early

(04:28):
days of the construction, there was also difficult weather to
contend with tropical rains and intense heat, and there were
political troubles as the United States cleared the way for
the canal by deeply interfering with local governments in order
to help Panama, then a province of Columbia, officially separate
and become its own country. Newly sovereign Panama was willing

(04:50):
to seed the necessary land of the US where Columbia
had balked. And we haven't even really talked about engineering yet, okay.
American engineers abandoned ideas about a sea level canal like
the Suez. Director Stephens instead insisted upon a series of
locks that would raise or lower ships as needed. But

(05:13):
that designed necessitated construction of another big project. A dam
had to be built across the sometimes raging Shagris River
to ensure the proper flow of water between the Pacific
Ocean and the Atlantic. Called the Gottune Dam, it was
at the time the largest dam in the world. It

(05:33):
also formed Gatune Lake, a major component of the canal's operation.
More on that in a minute. And then there was
the sheer scope of the project. Between the French and
American builders, Some seven point two billion cubic feet of
earth and rock had to be excavated two hundred and
seventy million cubic meters, which is three times what was

(05:55):
removed to build the Suez Canal. Most of that muck
was placed on to railcars and shipped to the coasts,
dumped into huge piles in the ocean. It now forms
breakwaters and the foundation for towns and a military base,
and much was also dumped into the adjacent jungle. Rogers
said they had to learn a lot while they were going.

(06:16):
They used up all of the vitrified clay pipes to
be produced in the United States, and all the cement
produced in the United States, and all of the dynamite
produced in the United States over this ten year period
all diverted down to Panama. Yet despite the constant challenges,
the Panama Canal opened in August of nineteen fourteen, spanning

(06:38):
some fifty miles or eighty kilometers through the land. In
its first five years, the canal was barely used due
to decreased commercial traffic because of World War One and
a series of landslides which closed the passage for almost
all of nineteen fifteen and would continue for years. The
different layers of earth and rock that made up the

(06:58):
land interacted on predictably due to all that excavation, But
by World War Two, the Panama Canal was traveled extensively
by US warships and it's become a major shipping route
between the Pacific and Atlantic. At one time, engineers again
looked at making the passage a sea level canal, which

(07:19):
would eliminate the need for locks and decrease travel time.
That idea was scrapped, and after World War II, when
military ships became too big to pass through, engineers also
considered detonating a series of underground nuclear devices to excavate
more earth and expand the canal. That too, was dismissed.

(07:42):
In nineteen seventy seven, the signing of the Turi Host
Carter Treaties returned control of the canal from the United
States to Panama, effective December thirty first of nineteen ninety nine.
Since then, the Panama Canal has been expanded so that
even larger aircraft, carriers and cargo ships can pass through.
The locks used to be about one hundred feet or

(08:02):
thirty meters wide, and are now at about one hundred
and seventy five feet or fifty meters. Even so, there
are now some ships too big for the canal. But
let's talk about how the locks work. The Pacific Ocean
sits at a slightly higher sea level than the Atlantic,
and the rocky land in between the two through Panama

(08:24):
rises to some three hundred and sixty feet or one
hundred and ten meters above both. Rather than excavating down
to the same sea level and letting the waters rip through,
engineers determined that a series of massive locking gates could
lower and raise ships. That's where our human made Gatun
Lake comes in, which risks at about eighty five feet

(08:46):
above sea level that's twenty six meters from either side.
Once a ship enters the Panama Canal, the goal is
to get them up and over the terrain across Gattun
Lake and then back down again, which is the job
of locking system. A ship's entering the Panama Canal from
the Atlantic enter the first of three Gatoon locks, where

(09:09):
a massive chamber fills twenty six point seven million gallons
of water. To fill the chamber with water and raise
the ship, the gates and lower lock valves are closed
while the upper valves are opened. Water from Gatoon Lake
rushes in through twenty holes in the chamber floor. It
takes about eight minutes for the chamber to completely fill

(09:30):
and raise the ship. The process is repeated two more
times until the ship is level with Gatoon Lake. The
ship then travels across Gatoon Lake until it reaches the
Pacific Ocean side, where it enters the Pedromaguel locks and
the process goes in reverse. It's lowered through one lock
down to a second human made lake Miraflorus, then through

(09:51):
a second lock back to sea level. The entire trip
takes an average of eight to ten hours. Ships don't
so through the Panama Canal for free. They pay a
toll based on the measurements of the vessel each time
they enter, and it earns Panama more than two point
five billion dollars a year. There are now three lanes
for ships and locks, so it's not a single file

(10:14):
line going through. That means that there are forty six
locking gates in total, and they're each massive of sixty
five feet wide by seven feet deep in metric that's
nine by two meters. Their heights vary from forty five
to eighty feet of fourteen to twenty four meters. The
mere Floris gates are the tallest because of the Pacific

(10:36):
Ocean tides. Each gate weighs from three hundred and twenty
to six hundred metric tons. The canal hosts nearly fourteen
thousand trips a year, mainly by container ships and others
carrying fuel, coal, grains, minerals and metals. Though other smaller
ships make the Crossing two. Now more than one hundred

(10:58):
years after its opening, you can see why it remains
a modern wonderer. Today's episode is based on the article
how the Panama Canal makes waterflow uphill on HowStuffWorks dot Com,
written by John Donovan. Brain Stuff is production by Heart
Radio in partnership with HowStuffWorks dot Com, and it's produced
by Tyler Klang. Before more podcasts from my heart Radio,

(11:21):
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