October 24, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the dream of the Panama Canal began long before it became real. For centuries, people imagined a passage that would unite the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and open the world to faster trade. The French tried first, but disease and disaster claimed their dream. When the United States took over, Theodore Roosevelt called it a mission worthy of a great nation. What followed was one of the most difficult projects in history. Men from across the world arrived to dig, blast, and clear the Isthmus of Panama, working in punishing heat and thick jungle. Malaria and yellow fever swept through the camps, and entire families lost fathers, brothers, and sons before the canal was complete. Yet from that suffering came a triumph of engineering and perseverance that reshaped global trade forever. Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister show, the Brain Food Show podcast. Also contributing to this story is the late, great historian David McCullough.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
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
(00:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
The Panama Canal was begun in the eighteen eighties, 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. It's magnet food was so great,
its ingenuity so remarkable. But here was the place to
(01:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
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 eight thousand
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.
(01:50):
About five percent of all the trade in the entire
world passes through this early twentieth century engineering marvel where
the canal sits. The Isthmus of Panama is a mere
fifty one miles cross compared with the Seuez Canal, which
was twice that length when first constructed in the modern
era in eighteen sixty nine. The shorter Panama Canal was
(02:12):
expected to be relatively easy to build when first envisioned
in eighteen seventy nine, and since those visionaries had successfully
completed the sea level Sewers Canal, they planned on making
the man made waterway that would join the Atlantic and
the Pacific Oceans in the same manner i e. At
sea level. Sea level canals are precisely what the name implies.
(02:33):
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 Sewez Canal, approximately six hundred million cubic
feet of stuff was removed from the land, and more
was dredged from the adjoining bodies of water. With that
(02:55):
French dug channel that joins the Mediterranean and the Red
Seas taking only ten years to complete. An the middle
of the nineteenth 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 Ferdinands Marie de la Sepe was
(03:17):
instrumental in building the Suez Canal, and he led the
initial work on the Panama Canal as well.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
He had defied the experts who said the task at
Suez was too big, and he succeeded with an unobstructed
one hundred and five mile passage dug through the Egyptian
sand at sea level. He was also married a second
time that same year of eighteen sixty nine, to a
beautiful young woman who produced twelve children, an achievement considered
(03:45):
in some circles more remarkable even than his Suez Canal.
At an international conference at the Associated Geography in Paris,
he reveals 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
(04:06):
York to San Francisco. It will save eight thousand miles
compared to rounding the Horn of South America. His route
will follow the Little Panama Railroad, just fifty miles from
c to sea.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
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 lasp another two years before
he agreed to consider the construction of locks to help
(04:41):
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 Gustaf I Felt. He built a
tower in Paris the next year for the eighteen eighty
(05:02):
nine wells Fat bus Well. It was already too late
for the Central American projects. Compagne Nouvelle, the company funding
the walk, when's bankrupt in eighteen eighty eight, and de
la Sepe died in disgrace shortly off that.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
The French were ten years in Panama, during which they
lost twenty thousand 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 the Lessons not insisted on
a canal at sea level, maybe things might have turned
out differently. But he tried to repeat his success at
(05:39):
Suez under conditions that were entirely different. He ignored his
best advisors. He discounted reality. Late in the summer of
nineteen hundred and one, 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,
(06:02):
Theodore Roosevelt said Senator Mark Hannah, 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
(06:23):
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 Flat Iron Building. Once the
Senate authorized the President to take up where the French
had left off at Panama, Roosevelt could hardly contain himself.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
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 nineteen oh three negotiated the
Heharon Treaty with Columbia, 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
(07:05):
in the country, and they refused to ratify it. Undeterred,
the US then aided a Panamanian nationalist's rebellion, including stopping
American owned railroads from transporting Columbian troops and sending the
Nashville a US warship to protect the rebels. On November
the sixth, nineteen o three, the United States recognized the
Republic Panama. Two days later, in U treaty the Hayba
al Varia was signed and granted the US permanent and
(07:29):
exclusive possession of the zone in exchange for a ten
million dollars signing bonus, which is worth about two hundred
and fifty five million dollars to day and two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars annually beginning nine years later.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
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 help much. When the
new chief engineer arrived on the scene. He was an
(08:02):
American named John Findlay 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 Findlay 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
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
saved the canal from almost certain disaster. To army doctor
William Gorgis, Stephens 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 doctor Walter Reed.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And you've been listening to Simon Whistler, and you've also
been listening to David McCullough, and this audio is taken
from his talk A Man A Plan, A Canal Panama.
McCulla is also the author of The Path between the Seas,
by the Way, the Creation of the Panama Canal, one
of his very best books. And what a story he's
(09:28):
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
(09:49):
of the Panama Canal. After these messages here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(10:11):
the story of the Panama Canal, and as told by
Simon Whistler in the late Great David McCullum let's pick
up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Work was slow going over the next few years, with
efforts focused on revamping the sixty year old railroad and
improving working as livin conditions.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Orders went out for a thousand brooms, four thousand buckets
carbolic acid, mercurial chloride, eight thousand pounds of common soap,
one hundred and twenty tons of insecticide. Stevens personally signed
requisitions for ninety thousand dollars worth of wire screens. By
December nineteen hundred and five, Gorges was able to announce
(10:55):
there was no more yellow fever on the Isthmus. It
was hard to believe but true. The year after, Stevens
had twenty four thousand minute 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
(11:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
The locks were begun in August of nineteen oh nine
with the construction of Gatton Locks on the Atlantic side.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
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 in
Lake Canal would bridge the Isthmus and make a virtue
of Panama's phenomenal rainfall by damming the Chagris River and
creating a man made.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Lake consisting of over three million cubic yards of concrete.
At Gatton, 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 one thousand and fifty feet
long and one hundred and ten feet wide, and together
they are placed consecutively like watery stair steps to ultimately
(12:26):
raise or lower ships the eighty five feet between the
highest points on lands and the ocean's surface.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
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
(12:55):
sea level canal, it was what many in Washington wanted,
but he listened to Stephens, 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
(13:18):
chief engineers walking off the job, appointed a man who
couldn't quit, an army officer, Colonel George Washington Goehals. Gothals
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
(13:41):
appropriate with the work at Folk last, the United States
was digging the equivalent of a Suez Canal every three years.
In any one day, there were fifty to sixty steam
shovels in the cut. Along the entire line, About two
hundred train loads a day were being hauled to the dumps.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
As a ship ends as a lower that twenty five
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.
In this process repeats twice on either side until the
ship reaches the plateau, where it sails across the isthmus
(14:21):
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 Gatin Lake, called the Pedro Miguel. Then there
are two others down to the ocean at Mira Flores.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
The volume of concrete poured for the Gatoon locks alone,
somebody figured, was enough to build a wall eight feet thick,
twelve feet high, and one hundred and thirty three miles long,
with an overall length of one thousand feet and a
width of one hundred and ten feet each lock, was
considerably bigger than a ship the size of the Titanic.
(14:58):
In fact, a single lock chamber, if stood on end,
would have been the tallest structure in the world.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Ship center via two pairs of large, yet relatively light
weight and buoyant, seven feet thick gates that vary in
size depending on the conditions. The heaviest and tallest gates,
six hundred and sixty two tons and eighty two feet high,
are at Near Flores, 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
(15:27):
may need to be lifted or lowered as much as
sixty four point five feet or as little as forty
three feet. The remaining Pacific lift at the Pedroumaguel lock
is consistently thirty one feet. Likewise, on the Atlantic side,
the lift of the three Gaten locks remains relatively stable,
at eighty five feet in total. Remarkably, ships require only
two feet of clearance on each side of the canal,
(15:49):
such that in the one hundred and ten foot wide area,
about of one hundred and six 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 hundred and sixty five feet, and the maximum draft
is thirty nine point five feet. Together these maximum specs
are known as the Panamax.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
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 Lindberg Junior, traveling with his mother, remembering his excitement.
Years later, Lindberg would write, the very name America made
(16:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
This is pretty small by today's standards of commercial ship
since although some massive ocean vessels routinely carry eighteen thousand containers,
the largest that can through the canal will hold less
than five thousand. Completed in twenty sixteen, the new canal
has a set of logs which are one hundred and
eighty feet wide and one four hundred feet long. This
new size means ships as big as the large as
(17:12):
that could traverse the Sewerz Canal can now travel through
the Panama Canal. They can hold about thirteen thousand containers. Interestingly,
due to currents and other such factors, the Pacific around
Panama is on average about eight inches that's twenty 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
(17:33):
would also present something of a problem for ships in
this case. If you're wondering at how much 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 five thousand containers, you can expect to pay a
bit under half a million dollars when all the fees
are added up. This does vary, though, depending on several factors.
(17:54):
On the other hand, if you're a cruise ship holding
say one thousand passengers, the cruise company is going to
be paying close to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
for the shortcust However, if you're just out there on
your little private boat, you could expect to pay somewhere
between one thousand to three thousand dollars to go from
one site to the other.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
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 Brain Food Show podcast and of
course a special thanks to the late great David McCullough.
David McCullough is also the author of the marvelous book
(18:30):
The Path between the Seas, The Creation of the Panama Canal,
and My Goodness. John Frank Stevens is hired by Roosevelt
as the chief engineer. He had built, by the way,
the Great Northern Railway, and with stevens help, the idea
of a sea level canal was abandoned. This was a
pivotal change and turn. But Stevens abruptly quit and the
(18:54):
next person in charge couldn't be fired. Roosevelt hired someone
from the military, George Washington Gothales. If you've ever been
over the Gothels Bridge connecting New Jersey to Staten Island,
now you know where the name came from and what
a marvel was produced. I love that reading from McCullough
talking about Charles Lindbergh visiting Panama. It became a top
(19:18):
tourist destination simply to see this engineering marvel. The story
of the Panama Canal here on our American Stories
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
(00:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
The Panama Canal was begun in the eighteen eighties, 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. It's magnet food was so great,
its ingenuity so remarkable. But here was the place to
(01:06):
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.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
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 eight thousand
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.
(01:50):
About five percent of all the trade in the entire
world passes through this early twentieth century engineering marvel where
the canal sits. The Isthmus of Panama is a mere
fifty one miles cross compared with the Seuez Canal, which
was twice that length when first constructed in the modern
era in eighteen sixty nine. The shorter Panama Canal was
(02:12):
expected to be relatively easy to build when first envisioned
in eighteen seventy nine, and since those visionaries had successfully
completed the sea level Sewers Canal, they planned on making
the man made waterway that would join the Atlantic and
the Pacific Oceans in the same manner i e. At
sea level. Sea level canals are precisely what the name implies.
(02:33):
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 Sewez Canal, approximately six hundred million cubic
feet of stuff was removed from the land, and more
was dredged from the adjoining bodies of water. With that
(02:55):
French dug channel that joins the Mediterranean and the Red
Seas taking only ten years to complete. An the middle
of the nineteenth 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 Ferdinands Marie de la Sepe was
(03:17):
instrumental in building the Suez Canal, and he led the
initial work on the Panama Canal as well.
Speaker 2 (03:23):
He had defied the experts who said the task at
Suez was too big, and he succeeded with an unobstructed
one hundred and five mile passage dug through the Egyptian
sand at sea level. He was also married a second
time that same year of eighteen sixty nine, to a
beautiful young woman who produced twelve children, an achievement considered
(03:45):
in some circles more remarkable even than his Suez Canal.
At an international conference at the Associated Geography in Paris,
he reveals 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
(04:06):
York to San Francisco. It will save eight thousand miles
compared to rounding the Horn of South America. His route
will follow the Little Panama Railroad, just fifty miles from
c to sea.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
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 lasp another two years before
he agreed to consider the construction of locks to help
(04:41):
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 Gustaf I Felt. He built a
tower in Paris the next year for the eighteen eighty
(05:02):
nine wells Fat bus Well. It was already too late
for the Central American projects. Compagne Nouvelle, the company funding
the walk, when's bankrupt in eighteen eighty eight, and de
la Sepe died in disgrace shortly off that.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
The French were ten years in Panama, during which they
lost twenty thousand 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 the Lessons not insisted on
a canal at sea level, maybe things might have turned
out differently. But he tried to repeat his success at
(05:39):
Suez under conditions that were entirely different. He ignored his
best advisors. He discounted reality. Late in the summer of
nineteen hundred and one, 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,
(06:02):
Theodore Roosevelt said Senator Mark Hannah, 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
(06:23):
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 Flat Iron Building. Once the
Senate authorized the President to take up where the French
had left off at Panama, Roosevelt could hardly contain himself.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
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 nineteen oh three negotiated the
Heharon Treaty with Columbia, 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
(07:05):
in the country, and they refused to ratify it. Undeterred,
the US then aided a Panamanian nationalist's rebellion, including stopping
American owned railroads from transporting Columbian troops and sending the
Nashville a US warship to protect the rebels. On November
the sixth, nineteen o three, the United States recognized the
Republic Panama. Two days later, in U treaty the Hayba
al Varia was signed and granted the US permanent and
(07:29):
exclusive possession of the zone in exchange for a ten
million dollars signing bonus, which is worth about two hundred
and fifty five million dollars to day and two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars annually beginning nine years later.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
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 help much. When the
new chief engineer arrived on the scene. He was an
(08:02):
American named John Findlay 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 Findlay 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
(08:24):
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
(08:46):
saved the canal from almost certain disaster. To army doctor
William Gorgis, Stephens 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 doctor Walter Reed.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
And you've been listening to Simon Whistler, and you've also
been listening to David McCullough, and this audio is taken
from his talk A Man A Plan, A Canal Panama.
McCulla is also the author of The Path between the Seas,
by the Way, the Creation of the Panama Canal, one
of his very best books. And what a story he's
(09:28):
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
(09:49):
of the Panama Canal. After these messages here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories and
(10:11):
the story of the Panama Canal, and as told by
Simon Whistler in the late Great David McCullum let's pick
up where we last left off.
Speaker 3 (10:23):
Work was slow going over the next few years, with
efforts focused on revamping the sixty year old railroad and
improving working as livin conditions.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Orders went out for a thousand brooms, four thousand buckets
carbolic acid, mercurial chloride, eight thousand pounds of common soap,
one hundred and twenty tons of insecticide. Stevens personally signed
requisitions for ninety thousand dollars worth of wire screens. By
December nineteen hundred and five, Gorges was able to announce
(10:55):
there was no more yellow fever on the Isthmus. It
was hard to believe but true. The year after, Stevens
had twenty four thousand minute 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
(11:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
The locks were begun in August of nineteen oh nine
with the construction of Gatton Locks on the Atlantic side.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
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 in
Lake Canal would bridge the Isthmus and make a virtue
of Panama's phenomenal rainfall by damming the Chagris River and
creating a man made.
Speaker 3 (12:03):
Lake consisting of over three million cubic yards of concrete.
At Gatton, 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 one thousand and fifty feet
long and one hundred and ten feet wide, and together
they are placed consecutively like watery stair steps to ultimately
(12:26):
raise or lower ships the eighty five feet between the
highest points on lands and the ocean's surface.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
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
(12:55):
sea level canal, it was what many in Washington wanted,
but he listened to Stephens, 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
(13:18):
chief engineers walking off the job, appointed a man who
couldn't quit, an army officer, Colonel George Washington Goehals. Gothals
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
(13:41):
appropriate with the work at Folk last, the United States
was digging the equivalent of a Suez Canal every three years.
In any one day, there were fifty to sixty steam
shovels in the cut. Along the entire line, About two
hundred train loads a day were being hauled to the dumps.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
As a ship ends as a lower that twenty five
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.
In this process repeats twice on either side until the
ship reaches the plateau, where it sails across the isthmus
(14:21):
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 Gatin Lake, called the Pedro Miguel. Then there
are two others down to the ocean at Mira Flores.
Speaker 2 (14:38):
The volume of concrete poured for the Gatoon locks alone,
somebody figured, was enough to build a wall eight feet thick,
twelve feet high, and one hundred and thirty three miles long,
with an overall length of one thousand feet and a
width of one hundred and ten feet each lock, was
considerably bigger than a ship the size of the Titanic.
(14:58):
In fact, a single lock chamber, if stood on end,
would have been the tallest structure in the world.
Speaker 3 (15:05):
Ship center via two pairs of large, yet relatively light
weight and buoyant, seven feet thick gates that vary in
size depending on the conditions. The heaviest and tallest gates,
six hundred and sixty two tons and eighty two feet high,
are at Near Flores, 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
(15:27):
may need to be lifted or lowered as much as
sixty four point five feet or as little as forty
three feet. The remaining Pacific lift at the Pedroumaguel lock
is consistently thirty one feet. Likewise, on the Atlantic side,
the lift of the three Gaten locks remains relatively stable,
at eighty five feet in total. Remarkably, ships require only
two feet of clearance on each side of the canal,
(15:49):
such that in the one hundred and ten foot wide area,
about of one hundred and six 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 hundred and sixty five feet, and the maximum draft
is thirty nine point five feet. Together these maximum specs
are known as the Panamax.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
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 Lindberg Junior, traveling with his mother, remembering his excitement.
Years later, Lindberg would write, the very name America made
(16:29):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
This is pretty small by today's standards of commercial ship
since although some massive ocean vessels routinely carry eighteen thousand containers,
the largest that can through the canal will hold less
than five thousand. Completed in twenty sixteen, the new canal
has a set of logs which are one hundred and
eighty feet wide and one four hundred feet long. This
new size means ships as big as the large as
(17:12):
that could traverse the Sewerz Canal can now travel through
the Panama Canal. They can hold about thirteen thousand containers. Interestingly,
due to currents and other such factors, the Pacific around
Panama is on average about eight inches that's twenty 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
(17:33):
would also present something of a problem for ships in
this case. If you're wondering at how much 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 five thousand containers, you can expect to pay a
bit under half a million dollars when all the fees
are added up. This does vary, though, depending on several factors.
(17:54):
On the other hand, if you're a cruise ship holding
say one thousand passengers, the cruise company is going to
be paying close to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
for the shortcust However, if you're just out there on
your little private boat, you could expect to pay somewhere
between one thousand to three thousand dollars to go from
one site to the other.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
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 Brain Food Show podcast and of
course a special thanks to the late great David McCullough.
David McCullough is also the author of the marvelous book
(18:30):
The Path between the Seas, The Creation of the Panama Canal,
and My Goodness. John Frank Stevens is hired by Roosevelt
as the chief engineer. He had built, by the way,
the Great Northern Railway, and with stevens help, the idea
of a sea level canal was abandoned. This was a
pivotal change and turn. But Stevens abruptly quit and the
(18:54):
next person in charge couldn't be fired. Roosevelt hired someone
from the military, George Washington Gothales. If you've ever been
over the Gothels Bridge connecting New Jersey to Staten Island,
now you know where the name came from and what
a marvel was produced. I love that reading from McCullough
talking about Charles Lindbergh visiting Panama. It became a top
(19:18):
tourist destination simply to see this engineering marvel. The story
of the Panama Canal here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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