It was 40 miles long and literally cut through the continental divide, so it was extremely difficult. The French attempted to do this and failed. After that failure, the US came in. The American ingenuity was of building, rather than a sea level canal, a lock canal. The way the terrain is, a sea-level canal would flood, it was prone to landslides and the terrain was not stable enough.
You had to accommodate different levels. It was lower on one side than on the other side, with mountains in between. The systems of locks is what made it possible. Noel Maurer: A key thing the US did, was they used railroads to truck out the dirt. The French were piling it up, which led to landslides. Also, when it rained, the dirt would turn to puddles, which attracted mosquitos, which meant malaria rips through your workforce.
The US established medical innovations to control malaria and yellow fever. Ovidio Diaz-Espino: The construction itself was so significant that at one point one-third of the city of Pittsburgh was working to build the canal. Every lock of the canal, and there are four, has more steel, more concrete, and took more work than the Empire State Building. Something like six Empire State Building constructions are here. There was massive steel, provided by US Steel.
Massive concrete provided by Portland Cement. GE had to invent new type of machineries to be able to move the ships, these huge tankards that only had a few inches on either side needed to be controlled. Railroad had to be developed with minute precision. Dredging techniques used to dredge the Port of New York had to be much more precise. With such a massive body of work it probably employed one-third of Central America and the Caribbean, and the US was heavily influenced by it and by the money that was flowing through Wall Street, the banks, the insurance companies.
He staged a successful PR stunt: he sat in a big earth moving machine wearing a Panama hat, made a speech that America could and needed to do this, and when he returned to the US the Senate supported its construction. Julie Greene: But on top of that had to do with the human challenges involved. The chief engineer said at one point that the real challenge of this canal, and what allowed the US to succeed, was in figuring out how to manage and discipline the humans.
By that, he meant they had to build a whole society: a police force, dorms, cafeterias, a judicial system. Forty-five thousand women and men, mostly men, came from dozens of different countries, and then thousands of women and children came to be with their menfolk.
To create a world for them and then to keep it orderly was a challenge. Julie Greene: The United States built the Canal between and , picking up the ball from the disastrous efforts by the French. The loss of life during the French era was much greater because disease was more widespread.
The US managed to get yellow fever completely under control, and malaria largely under control. By the official US statistics, the mortality rate was about 10, people, maybe a little less.
Richard Feinberg: Panama had not existed before this. There were some independence movements which the US decided to support, creating a new country in order to construct this canal. So Panamanians who welcomed independence welcomed the canal. But the canal was built mostly by foreign workers. They imported tens of thousands of Caribbean workers, many of whom died from disease or accidents.
Following heated debate over the location of the proposed canal, on June 19, , the U. Senate voted in favor of building the canal through Panama.
President Roosevelt responded by dispatching U. Colombian troops were unable to negotiate the jungles of the Darien Strait and Panama declared independence on November 3, The newly declared Republic of Panama immediately named Philippe Bunau-Varilla a French engineer who had been involved in the earlier de Lesseps canal attempt as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary.
More than 20m years ago, Panama and much of Central America was under water or, more accurately, much of this land mass was yet to form, and water flowed freely between these two climatically important ocean basins. The position of continents naturally affects the shape and size of the oceans, and crucially, the currents that flow within them that transport energy in the form of heat to different parts of the globe.
This played a crucial role in shaping our modern climate system. None of this happened overnight. Over time, these eventually emerged above the water line. By 7m to 11m years ago, the volcanoes had grown, and the sea had become shallow enough that deep water exchange between the Pacific and Atlantic is thought to have ceased, leading to a reorganisation of oceanic currents.
This continued positive effect on growth reflects that the existence of the canal becomes more valuable over time as globalization and trade intensified. Please read our comments policy before commenting. Click here to cancel reply. Facebook Facebook. How the Panama Canal reshaped the economic geography of the United States. Credit: Public domain via Wikimedia Commons In recent research , we study how the opening of the Panama Canal in influenced the economic geography of the United States.
Figure 1 — Market access impact of the Panama Canal Using this data, we are able to show that there was a strong positive causal effect of market access change on population growth throughout the 20 th century — with no difference between small and large counties.
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