The Panama Canal is widely-considered one of the engineering marvels of the world, and the idea of building it was hatched almost as soon as the European shipping industry discovered that the Isthmus of Panama is only about 50 miles wide. In 1534, King Charles V of Spain issued a royal decree to investigate the feasibility of building a canal (it was deemed impossible at the time). And over the subsequent years, numerous other ideas and plans for connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific in Central America were discussed.
But it wasn’t until 350 years after the initial idea that someone actually started moving dirt. In the early 1880s, fresh and confident from the success of building the Suez Canal in 1869, a French consortium raised money and started digging a sea-level canal across Panama (not realizing at the time that the sea level in the Pacific is actually almost a foot/30cm higher in the Pacific than the Atlantic, rendering a sea-level canal impractical at best). Despite deploying ~40,000 workers (more than half of whom died – medical experts at the time hadn’t yet learned that yellow fever and malaria were transmitted by mosquito) and digging for 8 years, only a small fraction of the canal was built before the consortium ran out of money.
In the early 1900s, the idea of building a canal had captured the imagination of then-US President Theodore Roosevelt, and he instructed his team to negotiate with Colombia (of which Panama was a province at the time) for the right to build and operate a canal. The resulting Hay-Herran Treaty was proposed and ratified by the US, but it was objected to and ultimately rejected by Colombia.
Not to be deterred, the US hatched a new plan. In exchange for agreeing to support rebels who were agitating for Panamanian independence from Colombia, the rebels would grant a perpetual license for the US to operate a canal and establish sovereignty over a 5 mile wide strip on either side of the future canal. Panamanian independence was declared on 3 November 1903, and 15 days later the canal deal was announced.
Canal construction restarted in 1904, and several years later the design was changed to the present-day setup of a set of three locks at either end of a Lake Gatun, a large reservoir formed by damming the Chagres River. While mosquito-borne illnesses were nearly eradicated in the first several years of construction, between 5 and 6000 workers still died in the difficult working conditions of tropical heat and jungle.
By 1914, the construction was complete, the Canal was opened, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were connected. Over 100 years later, it remains one of the most important waterways on the planet.
