The American Engineers that Built the Panama Canal

When the United States took over title of the French canal franchise in Panama in 1903, it approached the project with vigor and confidence, treating it as an enormous railroad engineering project. A large part of the eventual success of the United States in building a canal at Panama came from avoiding the mistakes of the French, whose leadership had proven too inflexible. From the outset, the Americans employed third-party oversight and a knack for innovative solutions on a broad number of challenges which, like the French, they did not foresee. By 1907, the various excavation problems led American engineer John Frank Stevens to redesign the project, using a series of three locks at either end to lift ships 85 feet and transit across man-made Gatun Lake. In 1908, control of the project passed to four Army Corps of Engineers officers and a Navy civil engineer. They completed the project in August 1914, excavating 225 million cubic yards of material at a cost of $22 million below budget, despite battling landslides for the previous 10 months. The project was the jewel of an emerging American empire, and its contributions to world health and sea-born commerce were without precedent.