For the next two years, from early 1883 until the summer of 1885, he was to direct the largest, most ambitious engineering effort the world had as yet seen. His decisions were not to be the best always. Before sailing from France he also made the unfortunate declaration that once on the Isthmus he would prove that “only drunkards and the dissipated take the yellow fever and die there.” Still it would be a long time before a more effective chief engineer would be dispatched to Panama—not until Theodore Roosevelt sent John Stevens in 1905—and Jules Dingler was to pay a dreadful price for his
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