The Path Between the Seas

by David McCullough

Yet the Panama Canal was built under three American Presidents, not one—Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson—and in fact, of the three, it was really Taft who gave the project the most time and personal attention.

no present system could possibly carry the spoil away any faster or more efficiently than the system employed.

Bishop began publishing weekly excavation statistics for individual steam shovels and dredges, and at once a fierce rivalry resulted, the gain in output becoming apparent almost immediately.

“He was a combination of father confessor and Day of Judgment,”

Thus it was to be more than four times as broad as the French canal would have been at that point.

(The largest commercial vessel then being built was the Titanic, with a beam of 94 feet.)

Soo Canal

Pronounced like “Sue”

Construction of the canal would consume more than 61,000,000 pounds of dynamite,

To keep the flooding Chagres from backing up into the Cut as the great trench deepened, an earth dike was thrown across the north end, at Gamboa, seventy-eight feet above sea level.

“Culebra Cut was Hell’s Gorge,” one steam-shovel man would write,

“It was, in fact, a tropical glacier—of mud instead of ice,” Major Gaillard noted in an article for Scientific American,

“The work of months and years might be blotted out by an avalanche of earth or the toppling over of a small mountain of rock.”

It was as if the flying buttresses had been removed from the wall of a Gothic cathedral: the exposed wall of the Cut simply buckled outward under its own load and fell.

The most uncanny of all effects, however, was the rising of the floor of the Cut. Not merely would the walls of the canal come crashing down, but the bottom would rise ten, fifteen, even thirty feet in the air,

the angle of inclination was about one on five (one foot vertical to five horizontal). Still the ground kept moving.

the slide had wiped out months of work.

Even with seven years of American example about him the Panamanian had not yet grasped the divinity of labor.

“The marvel is,” wrote this same man, “that even under administrators unfriendly or indifferent to Socialism, these socialistic experiments have succeeded—without exception.”

Panama was still four times more deadly for the black man than it was for the white.

the conception of a long arm of fresh water suspended in the jungle, began to take hold and with good effect.

A single lock if stood on end would have been the tallest structure in the world, taller even than the Eiffel Tower.

The power of falling water at the Gatun spillway would generate the electrical current to run all the motors to operate the system, as well as the towing locomotives or “electric mules.”

the quantity of frogs that came swirling in with the muddy water.

but a passage among flaming green islands,