History of the Panama Canal II

Last time I wrote of the French failure of the Panama Canal. Its kind of like Vietnam where the French failed then the United States comes in, only the Panama Canal excursion went quite a bit better than Vietnam did. 

Panama was actually part of Columbia. Columbia didn't want the United States coming in and building a canal. So the U.S. and Teddy Roosevelt, who I think was a great president except for this, not so secretly supported a coup. Panama became its own country and agreed to have the U.S. come in. Some in the U.S. wanted the canal to go through Nicaragua. Its not as mountainous. It is wider but has a giant lake in the middle which would reduce the amount of digging. It was rumoured that they had occasional volcanic eruptions. That was supported by the fact that their stamps had an actual volcano pictured on them.

So Panama became independent and let the U.S. start building. A big advantage the U.S. had was to go with the lock system rather than trying for a sea level canal. Digging down to sea level just probably wasn't possible. Even today there is constant dredging going on from the ssides of the canal eroding. 

Another key was stopping the deaths from malaria. A Dr. Gorges realized it was spread by mosquitos and they proliferate where there is standing water. So he got rid of standing water. They used to put the legs of beds in buckets of water to keep ants from climbing up them. He got rid of those and he made sure all windows had netting on them. Pretty soon malarial deaths went from the thousands to a handful.

The other things that worked was to dam up a river to create a giant manmade lake. Then a lot of the canal didn't even need to be dug, and the electricity from the dam was used to power the locks. Pretty smart.

Even with that, it took a decade or so to build the canal. Worth it, because now people liek me get a fun vacation going through it.