This episode we discover the history of the Panama Canal, an engineering monument more than a century in the making, a corridor for over 200 million metric tonnes of cargo every year, and a great place for boats.

The ten hour journey through the Panama Canal made by over 13,000 ships each year was first conceptualized all the way back in 1534 by Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V, wanting a way to get ships through the Americas in hopes of an advantage over Portugal. This idea was floated next when Scotland attempted a trade colony in the 1690s, resulting in a massive financial failure that contributed to Scotland joining England to become Great Britain.

In 1855 the Panama Railroad was established to facilitate shipping from one ocean to the other, and by 1881 France had contracted Ferdinand de Lesseps to build the Panama Canal, fresh off his successful building of the Suez Canal. De Lesseps made the grave error of not visiting Panama during the rainy season, the first of many errors that contributed to massive workforce fatalities, with at times more than 200 workers dying each month. Even after recruiting Gustav Eifel for additional help, the company created to build the canal was bankrupt by 1889, having spent $287 million USD, the equivalent of $7.8 billion USD today.

In 1908 John Findley Wallace was appointed as chief engineer to right the ship, but lasted only a year before leaving the project. Enter the hero of our story, John Frank Stevens, a self-educated engineer with a history as a train engineer who, seeing the errors of his predecessors, prioritized the well-being of the workers, ultimately leading to the successful construction of this engineering mega project. “The digging is the least thing of all”

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Learn more at: MeasuredInMetric.com

Edited by: Astronomic Audio

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