The Engineering Book: From the Catapult to the Curiosity Rover: 250 Milestones in the History of Engineering

1914

Panama Canal

John Findlay Wallace (1852–1951), John Frank Stevens (1853–1943), George Washington Goethals (1858–1928)

To travel from New York to San Francisco by boat in the early 1900s was a major undertaking, consisting of two months and 13,000 miles (21,000 km) of travel around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America.

The Panama Canal became a much-needed shortcut in 1914, trimming 7,000 miles (11,300 km) off the journey by traveling across Panama. And the canal is a stunning engineering achievement. Engineers had to create a water pathway almost 50 miles (80 km) long through jungles and mountainous terrain.

The architecture of the Panama Canal is interesting because engineers could have solved the problem in several different ways. The principal engineers—John Findlay Wallace (from 1904–1905), John Frank Stevens (1905–1907), and George Washington Goethals (1907–1914)—chose to solve it this way: They built the world’s largest dam at the time to form Lake Gatun, then the largest manmade lake. The Gatun locks on the Atlantic side raise ships up from sea level to the lake in three stages. When built, these locks were the largest concrete project ever conceived. Ships travel 20 miles (33 km) on the lake. They then pass through the Culebra Cut, an immense 7.8-mile (12.6 km) artificial channel created by blasting through a mountain. A lock lowers ships to Miraflores Lake, and two more locks lower ships to the Pacific Ocean.

After the canal was completed, operators noticed a problem with the water supply. Each time the locks cycle to raise or lower a ship, an immense amount of water flows from Lake Gatun into the ocean. In the dry season, there isn’t enough water. In the wet season, too much rain arrives. Madden Dam and Alajuela Lake solved this problem by storing water and allowing operators to release it when needed.

When the canal opened, it was celebrated as a gigantic engineering achievement. The shortcut it created has saved billions of dollars. The process used to create it has also been refined in later projects such as the Three Gorges Dam in China.

Seen here: The Panama Canal in 2009.