Celebrating a Centennial
The Panama Canal, which altered shipping worldwide, is poised to do so again.
By Henry Petroski
It was no coincidence that this year’s annual conference of the American Society of Civil Engineers was held in Panama City, Panama. The venue was chosen intentionally to mark the 100th anniversary — and to look to the future — of the Panama Canal, which remains one of the all-time greatest achievements of global engineering, the theme of the ASCE conference.
Among the highlights of the conference were sessions on the history of the canal sponsored by ASCE’s History and Heritage Committee. These ranged from the initial ill-fated construction effort led by the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had successfully developed the Suez Canal, to a look at the completed Panama Canal’s worldwide impact.
Joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across 50 miles of a Central American isthmus was a truly daunting engineering challenge, having to cross as the canal route did the continental divide. The enormous excavation work this required, coupled with the tropical heat and diseases that decimated the workforce, led the French to switch from a land-level design to one relying on locks at either end, but the decision was made too late and they had to abandon the project in 1888, less than 10 years after construction began.
America had been contemplating an interoceanic canal since 1869, the year the Suez Canal opened, and had considered routes across Mexico and Nicaragua. When the Republic of Panama was formed in 1903 in the wake of a revolution in Colombia, the United States went full steam ahead with its own plans and purchased the assets of the French canal construction company, which included its abandoned equipment.
The Americans came to understand not only the causes and treatments of the debilitating tropical diseases but also how to complete the canal by adopting the French switch to a lock-based design. The project was completed under the direction of chief engineer George W. Goethals; the canal opened officially on August 15, 1914.
The canal shortcut altered shipping practices throughout the world. No longer was it necessary to sail around the bottom of South America to travel by ship between the Atlantic and Pacific. Still, there was a limit to how large a vessel could pass through the locks of the Panama Canal, and the limiting size came to be known as Panamax.
With the development of containerized shipping, oceangoing vessels began to be made larger and larger, and in time there were some of “post Panamax” size. These giant ships generally limited their commerce to within the Pacific Rim, which obviously favored ports on the U.S. West Coast over those on the East.
Talk of expanding the Panama Canal to allow it to accommodate post-Panamax ships, which today constitute 37 percent of the world’s fleet, began even before the United States turned the canal over to Panama in 1999. The project to add new, larger locks began in 2007 and was expected to be completed this year. Unfortunately, delays caused by, among other things, a dispute between the canal and the construction company over cost overruns, have delayed the completion, which is now scheduled for 2015.
In the meantime, ports all along the East Coast have been deepening channels and having docks outfitted with larger cranes to accommodate the post-Panamax ships that will soon be passing through the canal and so bringing cargo directly from China and its Asian neighbors. The Port of New York and New Jersey is even raising the roadway of the Bayonne Bridge to provide 215 feet of vertical clearance for the skyscraper ships.
The full story of the making of the original Panama Canal is told in captivating detail by David McCullough in his book The Path Between the Seas. It is a story that every engineer and engineering student should find technically and humanly compelling.
Henry Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. His most recently published books are An Engineer’s Alphabet: Gleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, and The House with Sixteen Handmade Doors: A Tale of Architectural Choice and Craftsmanship.
Photo by Catherine Petroski