Today’s speaker was Julian Somerville on the “Building of the Panama Canal.”
After the success in building the Suez Canal the French were keen to build a canal across Panama to link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Their plan was to build a sea-level canal with few bends to speed up traffic. This was doomed from the start. It involved digging through a mountain range and the tidal range at one end of the canal was 1 foot and at the other it was 20 feet. The source of water for the canal was the River Chargres, a fast flowing river which would meet the canal at right angles.
The cost was initially estimated at $240m. This was considered too much to attract French investors so was reduced to $65m. 800,000 French families invested their life savings so the effect was devastating when the project collapsed and the company went bankrupt.
Several years later the idea of the canal was revived, this time by the Americans who wanted to build the canal across Nicaragua. A much longer canal involving raising ships to a lake through a series of locks. The French were still in favour of Panama and at a vote of interested parties at the National Geographic Society in England were successful.
By this time the control of diseases like malaria were understood and the construction equipment needed was much improved. The Americans lost 5,500 men compared to French losses of 22,000. The project took 5 years with the first ship sailing through the canal on15th August 1914.
To transit the canal, ships assemble near the entry to the canal then barter/negotiate their position in the convoy going through. Ships are under their own power under the control of a canal pilot. The margin of safety on each side of the ship in the locks is 2ft so there are shunter-type railway engines known as “Mules” attached to the ship fore and aft whose function is to hold the ship central. Each ship transiting the canal uses 55m gallons of fresh water. Traffic has increased so much, 140 ships per day, that the water supply is in danger of failing.
The speaker concluded his interesting talk with the well-known palindrome “A man a plan a canal Panama”.