Yesterday, August 15, was the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Panama Canal. This has a special meaning to me, since my parents both grew up in what was then the US Canal Zone across the Isthmus of Panama, and I heard a lot about the Zone and my relatives who livedthere as I grew up. My maternal grandfather was a mining engineer who worked in the dredging operations of the canal; my paternal grandmother was an office worker in the canal.
When I was 12, I spent the summer visiting my paternal grandmother. I saw and experienced many amazing things. The tropical weather (in the wet season); relatives with a pet capuchin monkey; leaf-cutter ants; iguanas; a strangler fig slowly destroying a tree to take its place in the jungle canopy; the Southern Cross and the Magellanic Clouds; snorkeling and seeing beautiful tropical fish; fishing on the ocean with my sister and dad; catching a Pompano fish (and grilling and eating it that evening); Panama City, my first real experience with a foreign country; seeing the canal from the air in a small airplane; and transiting the canal itself in a German cargo ship (arranged by a relative who worked for the canal).
But of course, beyond my own experiences, the Panama Canal is an extraordinary engineering accomplishment, absolutely visionary considering how long ago it was made. The construction of the canal was heroic, and involved brilliant, large-scale use of railroad technology to clear the debris from the digging, and to move the steam shovels around. Although the realization by the Americans that yellow fever and malaria could be controlled by eradicating mosquitos enabled the canal to be constructed, there was still a high death toll among the laborers. The French had to abort their attempt in the 1880s to build the canal; they lost 22,000 workers to accidents and disease before they did so. I saw the rather short French canal cut from the air.
The design of the canal is elegant. It is 52 miles in length, but it cuts through steep hills 600 feet tall. Rather than attempt a sea-level canal, they made most of the canal 85 feet above sea level. This required three sets of locks on each end of the canal. Each lock operates by allowing the ship to sail into the lock, closing the door behind it, and either allowing the water to drain from the lock to lower the ship, or allowing water into the lock from the higher level to raise the ship. The water thus provides all of the power to raise or lower the ship. It also provides the hydro-electric powerto operate the lock doors, and the electric "mules" that pull the ships in or out of the locks. All of this depends on a large man-made lake in the interior of the Isthmus, through which the canal passes. That in turn depends on the tropical rains, which I saw in abundance when I visited the canal in the summer of 1972. So the canal powers itself as a perpetual motion machine. Because the tropical rains depend on the tropical rain forest, the Panamanians who now have control overtheir canal have been careful to preserve the rain forests; these also generate tourist revenue because they are pristine. One remarkable aspect of the canal, which I saw in person, were how the controls for the lock worked: There was a scale model of the locks, and to operate the doors on the lock, you opened and closed the doors on the model. The doors on the model were perhaps six inches tall (if I remember correctly).
One interesting aspect of the canal is political. When I visited the Canal Zone in 1972, the Americans who lived there were skeptical that the Panamanians would be able to run the canal. There was more than a little racism in this attitude. (My own parents supported returning the Zone to the Panamanians.) It was only several years later that President Carter made the decision to return jurisdiction over the canal to the Panamanians. (One reason this was done, by the way, was the vulnerability of the canal to sabotage by embittered Panamanians, if the Americans tried to keep control of the canal--if the locks were destroyed and the lake emptied, it would have taken years for the lake to be refilled.) But it in fact turns out that the Panamanians are actually doing a better job of running the canal than the Americans did before they relinquished control.