GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT
The Panama Canal is the greatest engineering project of all history.
There is more than the patriotic prejudice of a people proud of their
own achievements behind this assertion. Men of all nations concede it
without question, and felicitate the United States upon the remarkable
success with which it has been carried out. So distinguished an
authority as the Rt. Hon. James Bryce, late British ambassador to
Washington, and a man not less famous in the world of letters than
successful in the field of diplomacy, declared before the National
Geographic Society that not only is the Panama Canal the greatest
undertaking of the past or the present but that even the future seems
destined never to offer any land-dividing, world-uniting project
comparable to it in magnitude or consequence.
We are told that the excavations total 232,000,000 cubic yards; that
the Gatun Dam contains 21,000,000 cubic yards of material; and that
the locks and spillways required the laying of some 4,500,000 cubic
yards of concrete. But if one is to realize the meaning of this he
must get out of the realm of cubic yards and into the region of
concrete comparisons. Every one is familiar with the size and shape of
the Washington Monument. With its base of 55 feet square and its
height of 555 feet, it is one of the most imposing of all the hand
reared structures of the earth. Yet the material excavated from the
big waterway at Panama represents 5,840 such solid-built shafts.
Placed in a row with base touching base they would traverse the entire
Isthmus and reach 10 miles beyond deep water in the two oceans at
Panama. Placed in a square with base touching base they would cover an
area of 475 acres. If all the material were placed in one solid shaft
with a base as large as the average city block, it would tower nearly
100,000 feet in the air.
Another illustration of the magnitude of the quantity of material
excavated at Panama may be had from a comparison with the pyramid of
Cheops, of which noble pile some one has said that "All things fear
Time, but Time fears only Cheops." We are told that it required a
hundred thousand men 10 years to make ready for the building of that
great structure, and 20 years more to build it. There were times at
Panama when, in 26 working days, more material was removed from the
canal than was required to build Cheops, and from first to last the
Americans removed material enough to build sixty-odd pyramids such as
Cheops. Were it all placed in one such structure, with a base as large
as that of Cheops, the apex would tower higher into the sky than the
loftiest mountain on the face of the earth.
Still another way of arriving at a true conception of the work of
digging the big waterway is to consider that enough material had to be
removed by the Americans to make a tunnel through the earth at the
equator more than 12 feet square.
[Illustration: A GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF THE MATERIAL HANDLED AT
PANAMA]
But perhaps the comparison that will best illustrate the immensity of
the task of digging the ditch is that of the big Lidgerwood dirt car,
on which so much of the spoil has been hauled away. Each car holds
about 20 cubic yards of dirt, and 21 cars make a train. The material
removed from the canal would fill a string of these cars reaching
about three and a half times around the earth, and it would take a
string of Panama Railroad engines reaching almost from New York to
Honolulu to move them.
Yet all these comparisons have taken account of the excavations only.
The construction of the Panama Canal represents much besides digging a
ditch, for there were some immense structures to erect. Principal
among these, so far as magnitude is concerned, was the Gatun Dam, that
big ridge of earth a mile and a half long, half a mile thick at the
base, and 105 feet high. It contains some 21,000,000 cubic yards of
material, enough to build more than 500 solid shafts like the
Washington Monument. Then there was the dam at Pedro Miguel--"Peter
Magill," as the irreverent boys of Panama christened it--and another
at Miraflores, each of them small in comparison with the great
embankment at Gatun, but together containing as much material as 70
solid shafts like our Washington Monument.
Besides these structures there still remain the locks and spillways,
with their four and a half million cubic yards of concrete and their
hundreds and thousands of tons of steel.
With all these astonishing comparisons in mind, is it strange that the
digging of the Panama Canal is the world's greatest engineering
project? Are they not enough to stamp it as the greatest single
achievement in human history? Yet even they, pregnant of meaning as
they are, fail to reveal the full and true proportions of the work of
our illustrious army of canal diggers. They tell nothing of the
difficulties which were overcome--difficulties before which the
bravest spirit might have quailed.
When the engineers laid out the present project, they calculated that
103,000,000 cubic yards of material would have to be excavated, and
predicted that the canal diggers would remove that much in nine years.
Since that time the amount of material to be taken out has increased
from one cause or another until it now stands at more than double the
original estimate. At one time there was an increase for widening the
Culebra Cut by 50 per cent. At another time there was an increase to
take care of the 225 acres of slides that were pouring into the big
ditch like glaciers. At still another time there was an increase for
the creation of a small lake between the locks at Pedro Miguel and
Miraflores. At yet another time it was found that the Chagres River
and the currents of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans were
depositing large quantities of silt and mud in the canal, and this
again raised the total amount of material to be excavated. But none of
these unforeseen obstacles and additional burdens dismayed the
engineers. They simply attacked their problem with renewed zeal and
quickened energy, with the result that they excavated in seven years
of actual operations more than twice as much material as they were
expected to excavate in nine years. In other words, the material to be
removed was increased 125 per cent and yet the canal was opened at
least 12 months ahead of the time predicted.
How this unprecedented efficiency was developed forms in itself a
remarkable story of achievement. The engineers met with insistent
demands that they "make the dirt fly." The people had seen many months
of preparation, but they had no patience with that; they wanted to see
the ditch begin to deepen. It was a critical stage in the history of
the project. If the dirt should fail to fly public sentiment would
turn away from the canal.
So John F. Stevens addressed himself to making it fly. Before he left
he had brought the monthly output almost up to the million yard mark.
When that mark was passed the President of the United States, on
behalf of himself and the nation, sent a congratulatory message to the
canal army. Many people asserted that it was nothing but a burst of
speed; but the canal diggers squared themselves for a still higher
record. They forced up the mark to two million a month, and
straightway used that as a rallying point from which to charge the
heights three million. Once again the standard was raised; "four
million" became the slogan. Wherever that slogan was flashed upon a
Y.M.C.A. stereoptican screen there was cheering--cheering that
expressed a determined purpose. Finally, when March, 1909, came around
all hands went to work with set jaws, and for the only time in the
history of the world, there was excavated on a single project,
4,000,000 cubic yards of material in one month.
With the dirt moving, came the question of the cost of making it fly.
By eliminating a bit of lost motion here and taking up a bit of waste
there, even with the price of skilled labor fully 50 per cent higher
on the Isthmus than in the States, unit costs were sent down to
surprisingly low levels. For instance, in 1908 it was costing 11-1/2
cents a cubic yard to operate a steam shovel; in 1911 this had been
forced down to 8-7/8 cents a yard. In 1908 more than 18-1/2 cents were
expended to haul a cubic yard of spoil 8 miles; in 1911 a cubic yard
was hauled 12 miles for a little more than 15-1/5 cents.
Some of the efficiency results were astonishing. To illustrate: One
would think that the working power of a ton of dynamite would be as
great at one time as another; and yet the average ton of dynamite in
1911 did just twice as much work as in 1908. No less than $50,000 a
month was saved by shaking out cement bags.
It was this wonderful efficiency that enabled the United States to
build the canal for $375,000,000 when without it the cost might have
reached $600,000,000. In 1908, after the army had been going at
regulation double-quick for a year, a board was appointed to estimate
just how much material would have to be taken out, and how much it
would cost. That board estimated that the project as then planned
would require the excavation of 135,000,000 cubic yards of material,
and that the total cost of the canal as then contemplated would be
$375,000,000. Also it was estimated that the canal would be completed
by January 1, 1915. After that time the amount of material to be
excavated was increased by 97,000,000 cubic yards, and yet so great
was the efficiency developed that the savings effected permitted that
great excess of material to be removed without the additional expense
of a single penny above the estimates of 1908, and in less time than
was forecast.
Although the difficulties that beset the canal diggers were such as
engineers never before encountered, they were met and brushed aside,
and all the world's engineering records were smashed into smithereens.
It required 20 years to build the Suez Canal, through a comparatively
dry and sandy region. When the work at Panama was at its height the
United States was excavating the equivalent of a Suez Canal every 15
months. Likewise it required many years to complete the Manchester
Ship Canal between Liverpool and Manchester, a distance of 35 miles.
This canal cost so much more than was estimated that money was raised
for its completion only with the greatest difficulty. Yet at Panama
the Americans dug four duplicates of the Manchester Ship Canal in five
years. All of this was done in spite of the fact that they had to work
in a moist, hot, enervating climate where for nine months in a year
the air seems filled with moisture to the point of saturation, and
where, for more than half the length of the great ditch, the annual
rainfall often amounts to as much as 10 feet--all of this falling in
the nine months of the wet season.
A few comparisons outside of the construction itself will serve to
illustrate the tremendous proportions of the work. Paper money was not
handled at all in paying off the canal army. It took three days to pay
off the force with American gold and Panaman silver. When pay day was
over there had been given into the hands of the Americans, and thrown
into the hats of the Spaniards and West Indian negroes, 1,600 pounds
of gold and 24 tons of silver. When it is remembered that this
performance was repeated every month for seven years, one may imagine
the enormous outlay of money for labor.
The commissary also illustrates the magnitude of the work. Five
million loaves of bread, a hundred thousand pounds of cheese, more
than 9,000,000 pounds of meat, half a million pounds of poultry, more
than a thousand carloads of ice, more than a million pounds of onions,
half a million pounds of butter--these are some of the items handled
in a single year.
Wherever one turns he finds things which furnish collateral evidence
of the magnitude of the work. The Sanitary Department used each year
150,000 gallons of mosquito oil, distributed thousands of pounds of
quinine, cut and burned millions of square yards of brush, and spent
half a million dollars for hospital maintenance.
No other great engineering project has allowed such a remarkable
"margin of safety"--the engineering term for doing things better than
they need to be done. The engineers who dug the canal took nothing for
granted. No rule of physics was so plain or so obvious as to escape
actual physical proof before its acceptance, when such proof was
possible. No one who knows how the engineers approached the subject,
how they resolved every doubt on the side of safety, and how they kept
so far away from the danger line as actually to make their precaution
seem excessive can doubt that the Panama Canal will go down in history
as the most thorough as well as the most extensive piece of
engineering in the world.