BBC Seven Wonders Of The Industrial World
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Ever since the time of Columbus men had dreamed of carving
a sea passage through the jungles of Panama.
By dividing the land we will unit the world.
For four centuries this remained a dream then one man said it could be done.
We must continue, the canal must be built.
The Panama canal was to be one of the great wonders of the modern age.
But thousands would die, reputations would be shattered
and governments fall before its mighty lock gates swung open.
Every man on the workforce wants to see the first ship pass through the canal.
l mean he has a meeting with destiny.
The great oceans of the world dividing peoples and continents untameable,
unfathomed beyond their control.
Or so it seemed, until in 1 869 one man shrank the globe by ploughing
through the deserts of Arabia to build the Suez canal.
The Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps ignored everyone
who said a canal in Suez was impossible.
His success made him a legend.
But this seventy three year old
impresario wanted to redraw the map of the world one final time.
Gentlemen, we are going to build an even greater canal
and link the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
And you can see for yourselves that Panama is the ideal place for it.
De Lesseps dreamed of a canal cutting through central America
at its narrowest point Panama.
A canal slashing eight thousand miles off the journey from east to west
and avoiding the perilous journey around South America.
Our great nation of France will link both those men of cheese.
A canal allowing giant ships to sail straight from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
This bold undertaking will bring credit and honour to the name of France.
This is a man whose vision shapes the world we live in.
lf anyone can conquer Panama de Lesseps can.
De Lesseps raised sixty million dollars to establish a canal company.
ln the tropics history would be made.
De Lesseps` engineers sailed across the Atlantic eager to win glory for France.
Jules Dingler was head of operations in Panama.
Philippe Bunau-Vanilla only twenty six years old would run the Pacific division.
Welcome.
Monsieur Dingler.
My wife.
Madame.
l am very glad to see you here.
The most expensive engineering enterprise in history had begun.
l am in some ways daunted by er the scale of the excavations.
We will be creating a sea level path, er like at Suez, we want to er,
to er cut right down to sea level, and we will achieve this.
The Panama canal would begin at Limon bay on the Atlantic.
Half the route followed the course of a river valley.
But then they would be confronted by something they never faced at Suez.
A mighty mountain range blocking their path to the Pacific.
Le Corieras which ran down the spine of Panama.
Some people might say this is impossible.
lt is not impossible.
l am sure that back in the time of er the great pyramids
there were people saying this is impossible, but it was done, ingenuity.
The French planned to cut right
through the mountains at their lowest point, Culebra.
Culebra means snake in Spanish.
The Culebra Cut would soon prove even more deadly.
So far we have surveyed the entire canal route,
er we know we will have to remove
er more than one hundred and twenty million tonnes of earth.
That`s er, that`s a lot of dirt to shift.
lt is true to say our progress is slower than we had hoped.
Here at Culebra our progress is frequently thrown in to chaos
by er mud and rock slides.
We are battling against this land.
We are doing everything we can but er the geology here,
it make it very difficult for us to make the banks of earth stable.
We have to make the cut shallower than we first anticipate,
which means of course we`re moving much more earth.
Widening the cut would take time and money.
Critics said de Lesseps should rethink
and build locks to raise ships over the mountains.
But isolated in his French chateau he dismissed the sceptics.
The problems of creating a series of locks would be enormous.
lt is true l am not an engineer no er but l have...
...already supervised one rather large engineering project,
a few years ago, in joining Europe to Asia.
De Lesseps charmed his investors to quadruple the budget.
With this support he believed nothing could stand in his way.
But deep in the jungles of Panama there was a hidden enemy.
A mysterious tropical disease was wiping out the workforce.
With no cure the death toll mounted, the cause was a mystery.
People suspected miasma, poisonous marsh gasses.
They are scared, they are nervous.
There are rumours that the something is in the air.
They say people get it because they go out at night.
l have seen a family that dies and l will not let my son to die.
The victims turned yellow and brought up mouthfuls of black vomit
while waiting for the inevitable death.
Six thousand died in the first five years.
Panama became known as the fever coast.
One has to be prepared
that er things will not quite work out as quickly as, as one hope.
Our engineers will win through.
The history of mankind is one of triumph
over adversity and there will be a solution.
De Lesseps` faith was about to be shaken.
Snaking alongside the canal route was the Chagres river.
When Ferdinand de Lesseps first saw this river it was on a day like today,
er the dry season, perfect weather with the river only a few feet deep.
lf we were not building a canal it would be a lovely day out, some food, some wine,
but er in the rainy season this river becomes er a savage beast.
Torrential downpours could cause
the Chagres to rise over three metres in a single hour and flood the excavations.
The rain is causing us many problems,
we remove the earth, the rain washes it back again.
We remove the earth, the rain washes it back again, and not only washes the,
the dirt back again but often machinery and sometimes our men too.
We have had to cope with many floods.
But we will battle on.
This kind of problem creates a real man.
A weak man he run away from the battle...
...a good man he stay, l am staying here.
The French were in crisis,
the canal was going to take fifteen years longer to build than first promised.
De Lesseps concealed the truth from his investors.
Monsieur de Lesseps is a great man
but er he may have underestimated the power of nature and the battle before us.
He had a great success with Suez and Panama is not Suez.
The death toll from disease was soaring.
Three hundred and fifty workers were dying every month.
The mystery killer had been identified.
Every tropical disease known to man lurked in Panama,
the most feared was yellow fever.
There`s a smell of death.
l was chosen by God to be here and to help the people and at least
when they die they don`t die alone.
Some people they come in the morning and then at night they are dead.
So they just die like that and, just die like that.
ln Panama only the grave diggers are getting rich.
No one was safe.
Yellow fever wiped out Jules Dingler`s entire family.
By the end of 1885 only a tenth of the canal had been dug.
The hero of Suez pleaded for a National Lottery to fund his dream.
Gentlemen your engineers are already triumphing against adversity.
We shall finish the work, the canal will be built.
l know there is some talk of financial difficulties and yes l,
l`m a little concerned that the stress that is facing my husband and er.
But l am sure the public will keep their faith in him.
A huge storm was brewing.
Talk of financial scandal in the air.
Newspapers were asking is Monsieur de Lesseps a canal digger or a grave digger.
l am tired of these mud slides.
We have already been forced to excavate millions of extra tonnes of soil and rock
and now Culebra defies us again.
l think that er unless we change our approach here at er Culebra,
er we er will not win this battle.
Bunau-Vanilla argued for an audacious new approach.
Building colossal locks to raise ships over Culebra.
But the ailing de Lesseps
refused to consider anything other than a sea level canal.
l can never accepted that l am close to failure, l will never accept that no.
You know me better than that.
The idea of a lock canal was shelved.
The two men resigned from the company.
The lottery to raise new funds for the canal was a disaster.
ln December 1 888 the canal company went bankrupt,
triggering the biggest financial crash in human history.
My dear Ferdinand never had the slightest interest in profit
for himself or his family, yet he was destroyed.
Both in reputation and in health, by the Panama affair.
De Lesseps died a ruined man charged with bribing the press
and parliament to conceal the scale of the crisis in Panama.
The scandal that followed brought down the government.
Over twenty thousand men had perished,
millions of dollars had been squandered to create a muddy ditch in the tropics.
ln France for years
afterwards the word Panama was synonymous with corruption and disgrace.
Seventeen years elapsed before another man stepped forward
to take on the Herculean task of building the canal.
President Theodore Roosevelt handpicked
the railroad engineer John Stevens for the job.
l`ve built over a thousand miles of railroad in my day
and l`ve been most of the way around the world doing so.
l`ve encountered most of the conditions that any engineer would ever have to.
So l expect that`s what qualifies me for this job.
First Stevens inspected the abandoned French workings.
Little could be salvaged from the ruins.
l`m not afraid, l`m not nervous, l`m keen to dig through that mountain
and see ships sail from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Roosevelt wanted to build the canal so the US Navy could dominate the oceans.
America seized the route in 1 903 for a mere ten million dollars.
lt was now down to Stevens to turn this muddy ditch in to an ocean highway.
lt will be hard, but we will win through.
We`ll deal with the problems as they come up,
that`s what l`ve done all my working life l`m going to continue to do the same.
Been through bigger mountains than this, l`m not going to let this one beat me.
As a railroad man Stevens had a completely new approach.
He built a train system to act as a giant conveyor belt,
removing excavator rock quickly from the cut before it could slide back in.
We`ve got a system of steam shovels on tracks,
we`ve made a railroad for them as well.
They`re going to dig, they`re going to lift that dirt
and they`re going to put it on to the dirt trains
which are going to take it out of the cut.
So we need track here for the steam shovel
and track above parallel for the dirt train.
We`ve got track lifters that are going to move the tracks so the men don`t have to.
We`ve got dirt trains and a plough system
that will remove the dirt faster than six hundred men could do it.
We can now get the dirt out of here.
So when it rains it`s not going to go back in to the trench.
We not only speed up the work, we reduce the risk of mudslides.
Thousands of labourers flocked to Panama attracted by the high wages on offer.
The Americans were now excavating more in a day than the French did in a month.
Work on the canal had been industrialised.
Stevens had barely begun when the great scare descended on Panama.
Terrified workers fled from the most virulent outbreak yet of yellow fever.
American hopes rested on Dr William Gorgas.
lt is one thing to lose the life of a human being in battle.
A soldier is prepared to give his life for a cause.
But when one has the ability to defeat the enemy
and prevent the loss of life every death is a waste.
While many believed tropical diseases were spread on the air,
or even caused by immoral behaviour, Gorgas had a striking new idea.
l knew that my challenge was not to clean up the filth from the cities,
but rather to defeat an enemy here.
Where millions of predators were simply waiting for a human feast to arrive.
Gorgas believed the real culprit... was the mosquito.
A friend said to me, how do you stop the propagation of the mosquito
when the whole country is the breeding ground.
Panama was a mosquito paradise.
The heat and humidity allowed constant breeding.
Gorgas would need an army of workers to combat this tiny enemy.
But the authorities in Washington refused
to divert resources from digging to fly swatting.
Gorgas turned to John Stevens who faced a dilemma.
A third of his men were sick
but the instructions from Washington were to make the dirt fly.
According to Gorgas the hospital
itself was making things worse by acting like an incubator for yellow fever.
You see once the mosquitoes are inside the hospital
they have ample opportunity to bite these patients already stricken with disease
and draw their blood.
We need the materials to build isolation cages around each of our fever sufferers.
Mosquitoes are persistent little devils
that simply go from an infected patient to a new healthy victim
and pass on the disease with their blood.
lsolation cages such as this one stop the transmission of the disease.
Mosquitoes may be tiny
but they are just as dangerous and as allusive as any beast of the jungle.
Gorgas needed help from his new boss John Stevens.
But to overrule Washington Stevens would have to put his job on the line.
l`m willing to try anything Dr Gorgas recommends,
certainly in the past belief that miasma`s caused yellow fever
and malaria hasn`t done the men any good at all.
He is my medical expert and l trust him to do the job.
l am beginning to find my way around Washington,
you tell me what you need and l will see to it that you get the materials.
That would be much appreciated.
There will be brooms, buckets for cleaning.
We`ll need to fumigate the town.
We need to put screens up on every single window and door,
and screen porches around where the workers live.
Everything would depend on whether Gorgas was right about the insect.
Stevens wrote Gorgas a blank cheque
and allocated four thousand men to wage war on the mosquito.
lt was the most sustained assault on the mosquito in history.
Every town and city was fumigated.
All standing water was sprayed to prevent mosquitoes breeding.
There would be no hiding place.
What a transformation, life in the tropics will never be the same.
All over Panama houses are being built, cool and comfortable houses.
For the engineers and their wives
because their wives and children have begun to settle here.
And all over, springing up all over we have stores,
post offices and tennis clubs and bridge nights, l entertain.
After six months of battling
against the mosquito Gorgas could announce an astonishing success.
Gentlemen, this is indeed a great moment.
l believe that yellow fever has been completely eradicated from the isthmus,
while malaria and other diseases are also beginning to decline.
Please take a good look at this man,
if l`m not mistaken this is the very last yellow fever cadaver that you will see.
We are privileged indeed to be able to relieve such terrible suffering.
Stevens could now make the kind of inroad de Lesseps never achieved.
He used four hundred thousand pounds of dynamite a month
to blast his way through Panama.
The workforce tripled, all excavation records were broken.
Straight line, ok, over here.
Finally success was in sight.
But then the rains came,
an old enemy of the canal returned to haunt John Stevens, the Chagres river.
l have never in all my born days seen rain like this.
We`ve got mudslides, flooding,
hell the floods are washing the track right down the hill.
ln May 1 906 the nightmare of flooding and landslides recurred.
Stevens` new methods and massive machinery were no match for the Chagres river.
l`m afraid we don`t have a choice.
We will not dig successfully through Culebra Cut to create a sea level canal.
The dream was dead.
Just like the French before them it seemed Culebra had defeated the Americans.
All looked lost until Stevens revived a long forgotten plan,
so bold it had always been rejected as impossible.
l want to damn the Chagres river
and harness its power to create a system of locks
that will carry the boats up and over the mountain.
Stevens` vision was to damn the river where it met the Atlantic.
This would flood a huge section of the country
and create the largest artificial lake on earth.
A giant set of locks would raise ships on to the lake,
then they would sail half way across Panama
before passing through the Culebra Cut and on to the Pacific.
This is the only practical solution in order to build the canal.
Critics said it would be a disaster.
They claimed the concrete would never set in the tropical climate.
Worst still Panama was an earthquake hotspot.
Any tremor could destroy the damn at the locks.
But then an unexpected visitor arrived in Panama.
President Roosevelt came to give personal backing to Stevens and his lock canal.
This is one of the great works of the world.
lt`s a greater work than you yourselves at the moment realise.
lt fills me with pride to see the energy you are all bringing to your work
and with Mr John Stevens in charge l know that we can not fail to reach our goal.
Just when he had won the support of the President word spread
that Stevens would quit.
Well the rumours are running the length and breadth of Panama.
Some say Mr Stevens is unwell, some say...
He`s angered by interference from Washington, my wager.
Or perhaps he`s taken a lucrative railroad job back home.
We just don`t know, we can only surmise.
Without a word of explanation
the enigmatic Stevens walked off the project in March 1 907.
Roosevelt was furious, he turned to the army.
He wanted the canal`s new leader to be a man who couldn`t resign.
Colonel George Goethals was a military engineer expert in building locks.
l am told that army men are never successful
as executive heads of large enterprises.
However l now consider l am commending the army of Panama.
And the enemy we are going to combat is the Culebra Cut.
Any man working here who does his duty will have no cause for complaint.
Everything about the canal would be revolutionary.
The locks would be the largest concrete structures on earth.
A huge system of cranes and cables delivered the cement,
six tonnes of it in a single bucket.
The Americans threw vast sums of money and forty eight thousand men at the project.
The size of the project is monstrous, there`s no question of that.
We`re tackling something that is probably one of the largest engineering
feats ever undertaken by humanity.
Sixty one million pounds of dynamite were used on the canal.
ln a hundred and twenty degree heat was highly volatile.
The Culebra Cut became known as Hell`s Gorge.
But nothing would stand in Goethals way.
Every great enterprise involves great risk.
And if you`re not willing to take
that risk and seize it then you shouldn`t be here.
We are going to win and we`re going to win
and we are going to work and we`re going to succeed.
Goethals wanted to devote all resources to construction.
He slashed the medical budget failing to acknowledge a hidden enemy.
Colonel Goethals is an admirably efficient and capable manager.
lt is just that he doesn`t believe
that by controlling the mosquito we are controlling the disease.
lf we try and cut back on budgets too much now
we could have an epidemic on our hands.
And l can not accept that.
For six months the doctor and the army man fought it out.
Even the President heard of the conflict in the ranks.
We all have our ideas about how things should be done.
l like the fact that Doctor Gorgas fights his corner,
but it doesn`t mean that l won`t fight my corner.
Terrified of the return of yellow fever Marie Gorgas went public
with her condemnation of the Colonel.
Colonel Goethals constantly undermines him in a way that threatens disaster,
because he wants complete control,
and l believe he wants that control to secure his legacy.
And the canal will be a monument to his greatness,
oh we`re in Egypt don`t you know.
And the Colonel is the Pharaoh, and the pyramids the canal.
Oh l`m, l`m certain he has this fantasy, absolutely certain of it.
President Roosevelt knew from past experience
that a tiny insect could derail this massive enterprise.
He forced Goethals to back down.
Vindication, at last.
And now with the President`s full confidence
my husband will unquestionably win for us
the greatest triumph in the history of preventative medicine,
the destruction of the infecting mosquito.
But what that really means is that the canal can now be built.
For six long years the army of Panama blasted
its way through eighty million tonnes of rock.
Goethals shattered all excavation records.
Machine shops forged components for the colossal steel lock gates
which would stand six storeys high.
Each lock chamber would be bigger than the Titanic.
Work built towards the first tests in June 1 930.
Tomorrow we`ll do a dry lock test at the gates at Gathan.
This is the most demanding test to which we can put the apparatus.
The gates were hollow, designed to float on water.
Opening them in the empty chambers would put a huge stress on their hinges.
Crowds gathered for the test.
Nothing as big had been powered before by electricity.
The flick of a switch should cause the gates to swing in to action.
This has been a task of super human organisation and super human effort.
Now that we`re so close to finishing every man in the workforce
wants to see the first ship pass through the canal.
The damn was complete.
The valley was vast and took three years to fill.
The wild Chagres river had been tamed forever.
Soon the only barrier between the two mighty oceans
was a small earth dyke in the middle of the Culebra Cut.
Then on October 10th 1913 Culebra was finally conquered.
The extravagant dream had stolen the lives of twenty eight thousand people
and cost over three hundred million dollars.
The world had changed forever.
The Atlantic and the Pacific were joined.
The vessel chosen for the maiden voyage
through the mighty canal was the humble tug boat.
lt`s been an amazing journey for all of us.
Some of us didn`t make it.
Some of us did.
Our long years of labour are at an end.
The oceans are united at last.
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