CHAPTER II
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.
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.