“These towing-locomotives,” continued Colonel Sibert, leading us to the top of the nearest lock-wall up a broad, well-proportioned stairway cast in one piece with the rest of the structure, “will be equipped with winches and slip-drums, so that they can tighten or slacken the hawsers, a flexibility that is going to save breaking a lot of line. Four locomotives will take charge of each large ship, two forward and two aft. When they reach those archways carrying the tracks from one level to another, one pair will take the weight of the ship, while the others will climb up to the level above by this rack-rail.”
Between the two ordinary rails of the towing-track, neatly embedded in the concrete top of the lock-wall, was a third rail, broad and strong and indented for the teeth of a mighty cog-wheel. With isthmian thoroughness, these depressions are made self-draining, lest rain-water accumulate and breed fever-carrying mosquitos. There is a tragedy connected with the third, or return-track, of the towing-railroad, which runs down the middle of the center wall. It had to be there, and so did the range-light that will guide ships across the lake into the upper forebay of the locks. So they stuck that dignified lighthouse up on four bandy legs, like a mangrove on its roots; and when the Art Commission come down from Washington and see it, they will say unkind things of the engineers.
They are building the control-house, the nerve center of all the delicate, ponderous machinery at Gatun, at the lower end of the uppermost lock, where half a dozen operators can oversee and control everything. The control-board will be like a flat-topped table desk, with a model of the locks in low relief, the gates, large valves, and all important machinery shown in miniature, and moving in unison with the main machines. The switches which control the different units will be interlocked in such a manner that the operator cannot move the wrong machine. This switch will stretch a chain across the path of a runaway ship; that will open or close a valve in one of the three great culverts (each as large as the Pennsylvania Railroad tunnels under the Hudson River), and so empty or fill a lock; a third will swing round and drop into place the emergency dam that would hold the water in the lake were every gate and guard-gate swept away. If the control-house itself were destroyed, the machines could be operated in detail.
PICTURESQUE RUINS IN PANAMA
One man has succeeded in making a true picture of the gates of the Gatun Locks—Mr. Pennell.[8] I shall only ask you to imagine the blind walls of two six-story office-buildings swinging open on hinges, like the front of a doll’s house. This miracle is accomplished by a device called the “Bullwheel,” the invention of an employee of the Isthmian Canal Commission, Mr. Edward Schildhauer. A ponderous wheel, revolving horizontally, thrusts out through the side of the lock-wall a long steel arm that opens and closes one of the massive gates as easily as one could a bedroom door. These gates are of what is known as the “mitering-pattern,” making, when closed, a blunt wedge pointing up-stream, like a beaver dam. Mr. Schildhauer is also the inventor of a “miter-locking machine,” which bears a strong family resemblance to the large purple land-crab of the isthmus. One of these machines squats on the top of every gate, and, grasping a pin on the opposite leaf, holds both tightly together.
The fact that the three locks of the Atlantic division of the Panama Canal are together in one place has attracted the attention of the world to Gatun, to the disadvantage of the equally good work done at Miraflores and Pedro Miguel, and the quiet, efficient civil engineer under whom it has been done. Mr. S. B. Williamson, C.E. Of him they tell a story, one of the few that deal with the pre-isthmian days of Colonel Goethals.
Mr. Williamson was working under the colonel on some irrigation-project in the southwest. One morning his chief discovered him shoveling away a gravel-bank with his own hands among a gang of common laborers. The colonel took his subordinate roundly to task. Mr. Williamson blushed, stammered, and finally admitted:
“There was a bit of a slide, sir, and the men were afraid to go back into the pit until I showed them there was no danger.”
The colonel apologized, and has kept Mr. Williamson by him ever since. It is a good illustration of the spirit of Colonel Goethals and his men—the men who have put through the big job.