Posted on August 15, 2021
This is an update of my post published on August 15, 2010:
After ten years of work, the 48-mile (77-km) Panama Canal was finally completed.
And, on this date in 1914, the Panama Canal was officially opened.
It linked the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and cut in half the trip from the East Coast of the U.S. to the West Coast.
That's huge!
You know what else was huge? Digging the canal! It was a huge and difficult engineering project. The French tried to build a canal in the same location in the late 1800s, and 21,900 workers died (mostly from tropical diseases) before they finally gave up the effort. The U.S. canal construction wasn't as deadly, but 5,600 workers lost their lives before the canal was finished.
Did you know...?
It takes from eight to ten hours to travel the canal.
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At each elevation, a ship has to wait in each lock until the water level has been raised or lowered to the level of the next lock. |
The maximum size of ship that can use the canal is called Panamax.
Although the Pacific Ocean is west of the Atlantic, crossing from the Pacific to the Atlantic involves going the opposite you would think: from (south)east to (north)west. This is because the narrow chunk of land where the canal is built is a sort of “S” curve.
Word Play
Do you know what a palindrome is? It is a word or phrase that reads the same backwards or forwards. The words “mom” and “level” are both palindromes.
The Panama Canal is the subject of one of the longest and most famous palindromes:
A MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL – PANAMA
