July 20, 2009 • 13 mins
The idea for the Panama Canal goes back to 1534, when the Spanish surveyed the area. However, the canal wasn't built for centuries, and it was an arduous task. Learn more about the malaria plaguing canal builders in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kendis King. You're joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert.
Take Canadas. See there, Katie. If you are anything like me,
(00:20):
you've been pretty upset since the hit series The Real
Housewives of New York ended its run. But um, I've
been spending my time keeping up with the Discovery Channels
Monsters Inside Me about parasitical influences on the human body.
And uh, you may be wondering why I'm tying these
two shows together, and it's because today we are going
(00:41):
to pay homage to Monsters Inside Me by talking about
malaria and how it is connected to the building of
the Panama Canal, which was financed by an ancestor of
one of my favorite New York housewives, Lu and Lu
sub Do you see this? It all comes it all
comes together. So Um, the Panama Canal, all, as many
of you know, is stooped in history and challenge and
(01:05):
lots and lots of money and lost lives and it's
a fascinating story about business deals gone wrong and disease.
Our article on how the Panama Canal works by our
own Sarah Dowity really did help me with the research
for this one. But basically, the idea behind the Panama
Canal is connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and making
it easier so ships don't have to go around South
(01:27):
America's Cape Horn and instead can just go straight through,
because that is a pretty dangerous and time consuming and
expensive journey. The canal was designed to shave off eight
thousand nautical miles between the east and west coasts of
the United States, and it seemed like such a simple
idea because the isthmus of Panama was so narrow, but
(01:48):
in fact it took centuries between when the idea was
initially conceived and when the canal came to fruition. So
we're going to go back to fifteen thirty four, which
is when the Spanish started looking around and trying to
decide where would be the best way to do this,
and there were two routes that were actually considered, one
(02:09):
through Panama and the other one through Nicaragua all the
way up to the twentieth century, and the French chose
Panama because of the Panamanian Railway, and the French were
led by a brilliant financier named Ferdinand de la Ceps,
and he had had a lot of success working with
the Siouez Canal, and so he approached the Panamanian Canal
(02:32):
with the same guest jo. He thought, I can easily
do this. I don't even have to install a complicated
canal system. This one doesn't need any locks. It's going
to be a c level canal. We'll get through this
in no time. So a couple of things were on
Dela cup side, one of which was steam technology, which
was going to make the task a lot more manageable.
But something that was not on his side was his
(02:54):
own stubborn nature. He thought that he could build the
Panama Canal much in the same way as the Sis
can However, he was not accounting for Panama's geography and
its distinct characteristics like the mountains and jungle and invoking
parasites here mosquitoes. Those were a huge problem, and that's
because mosquitoes carry a protozoan parasite that causes malaria, and
(03:19):
they also carry yellow fever, which plagued the people building
the canal for years and estimated twenty two thousand people
died from illnesses like malaria and yellow fever during the
building of the canal, so needless to say, that really
did hold up progress, and eventually Delssas relented and planned
to incorporate locks into the canal. Once he realized that
(03:41):
he couldn't burst through the mountains, he was going to
have to find some way to hoist the ships through,
So he finally hires gustav I Fell and so he
hires the great mastermind behind the Eiffel Tower to design
a type of canal that did incorporate locks. But but unfortunately,
by this time he had wasted more than eight years
(04:02):
and uh an obscene amount of money. So the hero
behind the Suez Canal simply could not make the Panama
Canal happen. And this actually turned into a pretty sad
case for his family because at the canal that he'd
begun around one didn't get built until nineteen fourteen, not
by him, not even by his country, and he was
(04:25):
actually convicted in the French court system of mismanagement and
he and his son Charles were ordered to pay up
and to go to prison. However, because Delisavs was so
old at the time, his son served his prison sentence
for him. So for a while it seemed that between
all the deaths due to parasitical infections and the money
(04:47):
trouble and the seeming impossibility of breaking through the land,
that the Panama Canal was doomed never to happen. Fortunately
another country stepped in then, and that's when the US
took a her when in nineteen o two, Congress bought
the failed company's assets. And the catch was that we
were going to form a treaty with Columbia, who controlled
(05:10):
Panama at the time, and when Columbia wasn't particularly interested
in this catch that we had, um, we supported Panamanian independence,
and it's that Columbia. Yeah, that seems a little underhanded.
There were many it is. Yeah, there are many U.
S senators at the time who thought that it was
(05:30):
dirty and they didn't want to be involved with it. However,
many Panamanians today would probably beg to differ. And the
treaty was passed, the hay banal Varula Treaty UM, where
Panama signed over the rights and didn't actually have a
Spanish translation of the rights they were signing over. So
again some dirty dealing. Yeah, it seems like we've seen
(05:50):
these kinds of dirty dealings before in other errors of history,
but that aside. Moving forward, so the United States final
has paid about forty million dollars for the company's assets
and ten million dollars in good will money towards Panama. However,
there is still this raging debate, as there was in
the era of Della Steps canal building, as to whether
(06:13):
the United States should build a sea level canal or
a lock based canal. And finally Teddy Roosevelt, Mr. Rough
Rider himself steps up and says, here's the word. It's
going to be lock based. And that was that. And
with the sea level canal, basically what you do is
smashed through the terrain to make it what you want
to be, so everything is just flat across. But unfortunately,
(06:36):
in a place like Panama we were talking about the
mountain ranges and stuff, it is a little more difficult.
So they decided on locks, which basically the ship goes
into an open lock. There's a good diagram of this
and Sarah Dowdy's article on the website if you'd like
to see it. And then they close it up and
they either raise or lower the water level depending on
what the next little stretch of water is like there
(07:00):
are three different locks in the Panama Canal and it
starts at the cartoon locks. I'm sorry if I'm not
pronouncing that right, which lifts a ship eighty five feet,
and then the next lock, which is about eight miles later,
they lower the ship's thirty feet, and then the next
one they get returned to sea level. So incorporating the
lock based design into the plans for the Panama Canal
(07:21):
meant that despite advance smith and steam technology, and despite
having dynamite on hand, crews were not going to have
to burst through the terrain necessarily. They were going to
dam a river to create a gatoon lake, and then
they were going to send ships over the mountains instead
of through them. So it seemed like a pretty logical plan.
(07:41):
As these plans are coming together and converging on paper
and in blueprint, there's another ugly problem still rearing its head,
and that's yellow fever in the canal zone. So in
steps Colonel William Gorgons and his sanitation campaign that was
designed to stamp out all traces of mosquitoes, malaria and
(08:02):
yellow fever. And you have to realize that at this time,
no one knew what caused things like malaria. They thought
it was bad air or bad morals, or bad morals,
So we're sorry if it's your own fault that you're sick.
And it wasn't until the late eighteen hundreds that Alphonse
Lavran discovered that it was a parasite that caused malaria,
and then not until later than that that an army
(08:23):
surgeon named Ronald Ross discovered that it had something to
do with mosquitoes. It was estimated at the time that
one sixth of the population in just one city and
the Panama Ismus suffered from malaria every single year, and
it's still a problem today. Some five hundred million people
come down with malaria every year and it kills at
least a million. But they needed an attack plan against malaria,
(08:47):
and according to the CDC, they came up with a
few different ways of attacking and one was drainage. So
they drained all the pools near villages, which was actually
really good because mosquito's love stay at the water. Yes,
it's their favorite thing. They cut brush and grass, they
poured oil on near ponds to get rid of all
(09:08):
the mosquito larva. Um They found larva side, they gave
everyone quinine as a preventative. They put screens everywhere, and
then they killed as many adult mosquitoes as they could find.
They actually hired people to collect and to kill them.
And the death rate from malaria dropped from eleven point
five nine per one thousand people in November nineteen o
(09:28):
six to one point to three per one thousand people
in December nineteen o nine. So that is a pretty
insanely wonderful change. Let's take just a second now to
pause and think our sponsor, audible dot com. If you
go to audible podcast dot com slash history stuff, you
can get a free download. And if you're interested in
(09:49):
what you've been hearing about the Panama Canal, malaria and
yellow fever, you may be interested in this book by
Julie Green, The Canal Builders, Making America's Empire at the
PanAm All Canal or Panama Fever by Matthew Parker. And
again that's a free download of an audiobook when you
go to audible podcast dot com slash history Stuff. Okay,
(10:10):
so back to the story and the huge scope of
this project. You know, you think about undertaking a project
at home, Maybe you're painting your living room and you
have to clean the walls, and then you prime at
first and all that's happening. And know not that I'm
undergoing renovations, but to think that that's sort of preparation
takes time before you can undergo your real project. And
the whole time you have your eyes on the prize,
(10:32):
knowing that you're um, you're employing people and it's costing
you time and money. And to think about the kind
of time it takes to get this disease and these
parasites under control before you can move in and start working.
And the United States is, you know, under pressure because
of the shady dealings with Columbia and Panama, and that
because the French had lagged so far behind in their efforts.
(10:53):
I'm sure that the eyes of the world were on
the United States, wondering what exactly they were doing and
if they were going to be successful, where the French
were not so, but the eyes of the world upon
them and a lot of pressure too. They did eventually
um prevail, and they had the most trouble when they
were cutting through the Continental Divide. They moved ninety six
(11:15):
million cubic yards of dirt and rock and Finally, on
January seventh, nineteen fourteen, a crane called the Alexander La
Valley went through the canal, but the first time, the
first vessel to pass through, and the grand opening of
the canal was delayed for a little while another eight months,
and the celebrations were sobered about the start of World
(11:35):
War One. But what a huge achievement. And there were
nearly four hundred million dollars in costs that weren't recovered
until the nineteen fifties, a huge expenditure. And if you've
been wondering and feeling a little bit uneasy about the
the dealings with Panama, you will be happy to know
(11:57):
that that situation was rectified too. In nineteen seventy nine,
Jimmy Carter signed a treaty saying that for the next
twenty years, the US and the Republic of Panama would
share control of the Panama Canal, and in the Republic
of Panama got to canal back. And so today the
canal is not as young and sprightly as it once was,
(12:18):
but Panamas in the process of adding a third lane
to it and building some larger locks to help non
Panamax ships passed through and Panamax ship is one that
saw us to fit through the canal. So you see
thwarting the nasty, dastardly efforts of Mosquito's paid off in
the end for worldwide commerce. By the end of two
(12:40):
thousand six, ninety three thousand, forty two vessels had gone
through the Panama Canal in Cape porn cries every day indeed,
and we would like to remind you to check out
Monsters Inside Me on the Discovery Channel at nine on Wednesdays.
And if you wanted to learn more about Panama, the
Panama can out and be dashing bit ill fated for
(13:02):
an angelar stuffs. You can find all that plus our
stuff you missed in History Class Blog when you check
out the homepage at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot
com and be sure to check out the stuff you
(13:22):
missed in History Class Blog on the how stuff works
dot com homepage
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kendis King. You're joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert.
Take Canadas. See there, Katie. If you are anything like me,
(00:20):
you've been pretty upset since the hit series The Real
Housewives of New York ended its run. But um, I've
been spending my time keeping up with the Discovery Channels
Monsters Inside Me about parasitical influences on the human body.
And uh, you may be wondering why I'm tying these
two shows together, and it's because today we are going
(00:41):
to pay homage to Monsters Inside Me by talking about
malaria and how it is connected to the building of
the Panama Canal, which was financed by an ancestor of
one of my favorite New York housewives, Lu and Lu
sub Do you see this? It all comes it all
comes together. So Um, the Panama Canal, all, as many
of you know, is stooped in history and challenge and
(01:05):
lots and lots of money and lost lives and it's
a fascinating story about business deals gone wrong and disease.
Our article on how the Panama Canal works by our
own Sarah Dowity really did help me with the research
for this one. But basically, the idea behind the Panama
Canal is connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and making
it easier so ships don't have to go around South
(01:27):
America's Cape Horn and instead can just go straight through,
because that is a pretty dangerous and time consuming and
expensive journey. The canal was designed to shave off eight
thousand nautical miles between the east and west coasts of
the United States, and it seemed like such a simple
idea because the isthmus of Panama was so narrow, but
(01:48):
in fact it took centuries between when the idea was
initially conceived and when the canal came to fruition. So
we're going to go back to fifteen thirty four, which
is when the Spanish started looking around and trying to
decide where would be the best way to do this,
and there were two routes that were actually considered, one
(02:09):
through Panama and the other one through Nicaragua all the
way up to the twentieth century, and the French chose
Panama because of the Panamanian Railway, and the French were
led by a brilliant financier named Ferdinand de la Ceps,
and he had had a lot of success working with
the Siouez Canal, and so he approached the Panamanian Canal
(02:32):
with the same guest jo. He thought, I can easily
do this. I don't even have to install a complicated
canal system. This one doesn't need any locks. It's going
to be a c level canal. We'll get through this
in no time. So a couple of things were on
Dela cup side, one of which was steam technology, which
was going to make the task a lot more manageable.
But something that was not on his side was his
(02:54):
own stubborn nature. He thought that he could build the
Panama Canal much in the same way as the Sis
can However, he was not accounting for Panama's geography and
its distinct characteristics like the mountains and jungle and invoking
parasites here mosquitoes. Those were a huge problem, and that's
because mosquitoes carry a protozoan parasite that causes malaria, and
(03:19):
they also carry yellow fever, which plagued the people building
the canal for years and estimated twenty two thousand people
died from illnesses like malaria and yellow fever during the
building of the canal, so needless to say, that really
did hold up progress, and eventually Delssas relented and planned
to incorporate locks into the canal. Once he realized that
(03:41):
he couldn't burst through the mountains, he was going to
have to find some way to hoist the ships through,
So he finally hires gustav I Fell and so he
hires the great mastermind behind the Eiffel Tower to design
a type of canal that did incorporate locks. But but unfortunately,
by this time he had wasted more than eight years
(04:02):
and uh an obscene amount of money. So the hero
behind the Suez Canal simply could not make the Panama
Canal happen. And this actually turned into a pretty sad
case for his family because at the canal that he'd
begun around one didn't get built until nineteen fourteen, not
by him, not even by his country, and he was
(04:25):
actually convicted in the French court system of mismanagement and
he and his son Charles were ordered to pay up
and to go to prison. However, because Delisavs was so
old at the time, his son served his prison sentence
for him. So for a while it seemed that between
all the deaths due to parasitical infections and the money
(04:47):
trouble and the seeming impossibility of breaking through the land,
that the Panama Canal was doomed never to happen. Fortunately
another country stepped in then, and that's when the US
took a her when in nineteen o two, Congress bought
the failed company's assets. And the catch was that we
were going to form a treaty with Columbia, who controlled
(05:10):
Panama at the time, and when Columbia wasn't particularly interested
in this catch that we had, um, we supported Panamanian independence,
and it's that Columbia. Yeah, that seems a little underhanded.
There were many it is. Yeah, there are many U.
S senators at the time who thought that it was
(05:30):
dirty and they didn't want to be involved with it. However,
many Panamanians today would probably beg to differ. And the
treaty was passed, the hay banal Varula Treaty UM, where
Panama signed over the rights and didn't actually have a
Spanish translation of the rights they were signing over. So
again some dirty dealing. Yeah, it seems like we've seen
(05:50):
these kinds of dirty dealings before in other errors of history,
but that aside. Moving forward, so the United States final
has paid about forty million dollars for the company's assets
and ten million dollars in good will money towards Panama. However,
there is still this raging debate, as there was in
the era of Della Steps canal building, as to whether
(06:13):
the United States should build a sea level canal or
a lock based canal. And finally Teddy Roosevelt, Mr. Rough
Rider himself steps up and says, here's the word. It's
going to be lock based. And that was that. And
with the sea level canal, basically what you do is
smashed through the terrain to make it what you want
to be, so everything is just flat across. But unfortunately,
(06:36):
in a place like Panama we were talking about the
mountain ranges and stuff, it is a little more difficult.
So they decided on locks, which basically the ship goes
into an open lock. There's a good diagram of this
and Sarah Dowdy's article on the website if you'd like
to see it. And then they close it up and
they either raise or lower the water level depending on
what the next little stretch of water is like there
(07:00):
are three different locks in the Panama Canal and it
starts at the cartoon locks. I'm sorry if I'm not
pronouncing that right, which lifts a ship eighty five feet,
and then the next lock, which is about eight miles later,
they lower the ship's thirty feet, and then the next
one they get returned to sea level. So incorporating the
lock based design into the plans for the Panama Canal
(07:21):
meant that despite advance smith and steam technology, and despite
having dynamite on hand, crews were not going to have
to burst through the terrain necessarily. They were going to
dam a river to create a gatoon lake, and then
they were going to send ships over the mountains instead
of through them. So it seemed like a pretty logical plan.
(07:41):
As these plans are coming together and converging on paper
and in blueprint, there's another ugly problem still rearing its head,
and that's yellow fever in the canal zone. So in
steps Colonel William Gorgons and his sanitation campaign that was
designed to stamp out all traces of mosquitoes, malaria and
(08:02):
yellow fever. And you have to realize that at this time,
no one knew what caused things like malaria. They thought
it was bad air or bad morals, or bad morals,
So we're sorry if it's your own fault that you're sick.
And it wasn't until the late eighteen hundreds that Alphonse
Lavran discovered that it was a parasite that caused malaria,
and then not until later than that that an army
(08:23):
surgeon named Ronald Ross discovered that it had something to
do with mosquitoes. It was estimated at the time that
one sixth of the population in just one city and
the Panama Ismus suffered from malaria every single year, and
it's still a problem today. Some five hundred million people
come down with malaria every year and it kills at
least a million. But they needed an attack plan against malaria,
(08:47):
and according to the CDC, they came up with a
few different ways of attacking and one was drainage. So
they drained all the pools near villages, which was actually
really good because mosquito's love stay at the water. Yes,
it's their favorite thing. They cut brush and grass, they
poured oil on near ponds to get rid of all
(09:08):
the mosquito larva. Um They found larva side, they gave
everyone quinine as a preventative. They put screens everywhere, and
then they killed as many adult mosquitoes as they could find.
They actually hired people to collect and to kill them.
And the death rate from malaria dropped from eleven point
five nine per one thousand people in November nineteen o
(09:28):
six to one point to three per one thousand people
in December nineteen o nine. So that is a pretty
insanely wonderful change. Let's take just a second now to
pause and think our sponsor, audible dot com. If you
go to audible podcast dot com slash history stuff, you
can get a free download. And if you're interested in
(09:49):
what you've been hearing about the Panama Canal, malaria and
yellow fever, you may be interested in this book by
Julie Green, The Canal Builders, Making America's Empire at the
PanAm All Canal or Panama Fever by Matthew Parker. And
again that's a free download of an audiobook when you
go to audible podcast dot com slash history Stuff. Okay,
(10:10):
so back to the story and the huge scope of
this project. You know, you think about undertaking a project
at home, Maybe you're painting your living room and you
have to clean the walls, and then you prime at
first and all that's happening. And know not that I'm
undergoing renovations, but to think that that's sort of preparation
takes time before you can undergo your real project. And
the whole time you have your eyes on the prize,
(10:32):
knowing that you're um, you're employing people and it's costing
you time and money. And to think about the kind
of time it takes to get this disease and these
parasites under control before you can move in and start working.
And the United States is, you know, under pressure because
of the shady dealings with Columbia and Panama, and that
because the French had lagged so far behind in their efforts.
(10:53):
I'm sure that the eyes of the world were on
the United States, wondering what exactly they were doing and
if they were going to be successful, where the French
were not so, but the eyes of the world upon
them and a lot of pressure too. They did eventually
um prevail, and they had the most trouble when they
were cutting through the Continental Divide. They moved ninety six
(11:15):
million cubic yards of dirt and rock and Finally, on
January seventh, nineteen fourteen, a crane called the Alexander La
Valley went through the canal, but the first time, the
first vessel to pass through, and the grand opening of
the canal was delayed for a little while another eight months,
and the celebrations were sobered about the start of World
(11:35):
War One. But what a huge achievement. And there were
nearly four hundred million dollars in costs that weren't recovered
until the nineteen fifties, a huge expenditure. And if you've
been wondering and feeling a little bit uneasy about the
the dealings with Panama, you will be happy to know
(11:57):
that that situation was rectified too. In nineteen seventy nine,
Jimmy Carter signed a treaty saying that for the next
twenty years, the US and the Republic of Panama would
share control of the Panama Canal, and in the Republic
of Panama got to canal back. And so today the
canal is not as young and sprightly as it once was,
(12:18):
but Panamas in the process of adding a third lane
to it and building some larger locks to help non
Panamax ships passed through and Panamax ship is one that
saw us to fit through the canal. So you see
thwarting the nasty, dastardly efforts of Mosquito's paid off in
the end for worldwide commerce. By the end of two
(12:40):
thousand six, ninety three thousand, forty two vessels had gone
through the Panama Canal in Cape porn cries every day indeed,
and we would like to remind you to check out
Monsters Inside Me on the Discovery Channel at nine on Wednesdays.
And if you wanted to learn more about Panama, the
Panama can out and be dashing bit ill fated for
(13:02):
an angelar stuffs. You can find all that plus our
stuff you missed in History Class Blog when you check
out the homepage at how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot
com and be sure to check out the stuff you
(13:22):
missed in History Class Blog on the how stuff works
dot com homepage
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