The Ocala banner. (Ocala, Marion County, Fla.) 1883-194?, 1912-08-16
THE PANAMA CANAL
The Worlds Greatest Piece of Enoi-
neering Work-its Completion
Will Witness the Wharfage
of the Seas"

/
phases of the Panama canal, the
/ greatest of canals, and assuredly the
most interesting feature of the
worlds work now in progress.
The magnitude OF the canal as an
engineering undertaking is realized By
few persons who have not gone to
Panama and looked at the canal
Perhaps, since it is only by compare
! son that aught is great or small, only
those who have been through the
Suez truly appreciates the titanic
task that the United States is com
pleting And eTen those who have
investigated the question OF what
changes will be made in ocean trade,
and what benefits will accrue to the
various nations. can only speculate
upon the dimensions Of the canal as a
factor in the progress OF the world
Says William Bayard Halle, one of
the contributors TO the August
Worlds Work:
Its marvels are the Gatum dam,
the Culebra cut, and the locks-each
Of the six of them with two chambers
1000 feet long and 10 feet wide.
You may think you can manufac-
ture a mental picture Of these locks
but you cannot-until you have gone
down their perpendicular sides a
thousand feet and got aboard a dunn
my train that journeys three-fourths
OF a mile along the bottom; not until
you have looked up and seen the ca
thedral arches springing in glory from
side TO side, and gaZed at the steel
gates seven feet thick, and marked
the cistern holes in the bottom of the
channel, up and down through which
will move the strong streams that
will lift and let down the ships of the
nations into their cradles with the
tenderness of a mother with an in
FAINT. For underneath extend culyerts
the size of railroad tunnels; it is
through these and through mighty
valves that the locks are filled and
emptied Move about a while among
these works like a pygmy lost in a
labyrinth Of the gods and it will dawn
on you what sort of thing men have
been about here on this neck of Da-
rien"
In an exchange of speeches between
Secretary Knox and Panama cabi-
net minister recently the marriage
of the seas" was spoken Of Mr. Hale
points out that there is no literal unit
ing of the waters Of the Pacific and
Atlantic oceans. The canal is really
a water bridge across the isthmus. A
ship steams into Limon Bay, on the
Atlantic side, comes to full stop in
lock, the first of three locks by
which she is lifted to the level of a
fresh water lake eighty-five feet above
the level of the sea. She sails through
the lake and is lowered to the level
of the Pacific
The Suez canal was begun by Seti
I, father of Rameses the Great four
teen centuries before the birth of
Christ, when a canal about sixty
miles long was cut to connect a
branch of the Nile Delta with the Bit
ter Lakes, now a part of the canal
that connects the Mediterranean with
the Red Sea. Nearly thirty-five CEN
turtles interviewed between the begin
nings of the Suez canal and its COM
pletion. During all of that time the
unsolved problem interested the east
and west. and particularly Egypt and
Persia
When the Persian Darius undertook
to dig the Suez Canal about 1000
years after Seti's digging, engineers
told him that it's completion would
cause a deluge, and he gave up the
project Ptoemy Philadelphus, Am
rou, the Arab, and others, did more
or less digging and planning, and Ma
poleon had it in mind but was told by
his engineers that the level of the
Mediterranean was thirty feet below
that of the Red Sea. and abandoned
the idea of a sea level canal He
evacuated Egypt before he began his
contemplated lock and dam canal
The Suez was finally dug, at an
enormous expense of life, by misera-
Bile Egyptian peasants, who scooped
up the sand with their hands and car
ried it away in baskets. That this
could be done, even with a tyrant
who could draft workmen by the thou
sand and cared not at all how many
of them were sacrificed, shows strik-
ingly how small an engineering pro-
ject the Suez was in comparison with
the Panama, which America sees
nearing completion only a few years
after it was begun.