50 Fun Facts About The Panama Canal

The Panama Canal spares ships sailing between the Atlantic and Pacific a voyage around which cape?

Cape Horn, at the tip of South America. Cutting through Panama instead shortens a sea voyage from New York to San Francisco by nearly 8,000 miles.

Which event scrapped the grand celebrations planned for the Panama Canal's opening?

World War I had just broken out in Europe when the canal opened on 15 August 1914, so the planned festivities were scrapped and the first official transit was a modest local affair.

What moves the lake water that fills the Panama Canal's locks?

Gravity alone does the work: water drains downhill from Gatun Lake, 26 metres above the sea, through tunnels in the lock walls. No pumps are used anywhere on the canal.

Which US presidential nominee was born in the Panama Canal Zone, where his father was a naval officer?

John McCain was born in 1936 at Coco Solo Naval Air Station. When he ran for president in 2008, the Senate passed a resolution recognising him as a natural-born citizen, as the Constitution requires.

Which Frenchman led the failed 1880s attempt to dig a canal across Panama?

Ferdinand de Lesseps was a diplomat, not an engineer, and he insisted on digging at sea level, as he had at Suez. The Americans succeeded with the locks and artificial lake he had waved away.

Which disease, along with malaria, was the great killer of workers on the French canal project in Panama?

Yellow fever spared no rank: Jules Dingler, the French director general, brought his family to Panama and lost his daughter, his son and then his wife to it.

Which Frenchman, hired to build locks for the Panama Canal, was convicted in the scandal over the company's collapse?

Gustave Eiffel was fined and sentenced to two years in prison in 1893, though the verdict was annulled on appeal. He retired from engineering and gave his last decades to weather and aerodynamics research.

What forced the Panama Canal to cut the number of ships allowed through each day in 2023 and 2024?

A severe drought left too little lake water to work the locks at full pace, so crossings were rationed and some gas tankers bound for Asia detoured through Suez or around Africa instead.

Which country did a US commission first recommend over Panama as the canal route in 1901?

Nicaragua was the favourite until a lobbyist for Panama mailed every US senator a Nicaraguan stamp showing a volcano in full eruption, and the Senate then voted for Panama.

From which country did Panama declare independence on 3 November 1903, with US warships blocking a response?

Colombia's senate had rejected the US canal treaty earlier that year. When Panama rose, American warships blocked the sea lanes and a Colombian force sent overland was beaten back by the Darién jungle.

In which New York hotel did Frenchman Philippe Bunau-Varilla promise to bankroll Panama's 1903 revolt in return for becoming its envoy?

The Waldorf-Astoria suite is where he offered the rebels his own money. As Panama's envoy he then signed the Canal Zone treaty himself, and no Panamanian's name is on it.

Which US president championed the Panama route and famously said he 'took the Isthmus'?

Theodore Roosevelt's full boast ran: 'I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.' In 1906 he sailed to Panama to see the digging for himself.

The deadly Canal Zone riots of 1964 began with a dispute over what?

A flag: Panamanian students marched into the Zone to raise their country's flag beside the American one, and the riot that followed briefly broke off diplomatic relations and pushed both sides towards a new treaty.

Army doctor William Gorgas made the Panama Canal possible by waging a relentless campaign against which creatures?

Mosquitoes carry the fevers that had beaten the French. Gorgas's crews fumigated houses, screened windows and oiled standing water, though his own commission thought it a waste of money.

During which war did the battleship Oregon's two-month dash from San Francisco to Florida show Americans they needed a canal?

The Spanish–American War of 1898 caught the Oregon on the wrong coast. She reached the fleet off Cuba just in time for the Battle of Santiago, and the scare gave the canal campaign new life.

Which US Army engineer took over the Panama Canal works in 1907 and drove them to completion in 1914?

George Washington Goethals got the job because two civilian chief engineers had quit within three years: the president wanted an Army man who had to stay until ordered home.

Which Hollywood star, a well-known conservative, publicly endorsed the 1970s treaties handing the Panama Canal to Panama?

John Wayne was a friend of Panama's leader and broke with fellow conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, who had campaigned against giving up the canal.

Which Caribbean island supplied by far the most contract labourers for the American construction of the Panama Canal?

Barbados sent the great majority of the West Indian contract workers, and West Indians made up most of the roughly 5,600 workers who died during the American years.

Which artificial valley carries the Panama Canal through the Continental Divide, the hardest digging of the whole project?

Culebra Cut bore the name Gaillard Cut for most of the 20th century, after the Army major who led the digging and died months before the canal opened.

Which US president pressed a button in Washington in October 1913 to blow up the last dike across the Panama Canal?

Woodrow Wilson's signal ran down the telegraph wires from Washington to Panama, where it set off the charge that breached the Gamboa dike and let the lake water flood the last dry stretch.

Which machines, mostly built by Bucyrus in Wisconsin, did the Panama Canal's heavy digging?

Steam shovels on rails loaded the endless dirt trains. In May 1913 two of them, digging from opposite directions, finally met on the floor of the deepest cut.

Although the Pacific lies west of the Atlantic, ships crossing the Panama Canal towards the Pacific sail in which general direction?

Southeast: because of the way the isthmus curves, the canal runs from northwest to southeast, and its Pacific entrance lies a little east of its Atlantic one.

Which pair of leaders signed the 1977 treaties that provided for handing the canal to Panama?

Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos signed in September 1977. A year earlier, as a candidate, Carter had vowed not to surrender control of the Canal Zone; the Senate then approved each treaty with a single vote to spare.

Panama took full control of the canal just hours before which milestone?

The year 2000 was hours away: the treaties signed in 1977 had fixed 31 December 1999, 22 years ahead, as the day US control would end.

At whose request were the Panama Canal's locks built wider than first designed?

The US Navy wanted room for the battleships on its drawing boards, and for the next three decades American warships were designed to squeeze through. The size limit became known as Panamax.

The Panama Canal's 2016 expansion let far bigger 'Neopanamax' ships cross by adding what?

A third lane of locks, Agua Clara on the Atlantic side and Cocolí on the Pacific, opened in June 2016 after nine years of work and doubled the canal's capacity.

Which locks on the Panama Canal lower ships the final two steps to the Pacific?

Miraflores has the tallest gates of the canal's original locks, because the Pacific's big tides make the final step down vary by several metres.

For doing what did travel writer Richard Halliburton pay a Panama Canal toll of just 36 cents in 1928?

Swimming it. He was charged the way ships were, by tonnage, and no smaller toll has been paid before or since.

Why were the Panama Canal's giant steel lock gates built hollow?

To make them float: each leaf is as buoyant as a ship's hull, which takes the weight off its hinges, so a gate up to 82 feet high swings with little effort.

What was completed across Panama in 1855, linking the two oceans almost 60 years before the canal?

A railroad, running ocean to ocean 14 years before the first line across the United States. It cost thousands of labourers their lives, and half a century later it hauled away the canal's dirt.

Which body named the Panama Canal one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World?

The American Society of Civil Engineers drew up its list in 1994. Its canal was a second attempt: a French company went bankrupt digging in the 1880s, before the Americans dammed a river into a lake and lifted ships up to it.

Which conquistador's 1513 crossing of the Isthmus of Panama first raised the idea of a canal?

Vasco Núñez de Balboa discovered that only a narrow strip of land separates the two oceans, and within a generation Spain was surveying a route for ships. Nothing came of it for almost 400 years.

Which kingdom tried to plant a trading colony on the Isthmus of Panama in the ill-fated Darien scheme of 1698–1700?

Scotland's investors raised £400,000 for the colony, which collapsed within two years. Seven years later the weakened kingdom accepted union with England, whose payment went mostly to cover their losses.

What event in 1848 created huge demand for a crossing of Panama?

The California Gold Rush made Panama the fast route west: steamships from New York landed prospectors on the Atlantic shore, and a second line carried them on from the Pacific side to San Francisco.

Which river was dammed to create Gatun Lake, the Panama Canal's water supply?

The Chagres in flood was the terror of the French engineers, and the Americans' chief engineer called controlling it the one great problem of any canal there. The dam turned it into the lake that ships now sail across.

Which institution runs Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal as a rainforest laboratory?

The Smithsonian Institution has run it since 1946. The island was a hilltop until the canal's lake rose around it, and the forest stranded there is now among the most studied on Earth.

About how long does a ship take to sail through the Panama Canal from one ocean to the other?

About 10 hours covers the passage itself, which is usually put at eight to ten. Ships can spend far longer in canal waters, though, since they first wait at anchor for their turn to enter.

Which bridge over the Panama Canal long set the height limit for ships using it?

The Bridge of the Americas opened in 1962 as the Thatcher Ferry Bridge. Every ship crossing the canal must pass beneath its main span, so that clearance became the ceiling for 'Panamax' ships.

Which kind of warship knocked down the concrete lamp posts beside the Gatun Locks on its first trip through in 1928?

An aircraft carrier: USS Saratoga's flight deck overhung her hull, and the canal's pilots had never handled such a ship. Months later she took part in a fleet exercise that staged a mock attack on the canal.

Which Panamanian ruler did US forces overthrow in the 1989 invasion that briefly closed the Panama Canal?

Manuel Noriega had worked with Washington for years before the two fell out. The invasion briefly shut the canal, yet the planned handover of the waterway to Panama still went ahead.

Who ran the Panama Canal between the Zone's abolition in 1979 and the handover?

A joint commission of Americans and Panamanians took over on 1 October 1979, the day the Zone ceased to exist. Americans led it at first, and in 1990 a Panamanian became its administrator for the first time.

What powered every gate, valve and towing locomotive on the Panama Canal's locks when they opened in 1914?

Electricity was still a novelty for heavy works in 1914. It let a single operator at a control board work every gate and valve in a whole flight of locks.

The SS Ancon made the Panama Canal's first official transit in 1914 after years of hauling what for its builders?

Cement by the shipload: the Ancon and her sister ship carried it from New York for the locks, dams and spillways, and then the humble freighter was given the honour of opening the canal.

Which future president lost many of his soldiers to disease crossing Panama in 1852 and later ordered US surveys for a canal?

Ulysses S. Grant, then a young Army officer, set up a field hospital as cholera swept his column. As president he sent expeditions to survey canal routes across Central America.

The 1850 Clayton–Bulwer Treaty bound the United States to share control of any Central American canal with which country?

Britain held the Americans to that bargain for half a century. Only the Hay–Pauncefote Treaty of 1901 scrapped it and left the United States free to build and run a canal by itself.

Rock dug out of the Panama Canal was dumped in the Pacific to build what?

A causeway to islands: it links four small islands to the mainland, doubles as a breakwater for the canal's Pacific entrance, and still carries a road.

What chiefly decided whether a Panama Canal construction worker was paid on the 'Gold Roll' or the 'Silver Roll'?

Race: white Americans went on the Gold Roll and were paid in US currency, while the West Indians who did most of the heavy labour were paid in local silver on the Silver Roll.

Which historian told the story of the Panama Canal's creation in the prize-winning 1977 book The Path Between the Seas?

David McCullough's book came out months before the Senate debated handing the canal to Panama, and the president who signed the treaties later said they would not have passed without it.

Which Spanish monarch ordered the first survey for a canal across Panama, as early as 1534?

Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, wanted a shortcut for ships sailing between Spain and Peru. His governor in Panama surveyed a route and concluded that no one could ever build it.

The famous phrase 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama' is an example of what kind of wordplay?

A palindrome reads the same backwards as forwards. Its author, Leigh Mercer, did not want to be remembered for it: he asked not to be thought of purely as a palindrome man, having had many other hobbies.