Panama Canal

Three lectures by John Laverick have explained much about what we will be seeing.  Before the Canal, there was a railroad which was the most expensive ever built per mile and also had the heaviest traffic.  Twelve thousand died during construction, not only workers but family members.  So many died that the corpses were sold to medical schools. 

Five canal routes were considered and many plans including a tunnel .  A plan by De Lessups, who built the Suez Canal,  proposed a sea-level canal without locks ignoring the mountain range through the center of the country.  President Grant favored a route through Nicaragua.  Ultimately, of course, the Panama was built.  It is presently being enlarged mostly due to the needs of container ships.  While passenger ships are nice, the backbone of the Canal economy is trade goods.  Although John Stevens introduced the idea of locks, the successful canal project was led through most of the construction by George Washington Goethals (as in the Goethals Bridge, I presume), and he received most of the credit.  A major step forward was the discovery of the mosquito as the major cause of yellow fever by Walter Reed.  This was a major life-saver. 

The successful canal shortened a 13,000 mile journey to one of 5200 miles.  

The toll for the Queen Elizabeth will be approximately $350,000 and will take us about nine hours to travel fifty miles.  We will be hitched to giant tractors called mule which keep up lined up straight.  We will actually progress on the ship’s engines.  

You might think that nine hours to traverse six locks and a short passage through a lake would be boring, but it wasn’t.  There are so many things that are obvious, but I had never thought of them.  For instance, the gates are enormously powerful but how to they push against that much water pressure?  Well, they don’t.  The water flows in and out through giant tunnels underground and the whole water system is done by gravity.  Garden designers have been using the technology for centuries as in the Tivoli gardens south of Rome.  Although you have no sensation of rising or sinking, and you can see that you are by the position of the boat against the light poles.

About 1960 electric lights were installed so that he canal can now be used twenty-four hours a day.  Imagine doubling the capacity of the canal by electric lights. 

The Queen Elizabeth is a canalmax ship—any larger would be too large to go through.  Very large ships have prioirty in daylight which, although the lights are extremely powerful and bright , is still better than electric illumination.  Small ships are grouped together, but we, of course, were the only ship in the lock at the time we went through.

The computer on the ship is really slow unless you use it in the middle of the night so postings will not be as regular as I planned.  Regrets.