"The Path Between the Seas"

[fiefoe]

"All the great construction work of the canal... the building of Gatun Dam, the building of the locks - tasks of unprecedented magnitude":

• In 1878, only 35 years before, the Quaker ironmaster D. J. Morrell had marveled at certain relatively simple steel castings displayed by the French at their Universal Exposition in Paris.
• The vital factor in the whole plan and all its structural, mechanical, and electrical components - was water... The power of falling water at the Gatun spillway would generate the electrical current to run all the motors to operate the system, as well as the towing locomotives.
• To lift a great merchant liner, or any ship of more than six hundred feet, to the level of Gatun Lake would require an expenditure from the lake of 26 mill gallons of water, the equivalent of a day's water supply for a major city.
• The yoke assembly used to fasten the tops of the gates to the lock walls weighed seven tons.
• The canal's own motive power, its entire nervous system, was electrical.
• Between the fender chain and the guard gates, stood a big steel apparatus that looked like a cantilever railroad bridge. This was the emergency dam. It was mounted on a pivot and in a crisis it could be swung. across the lock entrance in about two minutes' time. From its underside a series of wicket girders would descend, their ends dropping into iron pockets in the concrete channel floor...  {Oh, why has there never been an ode to overbuilding?}
• The canal.. would be "a monument to the electrical art." It had been less than a year since the first factory in the United Sates had been electrified.
• Each control board was a ... counter, upon which the locks were represented in miniature - a complete working reproduction. .. Everything that happened in the locks.. happened on the board in the appropriate place and at precisely the same time.. The genius of the system, was in the elaborate racks of interlocking bars.. beneath the board... the switches were interlocking mechanically. Each had to be turned in proper sequence, otherwise it would not turn.  {Oh, the Trustee from the Toolroom surely would swoon over this?}
• More than half a century later the same control panels would still be in use, functioning exactly as intended.

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