On May 4, 1904, the United States officially took possession of the French Panama Canal Company's assets for $40 million, and by May 6 American engineers were beginning to survey the abandoned French works, rusted machinery, and overgrown excavations left after Ferdinand de Lesseps' failed 1880s attempt. The American effort, applying new sanitation science to defeat yellow fever and malaria, would complete the canal in 1914.
The French had tried first, led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, hero of the Suez Canal, who believed a sea-level canal through Panama would be a similar triumph. Between 1881 and 1889 the effort collapsed in scandal and disease, killing an estimated 22,000 workers, mostly from yellow fever and malaria, diseases whose transmission by mosquitoes wasn't yet understood.
When the United States took over the incomplete project in May 1904, following Panama's US-backed secession from Colombia the previous November, engineers found a jungle graveyard of rusting locomotives and abandoned excavators. Chief sanitary officer William Gorgas, applying newly proven mosquito-control methods, launched an aggressive campaign of fumigation, drainage, and screening that dramatically cut disease deaths, a public health triumph as significant as the engineering itself.
Chief engineer John Stevens, and later George Washington Goethals, redesigned the project around a lock-based system rather than a sea-level cut, a decision that made the canal feasible. It opened in August 1914, one of the era's most transformative infrastructure achievements, cutting the sea journey between the Atlantic and Pacific by thousands of miles.
Key people: Ferdinand de Lesseps, William Gorgas, John Stevens