After a decade of construction that claimed roughly 5,600 workers' lives to disease and accident, the Panama Canal opened to commercial traffic. The engineering feat, involving massive lock systems and the excavation of the Culebra Cut through the Continental Divide, transformed global shipping by eliminating the need to sail around South America's Cape Horn, cutting thousands of miles from key trade routes.
The cargo and passenger ship SS Ancon steamed out of Cristóbal on the Caribbean side and, over roughly nine hours, rose and fell through a staircase of massive concrete locks before emerging into the Pacific at Balboa. The event passed with less fanfare than organizers had hoped; World War I had erupted in Europe just weeks earlier, and newspapers gave the canal's opening secondary billing to the war news.
The project had defeated the French three decades earlier under Ferdinand de Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, whose company collapsed amid disease and financial scandal after losing over 20,000 workers. The Americans, taking over in 1904 under chief engineer John Frank Stevens and later George Washington Goethals, solved the sanitation crisis first, with William Gorgas leading a campaign against the mosquitoes carrying yellow fever and malaria. The canal's lock system, still using the same gates today, was an engineering marvel that let ships climb 85 feet above sea level and back down, and it remade global trade routes for a century to come.