On this day the United States officially took over active construction of the Panama Canal, a decade after France's disastrous attempt collapsed amid bankruptcy and disease. American engineers, led eventually by John Stevens and George Goethals, would spend a decade battling yellow fever, landslides, and the Culebra Cut before ships finally passed through in 1914.
The French effort under Ferdinand de Lesseps, hero of the Suez Canal, had ended in catastrophe: roughly 22,000 workers dead from malaria and yellow fever, and a company bankrupted by 1889. When the United States acquired the rights and began its own construction push in August 1904, it inherited rusting machinery, abandoned excavations, and a jungle eager to reclaim its territory.
The turning point was medical, not mechanical. Colonel William Gorgas, who had fought yellow fever in Havana, waged a relentless campaign against mosquitoes—draining swamps, fumigating buildings, and screening windows across the Canal Zone. His success made the engineering feats that followed possible.
The canal would ultimately require digging through the Continental Divide at Culebra Cut, moving roughly 76 million cubic meters of earth. When the SS Ancon finally transited the completed canal in August 1914, it validated a decade of work that reshaped global shipping and geopolitics, giving the United States a strategic chokepoint between two oceans.