Travel the Erie and the Panama Canals; China’s 5,000-year-old Grand one; and the Canal du Midi from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean (with Leonardo da Vinci’s help). Marvel at NJ’s 100-mile, mountain-climbing Morris Canal, drained 100 years ago; and the Pharaohs’ Canal – from the Nile to the Red Sea, dug 4,000 years before Mr. Eiffel helped link the Suez to Panama.
There is a simple reality: boats can carry so much more than wagons passing along dirt roads; so digging watery “roads”, i.e. Canals, made sense throughout history. Where the ground was flat, those roads were mere ditches. Egyptian Pharaohs understood this some 4,000 years ago as they tried to link the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Napoleon discovered it; the French then completed the link by digging a 120-mile-long ditch called the Suez Canal. It made the world smaller.
A thousand years before the Pharaohs, the Chinese began digging their own canals. They had to deal with the ups and down of the land; so invented “Locks” to allow canal boats to transition between canal levels. Leonardo Da Vinci would improve on these locks some thousands of years later as he worked on a short-cut canal across France. He died during that project (still carrying the Mona Lisa with him; still improving the painting — which is why it resides in France.)
The Royal Canal in Languedoc) — today named the Canal du Midi — one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 17th century — is still operational. It goes through hills in tunnels, over rivers on aqueducts, up hills using inclined planes and systems of locks as well as through the countryside peacefully. A marvel.
The Panama Canal was another French engineering project. The man who completed the Suez Canal thought it would be another ditch — this time only 50 miles long. The French failed. Huge of amounts of money were wasted trying to dig a pass through a mountain in the face of torrential rains for much of the year. Worse, some 20,000 men and women died from the diseases endemic in Panama. The story of the canal is of humans overcoming staggering obstacles. The full story is covered in a separate program. Here we just summarize.
That is only three of the six great canals we cover.