Before the Panama Canal, there was the Panama railroad

The Panama Canal connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through a 51-mile route that transformed global shipping when it opened in 1914. This breakdown covers how it was built, the workers behind its construction, and why its future may be challenged by climate and competition.

The effort proved the US could achieve grand engineering projects while granting it influence over (and benefitting economically from) a major interoceanic channel and its host country, Panama.

In 2023, canal authorities reduced traffic in the canal amid severely dry conditions. These seven infographics from the Woodwell Climate Research Center explain exactly what happened that historically dry October, and how it affected global supply chains.

While more container ships traverse the canal than any other type of ship, vessels carrying dry bulk goods, vehicle carriers, chemical tankers, passenger ships, and more also pass through the Central American passageway.

The canal displaced Panamanian communities, with towns like Gatun and Gorgona dismantled and farmlands lost, reshaping the region forever.

For about two decades, Suez Canal-builder and Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps led the project, but financial troubles forced it into the hands of the US, who completed it in 1914. This timeline, made to accompany the definitive PBS American Experience documentary about the canal, highlights major moments in its construction.

This was the result of two treaties signed during President Jimmy Carter's presidency, one shifting control to Panama and the other declaring the canal zone neutral. In recent years, US officials have suggested the US may retake control. Experts agree that the only viable way would be through military force.

The Appalachian Mountains, spanning from Alabama to Canada, long hindered inland commerce. The Erie Canal created the first reliable water route through the range by leveraging the natural valley of the Mohawk River, revolutionizing trade and migration.

In 1832, North America’s first cholera epidemic spread inland by way of the Erie Canal, carried by immigrants arriving on ships. Fearful towns barred passengers from disembarking, yet cholera, smallpox, and other diseases still traveled the waterway.

Before the canal, shipping goods overland cost about $100 per ton. After its completion in 1825, rates fell to just $10—making western farm products competitive in eastern markets for the first time.

Beyond goods, the canal carried ideas. Its corridor hosted Second Great Awakening revivals and became a center for activism—fueling abolitionist networks, women’s suffrage organizing, and other reform movements.

For each mile of canal that was built, 500 workers lost their lives. The threats came from multiple fronts: mudslides, floods, earthquakes and disease-carrying mosquitoes. Workplace accidents became so common that artificial limb manufacturers competed for contracts with the canal builders.

Listen to this podcast from Northwestern University exploring the canal’s groundbreaking infrastructure—from locks and aqueducts to its role as America’s first large-scale engineered waterway.

This map shows some of the alternative trade route options that are available to shipping companies, from overland routes that rely on railways to transport goods coast-to-coast, to Arctic Ocean passages.

The idea to facilitate trade between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea and connect the Eurasian continent was apparent even to pharaohs in the second millennium BCE. Though no physical traces remain, contemporary accounts attest to early, shorter versions of the canal, including from Herodotus.

On July 29, 1858, two steam-powered battleships met in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. There, they connected two ends of a 4,000 kilometer (2,500 mile) long, 1.5 centimeter (0.6 inch) wide cable, linking for the first time the European and North American continents by telegraph.

Constructed decades before the invention of dynamite, the Erie Canal’s toughest obstacles were blasted through using black powder charges.

One ingenious device created for the Erie Canal was the stump puller—a horse-powered machine using levers and chains to rip tree stumps from the ground.

The Erie Canal was one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in American history. Many have said such an effort would be impossible today. This article explores why that is the case and ponders the future of large-scale American infrastructure development.

In the 1800s, the National Mall looked nothing like it does today. Canals, rail lines, markets, and industrial uses crisscrossed the Mall before later redesigns cleared it into a unified civic landscape.

By redirecting western trade through New York Harbor, the canal turned New York into the nation’s commercial hub. This surge in commerce shifted financial power from Philadelphia to Wall Street, establishing the city as America’s banking capital.

With no engineering schools in the US, the Erie Canal was designed and built by self-taught amateurs who improvised new methods and became known as the “Erie School of Engineering.”

A 113-mile series of bridges called the Overseas Highway connects Key West—the southernmost point of the United States—to mainland Florida. The route originally served as a railroad but has required regular reconstruction due to major storms. This video traces the history of the project in fascinating detail.

The disease was one of the factors hampering the French effort to build the canal. Gorgas' experience elsewhere in the Caribbean had taught him that good drainage and quaranting patients were essential, and he would eventually apply mosquito prevention tactics on a mass scale.

When first proposed, President Jefferson scoffed at the idea of carving a 363-mile waterway through wilderness and rock. With no precedent in American engineering, the canal seemed impossible.

By providing cheap, reliable transport to the interior, the canal made western lands more accessible. Farmers, traders, and immigrants moved into the Great Lakes region, accelerating population growth.

In little more than 100 years, it grew from a small kingdom in the highlands of Peru to become the largest empire in the Americas. Read about the critical role played by the Great Inca Road.

The Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway in the hills of Pennsylvania wasn’t initially intended to be a ride, but over time passengers and businessmen alike took advantage of the lovely tour through nature. The railway eventually reached over 100,000 riders in some years.

Mostly using the low elevations of the Mohawk River Valley, the canal project connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard for the first time. This site has a series of old and new maps of the canal.

Over 45 days and 660 miles, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter identified more than 50 species in what was the first botanical survey of the region. Expected to help navigate boats and cook for the crew during the day, their work was confined to before dawn and after dusk.

The Jungfrau Railway utilizes electric trains powered by hydroelectric energy to ascend the Swiss Alps, while Poland's Elbląg Canal hauls ships along cable-powered tracks driven by waterwheels. Germany's Wuppertal monorail navigates bends as it glides over a river valley, and New Mexico's Holloman High-Speed Test Track can achieve speeds of Mach 8.6 for rocket sleds.

For centuries, leaders pursued a direct seafaring trade route from Europe to Asia. Jefferson joined this quest by sending Lewis and Clark west, though they confirmed no such practical interior route existed across the continent.

Reflections on the Erie Canal traces the waterway from its 1825 opening to its evolving role today. Each short video in this 10-part series explores a different aspect of the canal and its legacy today.

In 1870, Alfred Ely Beach secretly tunneled under Broadway in 58 nights, disguising his pneumatic subway as a mail tube to fool Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that ran New York City. Nearly half a million New Yorkers rode it before politics, and a stock market crash killed the project.

This enabled Budweiser to achieve national distribution long before competitors, fundamentally transforming the US beer industry. It was also among the earliest large-scale adopters to use pasteurization, allowing it to be shipped long distances without going bad.

The unlikely engineering project connecting the Midwest to the Atlantic saw a ceremonious opening as Governor Dewitt Clinton rode with a flotilla of boats from Buffalo on Lake Erie to New York City.

During “Railway Mania,” speculative excitement pushed British rail shares to extreme valuations as investors chased rapid expansion. When costs ballooned and profits failed to materialize, the bubble collapsed in 1847—wiping out fortunes across the country.

Historians argue that the boundary only became a celebrated American symbol in the 1860s, when Civil War-era leaders promoted a west-east geographic divide to replace the devastating north-south political divide, and that the term's use spiked after the transcontinental railroad crossed it in 1868.

As late as World War II, it took a well-prepared motorist roughly 10 days to cross America from coast to coast in a car. That all changed when the nation undertook its biggest public infrastructure project in 1956, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, initiating a 36-year, $114B mission to lay 41,000 miles of roads across America. Watch a smart overview here.