INVENTION'S AT PANAMA. 



151 



•establish its impracticability. The advocates of San Bias counted 

 upon further advances in the tunneling art, just as De Lesseps has 

 counted upon and witnessed like advances in the art of constructing 

 and operating the excavator and the dredge. 



We have considered the way in which inventions expedited the 

 <;utting of the two greatest engineering works, probably, ever built to 

 promote communication by land ; the two greatest to promote com- 

 munication by water remain to be considered. The Alpine invention, 

 the air-pressure engine, was not used upon the Suez Canal, nor has it 

 been at Panama. The special kinds of work to which it is adapted 

 are tunneling and mining. There could be no question of a tunnel at 

 Suez. On the other hand, in the plan for a sea-level canal at Panama 

 submitted to the Paris Congress, two solutions were presented. The 

 Cordilleras were to be pierced either by a tunnel or open cut. Tun- 

 nels of four or five different lengths were proposed, and calculations 

 submitted ; but the congress came to no decision on this point. Had 

 the tunnel plan been adopted, the tunnel would have been excavated 

 by the Alpine method, but subsequently the open-cut plan was adopt- 

 ed, and hand or steam drills instead of air-pressure drills have been 

 employed. Nitro-glycerine, however, which had been substituted for 

 powder during the work at St. Gothard, is largely used. 



In considering the two canal enterprises of De Lesseps, we begin 

 with the one completed. As has been said, when, through the inter- 

 vention of the British and Turkish Governments, the Suez Company 

 had to abandon forced labor, not a little injury was inflicted upon the 

 work. The damage was obviated in part by the indemnity paid by 

 the Egyptian Government, thirty-eight million francs, and in part by 

 the inventions of French engineers. In fact, the company proved to 

 be the gainer. The immense dredges which took such an active part 

 in the rest of the work were contrivances of this period. As to the 

 power and capacity of these machines, we can hardly do better than 

 quote the British historian of the canal, Percy Fitzgerald.* After 

 observing, vol. i, page 202, that the chief contractors, Borel and La- 

 valley ("men of extraordinary energy and fertility of resource"), came 

 to the task under every disadvantage, and had to establish their work- 

 shops and machinery in the desert, he continues : 



" They saw at once that the nen- difficulties as to procuring labor and the lim- 

 ited time allowed by the contract could only be overcome by the aid of machin- 

 ery of the most daring and novel kind. They accordingly devised those extraor- 

 dinary dredges which have been the admiration of engineers. . . . No one,'' 

 he adds, " who has seen an ordinary dredge at its slow work in an English 

 river could have an idea of the bold fashion in which the principle was now 

 apphed." 



And he thus refers to the general capacity of foreign engineers : 



* " The Great Canal at Suez. Its Political, Engineering, and Financial History," 2 

 ■vols. By Percy Fitzgerald, London, 18V6. 



