THE PANAMA CANAL 
201 
dent did happen, it was placed in position 
by hand and effectively served its pur- 
pose. 
But even here the manifold precautions 
to make impossible serious accidents in 
lock operation do not stop. Statistics of 
lock canals show that perhaps 90 per 
cent of the accidents in lock operation 
arise from vessels entering and leaving 
locks under their own power. There 
seems to be an impossibility to get ship- 
masters to respond to every signal given 
exactly as given and at the instant given. 
To secure the proper coordination be- 
tween the ship itself and the lock ma- 
chinery at Panama, it has been decided 
that no ship shall be allowed to negotiate 
the locks under its own power. There- 
fore a series of electric towing engines 
will be installed on the side walls of the 
locks. When a ship approaches, it will 
be brought to a standstill outside the 
locks. Then four of these towing en- 
gines will be attached to it by means of 
hawsers — two at the stem, to pull it into 
the locks, and two at the stern, to hold it 
back and to stop it at the proper time. 
No canal on earth now in operation 
has more than half as many precautions 
to insure successful operation as the 
Panama Canal will have. 
remarkable; liFFlCIIvNCY 
One of the most remarkable phases of 
the work of building the Panama Canal 
has been the unparalleled development 
of engineering efficiency. For instance, 
the cost of steam-shovel operation has 
been cut from 11.5 cents a yard to 8.88 
cents a yard. The cost of hauling away 
the spoil has been cut down from 18.54 
cents a yard to 15.22 cents, although the 
distance of transportation has increased 
from 8 to 12 miles. A ton of dynamite 
has been made to do twice as much work 
in 1912 as it did in 1908. They save 
$50,000 a month by shaking their cement 
bags. 
When Colonel Goethals took charge 
of the work at Panama the incessant and 
insistent demand of the people at home 
was that he should "make the dirt fly." 
He recognized that if the canal were to 
command the support and confidence of 
the people during its construction, "mak- 
ing the dirt fly" would have to be the 
first aim of the canal diggers ; the cost 
of making it fly would have to become a 
secondary consideration. How well he 
succeeded is shown by the tremendous 
results of 1908 — 37 million cubic yards 
of material removed. 
Thereafter one heard little talk about 
making the dirt fly, and the Commission 
was then able to bend their energies to 
the work of making it fly economically 
as well as to making it fly fast. A 
tightening-up process here, the elimina- 
tion of lost motion there, the invention 
of some time-saving device at another 
place — all served to make the operations 
more economical and to save millions of 
dollars. So great has been the progress 
in developing efficiency on the Isthmus 
that they have cut the cost of excavation 
in Culebra Cut by more than one-third. 
THE USE OF CONCRETE 
Nowhere else in the world has there 
ever been such a vast amount of masonry 
constructed on any single engineering 
project as is being built in the locks and 
spillways of the Panama Canal. In times 
gone by the masonry of all great pro- 
jects, like the Pyramids of ancient times 
and the Assuan Dam of today, was made 
of natural rock ; at Panama they make 
artificial rock, and make it so fast that 
one scarcely can believe his eyes. The 
concrete required on the whole project 
amounts to more than four and a half 
million cubic yards. 
This is enough to build up an airline 
street from New York to Washington, 
with six-room houses on both sides. 
Those houses would furnish shelter for 
a population the size of the city of 
Indianapolis, taking the census returns 
of the number of people to the average 
American dwelling as the basis. 
Expressing the magnitude of the pro- 
ject in another way, it would make a 
regulation sidewalk nine feet wide by 
six inches thick, reaching more than 
twice around the earth. 
The locks at Gatun require two million 
cubic yards of concrete. Those on the 
Pacific side, being built with two flights 
at one place and the third at another 
place, require nearly 200,000 yards more 
