Abstract :
With deadly diseases, landslides and momentous engineering challenges dogging the project, it´s a miracle the Panama Canal was ever completed. Not since the Great Pyramid at Giza five millennia before had the world seen such a vast construction project. Only this time, rather than constructing a monument to royalty, engineers, encouraged by the achievements of the Industrial Revolution, set about cutting an entire continent in two in order to solve a navigation problem that had challenged mariners for centuries.