The Panama Canal: Three Attempts, Thirty Years, One Shortcut

Two countries tried to dig a canal through Panama and failed. The first attempt bankrupted a company and brought down a French government. The second ran out of money and sold the ruins to the United States. The third took ten years, forty thousand men, and a war against mosquitoes, and it was won in the hospital before a single useful shovel was moved. This is the story of the Panama Canal: why the sea-level canal the French insisted on could never have worked, how yellow fever was beaten before the digging could start, and what the Culebra Cut did to the men and machines sent to break it. CHAPTERS 0:00 THE ISTHMUS 0:51 FOUR HUNDRED YEARS 1:43 THE FRENCH CANAL 2:42 THE GRAVEYARD 3:42 THE SCANDAL 4:15 THE BUYER 5:17 SANITATION FIRST 6:21 THE LOCK DECISION 7:17 THE CUT AND THE DAM 9:04 THE FIRST SHIP 10:50 The smallest toll ever paid SOURCES AND CREDITS Every figure in this film traces to a named source. Where sources disagree, the French and American death tolls especially, the narration gives the range rather than picking a winner, and claims that are widely repeated but unsupported are left out entirely. Narration is a synthetic voice generated on my own machine. Footage is from Pexels. Archival photographs come from the Library of Congress, US National Archives, DPLA, Wellcome Collection and Wikimedia Commons; public domain except the photographs credited on screen under CC BY. Runtime: 11:08. Music: Emotional Spiritual Soundtrack - Respect by MusicByMisterbates (cc0). Produced by Oliver Djoric. Research, script, voice and edit are assembled with a self-hosted pipeline: local models, my own hardware, no subscriptions. If you need video like this made for your channel or your product: https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/~0...