This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American stories.

The Panama Canal story is one of an age-old dream fulfilled through French failure

and American success, marked by engineering marvels along with immense human costs.

Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast.

Also, contributing to this story is the late great historian David McCullough.

Let's take a listen.

The Panama Canal was begun in the 1880s, and had it been built somewhere else,

somewhere safe and convenient, in Ohio, say,

it still would have been the engineering marvel of the age.

Its magnitude was so great, its ingenuity, so remarkable.

But here was the place to join the oceans. Panama. And Panama then was one of the

most difficult and deadly terrains anywhere on earth. And it's this, quite apart from its importance

as a world thoroughfare that makes the Panama Canal such an extraordinary story.

Rising 85 feet above the surface of one ocean and then descending again to be gently

floated onto another one, ships that traverse the Panama Canal shave nearly 8,000 miles off

their voyage to the other side by investing a long workday climbing up and then going

back down the Isthmus of Panama.

Made possible by a handful of locks, despite the extreme expense for commercial vehicles

to traverse it, about 5% of all the trade in the entire world passes through this early

20th century, Engineering Marvel.

Where the canal sits, the Isthmus of Panama, is a mere 51 miles across.

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