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August 15, 1914. The United States assumed and completed the Panama Canal after France’s 1880s attempt collapsed amid bankruptcy, disease, and engineering failure. President Theodore Roosevelt secured the route by supporting Panama’s 1903 independence from Colombia and negotiating the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, which granted the U.S. control of a 10-mile Canal Zone. America purchased French assets for $40 million and paid Panama $10 million plus an annuity.

U.S. Army engineers, led first by John Stevens and then Colonel George Goethals, abandoned a sea-level design for a lock-and-lake system. They created Gatun Lake—the world’s largest artificial lake at the time—and excavated nearly 240 million cubic yards of earth. Physician William Gorgas’s sanitation campaign virtually eliminated yellow fever and malaria, slashing the death toll that had doomed the French. At a cost of about $375 million—the most expensive U.S. construction project to that date—the canal opened on 15 August 1914, linking the Atlantic and Pacific and transforming global trade and naval strategy.

The American Engineers that Built the Panama Canal