The Panama Canal
A Firsthand Account
A French company had been working on the canal in Panama since 1881, while the U.S. investigated the possibility of building a canal across Nicaragua. A.B. Nichols was a division engineer in charge of surveys for a Nicaragua canal route for the U.S. Isthmian Canal Commission from 1899 to 1901. After the Republic of Panama seceded from Colombia and signed a treaty with the United States in 1903, the Isthmian Canal Commission assumed authority over the Panama Canal Zone, and in May 1904, A.B. Nichols was appointed to the Panama Canal service.
In that same month, the French property on the Isthmus was formally transferred to the Americans, and by September 1904, there were 1,800 workers on site. A.B. Nichols continued to work in the Canal Zone until 1914, when the Panama Canal was completed. His engineering notebooks, including manuscript notes, typescripts, photographs, blueprints, maps, charts, and scrapbooks, provide a firsthand account of the building of the Panama Canal.
The photograph on the left shows the headquarters building of the Compagnie Universal du Canal Interoceanique.
French Project
Nichols collected several documents related to work on the Panama Canal before the Americans took over the project from the French. One of these is an album of photographs of the equipment, work sites, buildings, and people involved in the French effort. The man in charge of the French project, Ferdinand de Lesseps, is shown in the photograph below from a group portrait.
Ferdinand de Lesseps had successfully completed the Suez Canal in 1869 and was considered the perfect choice to lead the enormous technical enterprise of building a canal across the Isthmus of Panama. Lesseps insisted on the construction of a sea-level canal, instead of one that utilized a series of locks. But the mountains of Panama proved more formidable than the desert of Egypt, and the French canal project ended in a financial disaster that could not overcome the technical challenges. A new French canal company, formed after the Compagnie Universelle de Canal Interoceanique declared bankruptcy in 1889, eventually sold all of its Panamanian assets to the United States in 1904.
Infrastructure
In July 1905, less than a year after A.B. Nichols began working on the Panama Canal,. John F. Stevens replaced J.F. Wallace as Chief Engineer. Stevens concentrated on preparatory activities, such as building adequate housing for workers and an extensive railroad system. Everything in the Isthmus moved by rail – steam shovels, cranes, workers, visitors, concrete, and dirt. So it is hardly surprising that A.B. Nichols had an entire notebook devoted to "Rolling Stock Diagrams", with sketches and blueprints of railroad equipment that was supplemented with an album of photographs. Stevens realized that the problem of transportation was perhaps even more important in Panama that the problem of excavation. This notebook hints at the extent of the railroad operations, and the care that was taken in understanding the details of all the equipment that was available for the project.
Gatun Dam and Locks
A.B. Nichols began his assignment in Panama as assistant engineer at Gatun on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus, where he worked for a year until June 1905. The American plan for the canal called for locks, rather than a sea-level passage as the French had attempted, and the largest of the various lock sites was Gatun, with three levels of chambers. The enormous concrete and steel chambers were built in pairs to handle two-lane traffic of ships as large as the Titanic.
Another feature at Gatun was the dam on the Chagres River that created a man-made lake as a pathway for ships to travel across most of the Isthmus. The Gatun Dam is a key element in the canal design, for it not only allows ships to sail across most of the Isthmus, it provides hydroelectric power for the Canal Zone, including the electrical mechanisms of the canal locks.
Culebra Cut
In July 1906, A.B. Nichols was appointed Office Engineer at Culebra, a position he held until he left Panama in 1914. At Culebra he would have seen the mountain range, nine miles wide and 550 feet high, that proved the most difficult challenge of the canal construction. The design for the channel to be cut through the mountains specified a width of 670 feet at the top. But the sides kept breaking loose and sliding into the trench, and the width at top eventually was almost three times as large. Although the huge American steam shovels could remove five times the amount of material than the machines used by the French could move at the start of the project, only dynamite could break the layers of rock that had to be blasted away. On December 12, 1908, twenty-three workers died when 44,000 pounds of dynamite exploded prematurely. It was the worst accident of the canal project, and happened at Bas Obispo in the Culebra Cut. One of Nichols's notebooks contains reports on the blast by the Superintendent of Construction and by the Electrical Engineer. These photographs show how one of the gigantic steam shovels was thrown completely across the cut and crushed.
Opening Panama Canal
The Panama Canal officially opened on August 15, 1914, only a few days after the outbreak of World War I. A.B. Nichols, who had been involved with the project either directly or indirectly for more than fifteen years, must have witnessed the event. He resigned shortly thereafter from his position as Office Engineer at Culebra, and sailed for the U.S. on the Panama on October 4, 1914.
Another eyewitness to the event was Ernest Hallen, Official Photographer of the Isthmian Canal Commission. Hallen began photographically documenting the construction process in 1907. The Canal Record, an official weekly newsletter, reported in 1908 that employees could buy his pictures by making written application to the "Office Engineer who will authorize or disapprove the issue or sale of such photographs." The unnamed "Office Engineer" presumably was Nichols, so it not surprising that some of Hallen’s photographs are included in Nichols’s notebooks. These unsigned photographs are probably by Hallen. They show the S.S. Cristobal (right) making a test run through the canal on August 4, 1914, eleven days before the official opening and inaugural passage of the S.S. Ancon (bottom).