I have just finished an excellent book about the construction of the Panama Canal. One of the world’s great construction project, the canal cost $352 million (1914 dollars). Given that it has operated for almost a century, has anyone calculated how much the initial investment returned?
The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal, by Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu estimates “the United States profited between 10 to 32 billion dollars from the initial arrangement, an amount that would have been astronomically higher if the Canal would have raised tolls as a commercial operation (the United States did not rise canal tolls until 1974 as a result of strategic policy of keeping a revenue-neutral operation).” - From this review
And, of course, the profits made possible for US businesses and trade (which generated tax revenue) would have offset the cost even if the canal never returned a direct profit to the US government. And then there’s the savings to the US Navy in time and fuel in peace and during the largest naval wars in History…
“Incalculable but immense.” It was an act of world-changing in the most literal sense.
I don’t want to derail this thread but I feel kind of silly making my own, but has any man-made “structure” changed the world as much as the Panama Canal did? I’m not talking about general inventions, but single structures you could point to (like a dam or a wall or a canal). It’s hard for me to think of anything more influential than the Panama Canal.
It is worth noting that, although the fast shipment of goods from California to the East and vice versa was a strong secondary motive, one of Roosevelt’s primary motivations in pushing the Panama Canal was being able to get the Navy from Atlantic or Pacific or the reverse without ‘rounding the Horn’. As Mr. Churchill told Mr. Chamberlain, the ROI on defending your country is incalculable.
The only comparable would be Suez, for approximately the same reasons. That however should not be taken to refute but rather to strengthen your point: bptj cama;s had impacts incalculably above anything else ever built.
Yeah, the closest I can think aside from Panama/Suez would be something like the Three Gorges Dam / hydroelectric power station. It’s a construction beyond belief in scale and raw physical power it harnesses, drastically changing the river system and etc. But as impressive as it is as a construction project its effects are mostly local, so it still doesn’t compare to the global impacts on trade routes that the two canals had.
Well said!
Look no further. The Erie Canal.
There’s a case to be made for various transcontinental railroads (US, Canadian, Siberian) but (like the Eirie Canal) they didn’t have the same kind of global impact as the Panama and Suez Canals. The closest thing to rival them in terms of global trade and transportation comes not from structural engineering but from mechanical engineering: the transoceanic airliner.
I’d imagine it was the Stockton-Darlington railway, or perhaps Ironbridge in Ironbridge giorge.
The birth of commercial railway or the use of large scale iron manufacture changed human society completely.
The longer railways only came about sometime later, when the effects of railways were already leading to the process of industrial globalisation.
Maybe the Eisenhower Freeway system? It only effected the USA but with great benefit to millions of people.
no doubt panama canal in too big project, but rate of return can’t be calculated directly against the investment of canal. But it may be give high rate of return to Us Government in near future.