__1859: __Egyptian workers under French engineers begin construction of the Suez Canal.

The canal was not the first to link the Mediterranean and Red seas. Egyptian pharaohs, Persian kings and Roman emperors had built small canals linking the Nile to the Great Bitter Lake and then from the lake to the Gulf of Suez. These canals periodically fell into disrepair and were eventually abandoned when Europeans first navigated around Africa.

Emperor Napoleon of France wanted to build a canal at the start of the 19th century, but his surveyors told him that the Red Sea was 30 feet higher than the Mediterranean, and that a canal would flood the Nile Delta and cause untold damage to the Mediterranean. Environmental concerns aside, they were wrong. The two seas are at the same elevation, and the surveyors, working in wartime conditions, had made too few observations and had not made them well. Napoleon scrapped the idea.

Napoleon met his Waterloo, but the idea didn't go away. A canal across the Isthmus of Suez could cut the ocean distance from Europe to Asia by up to 6,000 miles, and it could be built at sea level, without any locks. So Viscount (and diplomat) Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps founded La Campagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez (Universal Company of the Suez Maritime Canal) in 1858 to dig the ditch.

Amid allegations of slave labor (from the British, who didn't like the idea of the French controlling the shortest route to India), workers removed more than 2,600 million cubic feet of earth – 600 million from dry land and another 2 billion dredged from underwater. Of the 1.5 million Egyptians who worked on the canal, as many as 125,000 died of cholera. Construction was interrupted several times by economic and political problems.

The total original cost of building the canal was about $100 million (about $1.5 billion in today's money), about twice the engineers' estimate. However, about three times that sum has since been expended on repairs and improvements.

The canal opened Nov. 17, 1869, with a procession of international royalty. The partying went on for two weeks.

The effect on world trade was immediate, shortening the route between Europe and India, the East Indies, China, Japan and Australia. The canal opening came just six months after completion of the U.S. transcontinental railroad. The two wonders shrunk the globe rapidly, together enabling Jules Verne's fictional adventurers of 1873 to travel Around the World in 80 Days.

Today, the 101-mile canal is the longest in the world without locks. It's been widened from 72 feet to 200 feet. It was originally navigable to ships of 26-foot draft; now it accommodates up to 62 feet, with plans to deepen it another 10 feet by 2010 to allow supertankers to transit the canal.

The Suez Canal has just a single shipping lane for more than half its length, with several wide bays to allow northbound and southbound ships to pass. Ships take on local pilots and travel in escorted convoys.

About 15,000 ships make the 11-to-16-hour passage through the canal each year. The Egyptian government says the canal bears about 7 percent of world shipping.

De Lesseps' success of building a sea-level canal through the desert landed him the job of building the Panama Canal, but he met his own Waterloo there: The French effort to cross that isthmus was defeated by mountains and malaria.

Source: Various