Fresh from constructing a sea-level canal through the flat Egyptian sand, de Lesseps was determined, without having set foot in Panama and after only the vaguest of topographical studies, that his project through the mountainous central American isthmus would also be a sea-level canal, requiring no locks to cope with changes in altitude.

ECONOMIST: The Panama Canal

The key was not to try to dig a Suez-type of canal, a great sea-level trench from ocean to ocean, but to create a lock-and-lake canal, where the ships are lifted up by a series of locks to a man-made lake, and then they sail across that lake, and then they are set back down on the other side by another series of locks.

FORBES: Fact and Comment

As you sit on your top deck, nibbling aged Gouda and brown Dutch bread and sipping cold gin, you can watch canal life at eye level.

FORBES: Playing the Float

It is also short of water, which must be constantly replenished, because much of the canal is above sea-level.

ECONOMIST: The Panama canal

There is another reason to wear black over the holidays: for those of us who look upon the approach of the festive season with the same level of doom-laden reserve that we would normally muster for a root canal, black seems entirely appropriate.

WSJ: Tina Gaudoin on Style: Back to Black

De Lesseps's insistence that the canal be built without locks had led engineers to try to cut directly through the rock to sea level.

ECONOMIST: The Panama Canal