Engineers said it would cost less to complete the canal De Lesseps had started twenty years earlier in Panama.

VOA: special.2010.08.12

In the eighteen eighties, Ferdinand de Lesseps -- builder of the Suez Canal -- formed a French company to build a waterway across Panama.

VOA: special.2010.08.12

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