King Darius says: I am a Persian; setting out from Persia I [1] conquered Egypt. I ordered to dig this canal from the river that is called Nile [2] and flows in Egypt, to the sea that begins in Persia. Therefore, when this canal had been dug as I had ordered, ships went from Egypt through this canal to Persia, as I had intended.But again, it seems like Darius never finished his Canal. The Ptolemies did, building a Canal that was 50 yards wide (250BC). It was forgotten for centuries, and its existence erased by the elements.
It wasn't until Napoleon Bonaparte that this idea was resurrected, and some evidence of the existence of the old Canal found. Napoleon's engineers wanted to build their own, new Canal, but they thought it wouldn't be possible; they erroneously concluded that the seas had a big difference in their water level that would make it too expensive and probably impossible to build. It wasn't until 1869 that it was built without any need to compensate for the erroneous water level difference. It is what is called the Suez Canal.
The Panama Canal, on the other hand, does have a pretty huge difference on the water level from one side to the other. The average water level in the Pacific Ocean has 9 inches of difference across the Panama Canal, being higher on the Atlantic side; with the tides, it can be even more. To keep one ocean from flowing onto the other and eroding the whole canal on its way a complicated system of locks is used. The best explanation I've seen of how it works is in this video. It is an ubercool timelapse video of the locks working in sequence to let the huge ships crossing.
Oh, and, the subject of this post is a cool palindrome.
No comments:
Post a Comment