The entire first run, ocean to ocean, included twenty-six station stops and took seven hours.

More than $500 million in gold went across the Panama Railroad in this same ten-year period; more than $140 million in silver, $5 million in jewelry, and $19 million in paper money. And the company collected a quarter of one percent of the value of all precious cargo.

On June 11, 1881, the road was purchased outright by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Inter-océanique for $20 million. Park himself cleared about $7 million on the transaction. Years later, in 1904, when the United States purchased all the holdings of the long-since bankrupt French canal company—its equipment, properties, the unfinished excavatio

THROUGHOUT HIS extraordinary career Louis Agassiz was a man of large plans and boundless energy, a spirit emboldened by noble…

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From the legal-diplomatic standpoint the undertaking was made possible by a treaty signed in Bogotá. Panama was still part of Colombia (or New Granada, as it was then known), and for years the government at Bogotá had been urging Great Britain and France to guarantee New Granada’s sovereignty over the isthmus as well as the neutrality of any future

Prior to the railroad there had been no regular thoroughfare across the Isthmus of Panama, and this despite the fact that Panama had been a crossroads between the Atlantic and Pacific since the time of the Spanish conquest. Except for a few isolated villages scattered along the Chagres River, the interior was an unbroken wilderness, little changed

Another important discovery was that sea level on both sides of the isthmus was the same. Until then it had been widely thought that for some mysterious reason the Pacific was as much as twenty feet higher than the Atlantic at Panama. It was a misunderstanding that had appeared frequently in print and still does. But as was found, the difference is

Her oldest son, Frederick, put on a uniform and went off to fight. Impatient with Lincoln for not announcing emancipation right away, she went down to Washington when he finally proclaimed that the slaves would be free, and was received privately in the White House. The scene is part of our folklore. “So this is the little woman who made this big w

Alexander von Humboldt—Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt—or Baron von Humboldt, as he was commonly addressed. He had been born in Berlin on September 14, 1769, the second son of a middle-aged army officer, a minor figure in the court of Frederick the Great, and of a rather solemn, domineering young woman of Huguenot descent who