Panama Canal (captioned)

♪

♪

Early explorers feared that the very edge of the world lay in the uncharted waters of the Atlantic.

That there was a great abyss that would swallow ships whole, plunging men into a living hell of

nightmares and mythic monsters.

So, when Columbus stumbled onto the New World, when he came to places like Panama in 1502, he was

surprised to discover seeming paradise.

Seeming paradise.

But, in a way, the old stories were true, for there were monsters in this paradise.

There were frustration, disease, and broken dreams.

And conquering those would be one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century.

It started with the incredible motion of challenging the planets natural balance by linking the two

greatest oceans on Earth.

To slice a waterway across the continental divide of Panama, and bypass the navigational gauntlet

of South America.

There was more at stake than improved shipping lanes.

This would be mother natures last stand.

People would have to declare dominion over the very form and function of the land.

It was the most important engineering project of its time, involving the largest earthen dam ever built, the

the largest man-made lake ever created.

The epic effort was accomplished only through the grueling labor of 100,000 works equipped by the

ambitions of powerful men who enjoyed breaking all the rules.

In the end it would cost billions of dollars and claim thousands of lives.

The Panama Canal.

And the world still ponders the profound implications of this modern marvel.

♪

Panama has always attracted explorers and adventurers.

In 1534, Spanish engineers surveyed the Isthmus and proposed a plan for a canal that would link

the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

It was a bold idea that was quickly discarded.

The jungle was too dense, the weather too oppressive, the task too enormous for the limited

technology of the time.

But a seed had been planted in the imagination of explorers which would bear bitter fruit

for the next three and a half centuries.

Ambitious projects demand ambitious men.

There was nothing meek about Ferdinand de Lesseps, a celebrated entrepreneur who promoted

the French effort to carve the 105 mile Suez Canal in 1869.

De Lesseps celebrated success in the middle east was the pride of France.

So, ten years later when he focused on building a canal to span the 50 mile width of Panama, there was

no doubt that he would, again, succeed.

But there were two problems with his plan.

One: De Lesseps was a great promoter, not a great engineer.

Two: He had never been to Panama.

Unlike the Suez, Panama was a savage, tropical terrain. A swampy overgrown land that would not

easily bend to the will of man.

But, with the support of the French people and millions of dollars in investment capital, De Lesseps

and his team of eager young men began their nine year exercise in futility.

Problems began immediately.

Due to a eight month rainy season the jungle grows at an astounding rate with razor sharp grasses and

ferns which easily cut through the skin.

This all had to be cleared by hand.

And the jungle was home to a savage variety of insects: Spiders, ticks, mosquitoes, poisonous

snakes.

The French engineers and their laborers from local Caribbean islands were dying in rapid fashion.

75 percent of all workers who entered the hospital for treatment of small pox, typhoid, yellow fever,

food poisoning, or snake bite died painfully, prematurely.

Most of the illness was blamed on malaria which the French believed was caused by deadly vapors

seeping from the rotting jungle.

Despite solid medical evidence, the French refused to accept the fact that many tropical diseases are

carried, primarily, by mosquitoes.

De Lesseps and the French had the will, but not the way.

Their plan to carve a sea-level canal had never been practical.

The unstable earth of the Panamanian Mountains is prone to sudden slides and could never be tamed

by the primitive French construction equipment.

By 1889 the Europeans had run out of money.

They left behind rusting hardware and the corpses of more than 20,000 men.

Those who survived were credited with causing the worst financial failure of its time.

A 300 million dollar catastrophe which nearly toppled the French government.

But, the dream of building a Panama canal was not dead.

Robert Dill: Every man had a job to do, and he was to do it to the best of his ability, because

the French had failed, and we were determined to make a success of building the canal,

not only for ourselves but for the United States government and for the president.

Narrator: At 104 years of age, Robert Dill was the last member of the American team that built

the Panama Canal.

When he arrived on the Isthmus in 1911, the canal symbolized Americas emergence

as a world power.

And President Theodore Roosevelt was the embodiment of that spirit.

Teddy's advice was to speak softly and carry a big stick, but he never spoke softly.

His mythic image had been forged in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, when, as assistant

secretary of the Navy, he had led the Rough Riders on a bloody charge up San Juan Hill.

The public applauded the victory, but Teddy was upset that badly needed support from west coast

battleships was not available for his Caribbean campaign.

He saw an immediate strategic need for a canal that would facilitate a two ocean navy.

After the fighting, Teddy became vice president on the winning Republican presidential ticket

in 1900.

A year later when William McKinley was shot to death by an assassin, Roosevelt became president.

His first order of business was the Panama Canal.

News reels acclaimed his early addresses to Congress where we declared "No work which

remains to be undertaken on this continent is of such consequence to the American people as the Panama Canal."

The Isthmus of Panama was the northern province of Colombia.

And Colombia had no interest in granting the US the right to build a canal.

So Roosevelt encouraged the handful of prominent Panamanians who started a revolution in 1903, and

declared the region independent.

The bloodless coup took less than 24 hours, and to be certain it wouldn't fail, Teddy sent US battleships

to the Isthmus with orders to shoot down any Colombian effort to keep its territory.

Roosevelt denied any involvement with the revolution until relentless questions from reporters provoked

him into saying "I took the Isthmus."

Those four words were to prove costly.

Colombia demanded 25 million dollars from the United States as reparations for the illegal seizure.

But Teddy could finally build his canal thanks to a hastily drawn agreement in which the United States

would give the new nation of Panama 10 million dollars for the right to build and operate a

transcontinental waterway.

No Panamanians ever signed that agreement.

Still, preparations for building the dam began.

In 1905, John Stevens became the chief engineer of the project.

Robert Dill: I would say that Stevens was really the architect because when we took over building the

canal in 1904, they still didn't know whether it was going to be a sea level canal or just what they

were going to do.

Narrator: Stevens convinced Roosevelt of the plan to dam Panamas mightiest river and create, what was

then, the worlds largest man made lake.

Then use a system of lock to raise and lower ships 85 feet, to the level of the lake, for their

transit across the continental divide.

But problems still lingered.

How would Stevens protect his work force from the ravages of disease, which had already claimed

20 thousand lives during the French effort?

The answer was a combination of cunning and common sense.

At the turn of the century, Panama was a death trap.

For Robert Dill it was also an opportunity to forget the past.

Robert Dill: Because I learned that my fiance had gone out with one of her former boyfriends.

So, instead of joining the foreign legion or jumping off of a bridge, I decided that I would go

to Panama and work on the canal.

I lived in Gorgona in the bachelor quarters that were provided by the canal commission.

There were two of us in one room and the buildings were built for circulation of air.

The aggravation, I might say, would be that due to the dampness, the humidity, we would get up

in the morning and open our clothes closet and find that our shoes were full of mold.

Narrator: Most of the men who built the canal were not Americans assigned to bachelor quarters, but

tens of thousands of desperately poor workers from impoverished Caribbean islands who were housed

under far more primitive living conditions and worked for far less money.

Robert Dill: The labor was paid 90 cents a day and their meals were nine cents.

Their quarters were provided.

And the rest, of course, was up to them whether they saved it or spent it.

Well, my pay as a machinist, I think, started out about 38 cents an hour.

And I received four promotions in five and a half years.

Narrator: There was only one thing equal between the Americans and the massive black labor force:

The possibility that tropical diseases would claim their lives.

It was a reality that Roosevelt had faced during the Spanish-American War.

Robert Dill: 13 times of the men that were killed during the battle had died from malaria fever, from disease.

So when Teddy Roosevelt knew that we had a sanitation problem to solve, Dr. Gorgas was the

man for the job.

He was the man that eradicated, is the word, the malaria fever and typhoid in Cuba.

He felt that in addition to the health situation we had to build streets because some of the streets were

drainage ditches.

And he called off all the work on the canal until they got in a sanitary condition to where the men could

feel free to work. That had to be done first.

Narrator: Drainage ditches were cleaned of standing water where mosquitoes breed.

Swamp grass was trimmed to allow small fish to feast on the insect larvae.

Ponds and puddles were sprayed with a film of oil to kill the newly hatched insects.

Living quarters were fumigated and insect screens were attached to windows.

As the environment was being controlled, massive shipments of sanitation materials arrived.

120 tons of insecticide, 8,000 pounds of soap, thousands of buckets, brooms, and rakes.

In a few months, the men had accomplished the impossible.

By Christmas of 1905, yellow fever had been eliminated in Panama.

But health did not come cheaply.

Every mosquito killed cost the United States government ten dollars.

But the government went even further to protect the workers.

The men were prescribed regular rations of quinine.

Robert Dill: They would have a man with liquid quinine.

The person that would go around to the shops, the gangs, wherever there was activity and men working,

and you would take the required amount of liquid quinine.

Narrator: But quinine was distributed to workers in a racially segregated way.

American men were labeled as gold employees, and the black Caribbean laborers as silver employees.

Robert Dill: And the gold would drink out of the gold cup and then all the non-Americans, of course, would

drink out of the silver cup.

Narrator: When canal construction began full force, new dangers surfaced.

The hardest work was in the Culebra Cut, where whole mountains were removed to carve a path

eight miles long, 300 feet wide, 50 feet deep.

This man made gorge would later be filled with the cool waters dammed from the Chagres River.

Until then, the men worked in 120 degree temperatures to blast away sliding hillsides and dig

200 trainloads of earth, every day.

50 to 60 steam shovels were operating at any one time in a choreographed dance with

nonstop locomotives.

Robert Dill: So they arranged the timing that the train would move very slowly.

The steam shovel would come over and put a load.

And then it'd take a load, and the train will have moved far enough ahead to put the second dipper there.

In other words, there was no lost motion of either steam shovels.

Narrator: Special devices allowed the trains to be unloaded with one giant sweep, depositing millions

of tons of soil to create a huge earthen dam, one and a half miles long, a half mile thick at the base.

It would take that much volume to hold back the water of the huge, man made lake.

Meanwhile, in the Cut, 61 million pounds of dynamite was the primary tool for moving earth.

The explosive force was equal to all the firepower used in all the wars the United States had fought

up until that time.

Often the tropical heat would make the dynamite unstable.

It would explode unpredictably.

A sudden blast killed 27 men in a single, blinding instant.

Other workers were killed, or injured, by flying debris.

Funerals were as regular as rain.

Sometimes the blasts sparked deadly fires.

A Panamanian fire department was formed to respond, but was largely untrained in the techniques

of fighting fires.

Roberts Dill: The Panamanian fire department, instead of going around, you know, and fighting it

back, they just followed with it.

And when it exploded I think there were six or seven firemen that were just blown to bits.

Narrator: It was not uncommon for workers to be ground under the wheels of the speeding trains

caught unaware due to the deafening noise of the site.

But Teddy Roosevelt was pleased with the progress.

The American effort was digging in a single day what the French had taken a month to match.

In 1906, Roosevelt decided to see the work for himself, and arrived in Panama for an inspection tour.

The first time in history a president had left the United States while in office, and the first

time a world leader had ever posed for photos in the seat of a steam shovel.

Robert Dill: It was in November, which was the worst month of the rainy season.

And when he saw the conditions under which the men were working, their sincerity, their determination

to get the job done, he felt that they should have a tin, or a badge, or something.

So, he had French junk sent to the Philadelphia mint.

And there were over 7,400 medals that were struck and were given to those who had served two years

or more doing the construction.

Narrator: The medals struck from the steel of discarded French construction equipment

featured a cameo of Roosevelt.

Robert Dill: My medal numbered 6726. There's a lot of history between number one and 6726.

Narrator: Digging the waterway through the Panamanian mountains was a monumental feat.

But that was only part of the construction process.

The locks which would lift and lower ships from the elevated canal were equally mammoth structures.

Their jobs would be to raise the worlds largest ships to the height of a seven storey building.

Built in 36 foot sections, they were the largest concrete structures on Earth.

1,000 feet long, 110 feet wide.

Each of the six locks could hold an object the size of the Eiffel Tower.

They were designed to fill with water flushed in from the lake through pipes the size of railroad tunnels,

with two valves, weighing ten tons each.

Even though the lock doors weighed 700 tons, they were so perfectly balanced that their opening and

closing required only the power of a 40 horsepower motor, the same power used by many

industrial lawnmowers.

The locks operated exclusively from electricity - A radical new technology for the time.

And their power was to be generated from Gatun Dam, a one and a half mile long earth barrier made

from the soil of the Culebra Cut.

Because of the enormous volume of water in the man made lake, the dam is designed to process

in a single day the water equivalent of two Niagara Falls.

The Panama Canal represents the perfect balance between technology and teamwork,

dreams and determination.

It was born of a unique convergence of men, might, and money, which defined a defiant age.

Robert Dill: I think I should mention what it meant to work on the Panama Canal and the actual experience

of working together with a closeness that you never felt when you were alone.

And if you were working with a group, if for some reason one man fell out, then there were others

right there to take on his part.

There was no such thing as saying "Well, that's his job." This is our job.

Narrator: The epic nature of the Panama Canal inspired a spirit of comradery among the workers.

But the project could test the strongest of men.

In February of 1907, for personal reasons, Chief Engineer John Stevens resigned his post and

left Panama.

It disheartened the crews, but it enraged the president.

President Roosevelt was set on appointing a new man to head the effort who could not leave his post.

That man was George Washington Goathals.

He was regular military, demanding, authoritative, and, best of all, if he tried to quit he could be

court martialed and sent to prison.

Robert Dill: Every day was a work day. And, of course, Sunday we were all supposed to observe

the Sabbath.

But, there was always necessary work to be done that couldn't wait for Monday.

Narrator: The military regime pushed the project over the top.

In the end, 12 million cubic yards of concrete were set in the locks, and enough dirt was hauled from

the Culebra Cut to equal three and a half times the volume of the Suez Canal.

On May 20th, 1913, Joseph Kirk in shovel 222

met DJ McDonald in shovel 230 at the bottom of the excavation.

The digging was done.

The canal was prepared to be filled.

Four months later, workers placed the final dynamite

in a small dike that held back the Chagres River.

Robert Dill: We were very, very proud to be successful

and when the canal was completed,

and when they blew up the dike at Gamor,

[explosion]

I'll never forget the applause and noise,

and whistling and the yelling and all that everyone made,

that were standing on the banks of the canal,

when the dike was blown up.

Narrator: The water started flowing,

the locks were filled,

and when the level had risen,

a tug boat was draped in flags and sent to make the first trip

through the greatest engineering accomplishment of its time.

Thousands cheered the triumph, but the cheering did not last long.

By the time the steamship Ancon officially opened canal operations on August 15th, 1914--

ten years after the work begun--

the story of the Panama Canal was buried on the back pages of newspapers

because just days before,

Europe had erupted in war.

At first, America was determined to stay out of the conflict.

Instead of fighting, we put on a fair.

The spectacular Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco

celebrated the ingenuity and magnificence of America and the canal

and marking the emergence of the United States as a cultural and technological world power.

But the rest of the world didn't have time to celebrate.

[explosion]

The United States finally entered the war

and with the passage of the Pacific fleet through the canal in 1919,

Teddy Roosevelt's dream of a two-ocean navy became a reality,

but Teddy never lived to see the triumph.

He had died a few months earlier.

After the war the United States disassembled a third of its battleships

in the collective cause of world peace.

The navy's use of the canal dropped off

and a worldwide depression was having a negative impact on the canal as well.

George Muller: There were periods of time traffic became so slow, so low, so minimum,

that there were layoffs and I recall once,

my father was working two different jobs.

Joan: If they were laid off they would have to go back to the states

and what would we do there?

Stand on street corners selling apples and pencils?

Narrator: George Muller and Joan Marie Ridge Degrummond are canal brats,

children of canal workers who lived in the American zone

and often grew up to join the workforce themselves.

Against the backdrop of Panama,

they developed their own way of making it through the depression.

Joan: These men pulled together and they decided that they would work

maybe one or two weeks a month and that person could work one or two weeks a month

and that way they could keep their housing and still have a job.

Narrator: But with the basic canal construction finished

and most of the workers shipped back home,

the American presence in Panama became a military one.

A strong defense of the canal would become an important asset as the world grew more restless.

[explosions in the background]

[voices over radio]

Narrator: December 7th, 1941.

Once again, war had erupted and once again sea power would be a determining factor.

The Panama Canal would be a vulnerable lynchpin in the allied effort.

[explosions]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, concerned about Panama's strategic value,

exposed Nazi designs on the waterway.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: They have divided South America into five vassal states,

bringing the whole continent under their domination

and they have also so arranged it

that the territory of one of these new puppet states

includes the Republic of Panama and our great life-line, the Panama Canal.

That is his plan.

It will never go into effect.

Narrator: In April 1941,

the U.S. Coast Guard seized several axis ships

to prevent the widespread Nazi sabotage plot which included the scuffling of vessels in the canal.

The fear was rooted in reality.

For Germany, in conquering its weaker European neighbors,

had gained control of some of their colonial footholds in the western hemisphere.

They split the canal within range of air attack.

To protect against attack and sabotage,

the canal instituted a top secret program called SIP-7,

an emergency damming method in which an underwater blockade could lifted hydraulically

to hold back the raging waters of Gatun Lake

if the doors of the locks were hit by Nazi bombs.

George Muller: Should a gate be damaged by some wartime activity,

they could easily lose all the water in Gatun Lake

and that was one of their concerns.

Narrator: It could be activated in minutes even by hand

if all the electricity were cut off.

SIP-7 proved to be an integral part of America's wartime defense.

But the canal had another unusual influence on the war effort.

Around the globe,

American fighting men were suddenly encountering rare, tropical diseases.

What had been learned about controlling malaria during the construction of the canal

was now taught to GIs through educational cartoons.

Male: This is the story of an outcast,

now a hunted wanderer over the face of the globe.

You all know her name, Anopheles Annie,

the malaria mosquito.

[gulps]

[spits]

Anopheles Annie: To look at me now you wouldn't hardly believe it.

But back in the good old days, I was really some stuff.

Yeah I took my drinks straight but the boys got theirs mixed with a Mickey Finn.

[mosquito sputters]

[air plane dive sounds]

Narrator: As a facility and as a symbol of the Nation's might,

the Panama Canal had established its importance

but there were some people who had forgotten that

despite the money, blood, sweat and tears the United States had invested in the ten-mile strip,

Panama still belonged to the Panamanians.

There was an enforced segregation between Americans and the Panamanian people.

George: If you are not an American citizen living in the canal zone,

you were expected to be out of the canal zone after dark in the evening

unless you had business.

Now many of us had domestic servants and they could stay several hours after sunset

and they would not be challenged as they were returning to their homes in Panama

or coming back into the zone in the early morning hours.

One thing about the canal zone--

they insisted on their employees, that is the parents with their families,

return to the states periodically

the idea being that they wanted the families to remain Americanized

rather than to assimilate too much of the Panamanian culture to the extent that they

would forget their identity as Americans.

Narrator: As Panama grew into the 20th century,

Panamanian nationalism increased.

in 1964, the United States refused to allow the Panamanian flag

to be raised alongside the U.S. flag in the canal zone.

Enraged citizens took their anger to the streets in a violent riot

that claimed the lives of 22 Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers

and injured more than 350 people.

Many in the U.S. blamed a subversive communist element for inflaming the Panamanians.

But the Panamanian government didn't agree that nationalism was subversive

and immediately severed diplomatic relations with the United States.

The organization of American states called an emergency meeting to urge negotiation.

Male: How would you feel if France exercised jurisdiction over a swath of land, ten miles wide,

along the banks of the Mississippi River, from New Orleans to Canada?

Nothing in the 1903 treaty or its amendments indicates that Panama ever ceded the canal zone to the United States.

Narrator: So President Johnson promised to renegotiate the Treaty of 1903

and recognize the sovereignty of the Isthmus.

That was the first stage in a process that would eventually turn control of the waterway

over to the country that had been created so the Panama Canal could be built.

Narrator: The economic advantages of the Panama Canal are obvious.

Its unique geography facilitates trade

with a direct water link between Europe and the Pacific

and trims nearly eight thousand miles off the shipping route between New York and San Francisco.

[steamship horn sounds]

The engineering behind this modern marvel is ingenious

and the transit of ships a masterpiece of choreography.

The route begins on either the Atlantic or Pacific entrance

where vessels make their request to canal traffic control for permission to pass through the locks.

The locks are double-sided, permitting traffic to flow in either or both directions at once.

Experienced canal pilots board the ships to navigate them through the narrow waterways

helped into the locks themselves by special electric locomotives called "mules"

which pull the ships into the chambers.

Except for the opening and closing of the massive lock doors and the towing of ships into the locked chambers,

the entire raising and lowering operation works from gravity.

Panama's jungles receive 100 inches of rainfall each year

and flush billions of pounds of water from the high regions of the Continental Divide

to the Atlantic and Pacific.

As the water fills the lock chambers on its way to the sea,

ships float on its surface and rise without mechanical assistance.

What is mind-boggling about the operation is its overwhelming size

which can best be appreciated when the locks are drained for maintenance.

Repair and upkeep is an ongoing demand

with over one hundred million dollars spent in the last ten years on improvements.

The difficult handwork is accomplished in largely the same fashion as in 1915.

A human touch is required on every square inch of the locks.

The lock chambers are massive.

Their length, longer than three regulation football fields.

Their volume, the equivalent of nearly five hundred school buses.

Four space shuttles to be parked within each of the locks.

When these giant chambers were first designed

they could easily accommodate three, ocean-worthy vessels at a time.

Today ship builders base the dimensions of their Panamax cargo ships

so that one enormous craft can perfectly match the contours of the lock.

Once through the locks, ships enter the man-made Gatun Lake,

formed by the waters of the Chagres River, the lake also contains hundreds of tiny islands,

with ecological micro systems which are natural laboratories for valuable research by universities and scientists.

But the lake does not extend from one coast to the other.

The Culebra Cut meanders for nine miles through the mountains of the Continental Divide

to link the system.

Carving this piece of the puzzle was the deadliest part of the canal construction

as unstable hills avalanched into the work area to bury men and equipment.

Even today the most intensive canal maintenance efforts are focused on the treacherous Culebra Cut.

Since its original construction, this channel has been widened from 300 to 500 feet

to allow passage of wider, modern vessels.

[explosions]

More earth has been removed in this explosive process of widening

than was excavated originally to build the canal.

The enormity of contemporary ships contributes to the errosion of the canals narrow banks

as the churning of their giant propellers scour the canals shallow base,

dislodging silt.

More than 500 men labor 365 days a year in a constant dredging operation

to remove two and a half million cubic yards of soil each year.

The sludge is pumped inland to drain and dry

but the Panamanian weather often sabotages that effort.

At nine degrees above the equator,

the tropical sun bakes a thin crust on the surface of the soil

keeping the thick, glutenous soup protected underneath, unable to drain.

During the rainy season,

water collects in the cracks and becomes a breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes.

These crusts must routinely be broken for drainage

but the weight of men and equipment would easily crack the surface

and cause them to be sucked into the slime.

[explosion]

The solution is called "explosive ditching,"

a process in which men race across the pits to deposit dynamite charges,

then blast away channels in the crust to allow standing water to drain back into the canal.

[loud explosion]

The results are immediate.

Blasts are monitored with special high speed cameras

so the shock waves from the explosion can be measured from a safe distance and studied.

[explosion]

As in the original construction of the canal,

a massive, full-time crew of more than 8,000 people

are constantly blasting, digging, and dredging to maintain the canal.

Steven Tekosky: A project like the Panama Canal can no longer be built

in fact, it would be mind boggling to assume that that project could get through

all the environmental hurdles that are necessary in order to have a project

like that proposed, circulated, and built to completion.

Narrator: When Teddy Roosevelt bullied the Panama Canal into existence,

he didn't have to contend with the legal challenges which would today,

prevent the first shovel from ever breaking earth.

In that sense, the canal is the last hurrah for the kind of ambitious project

which would dare to change the shape of the world.

Yet the waterway has found a permanent place in the imagination of man.

Over half a million ships have made the nine hour voyage from sea to sea

over the Continental Divide spanned by the Panama Canal.

The operation is funded by tolls for using the locks,

ranging from $142,000 for majestic cruise ships,

to $.38 for one daring man who swam the distance.

But the real value of the canal cannot be measured in dollars.

The Panama Canal is a working monument to man's nature

at times, stubborn and harsh,

but always longing for greatness and cradled in bittersweet glory.

Roger Knight: As we pass through the canal during the day,

we get to a spot which is the deepest cut,

it's called the Gaillard Cut,

and that was the scene of the biggest digging

and of course the biggest causalities while they were digging through.

And as we go through there is a big plaque on the side of the hill

to commemorate all of the lives that were lost during the construction.

Narrator: The thousands of workers who sacrificed their lives

when this narrow sliver of land was wrenched from nature

were also building connections between men

and creating a door which would lead the world into the 20th century.

Robert Dill: It is the most important part of our education.

I learned things there that cannot be written.

Some that you can't learn from textbooks and no one can teach you.

You must participate and observe and working with people

I wish now I had stayed,

but that's another story.

(laughter)

♪