19141776 Club
The Ancon crosses from ocean to ocean; the Panama Canal opens for business
A cargo ship and two hundred dignitaries make the trip a decade of digging was for.
Ten years after the United States took over a French project buried in mud and fever, the Panama Canal opened to shipping on August 15, 1914. The SS Ancon left Gatun on the Atlantic side that morning and reached the Pacific the same day, carrying about two hundred dignitaries through the lock system, the first official transit of the 82-kilometer waterway. The ceremony was smaller than planners had imagined. War had broken out in Europe two weeks earlier, and the world's attention was elsewhere…
