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Canal required tons of steel, giving Pittsburgh a big boost
Monday, December 06, 1999 By Jack Kelly, Post-Gazette National Bureau
Pittsburgh played a major role in the construction of the Panama Canal.
"Some 50 different mills, foundries, machine shops and specialty fabricators [in Pittsburgh] were involved in the canal, making rivets, bolts, nuts, steel girders, steel plates, steel forms for the lock walls, special collapsible steel tubes by which the main culverts were formed, 18,794 steel roller bearings for the stem valves and spillway gates," historian David McCullough wrote in his 1977 history of the building of the Panama Canal, "The Path Between the Seas."
McClintic-Marshall, a firm that specialized in heavy steel bridge construction, built the gates to the locks.
Lobbyists for Pittsburgh steel interests may have had a lot to do with the decision to build the canal in Panama rather than in Nicaragua. Though it offered the shortest distance between the Atlantic and Pacific, a Panama canal would have to use locks, requiring massive amounts of steel.
The Nicaraguan canal was contemplated as a sea level canal, in which much less steel would be needed.
The arguments of Pennsylvania's Republican Sen. Philander Knox, a former attorney general under President Theodore Roosevelt, had a lot to do with the Senate choosing Panama over Nicaragua.
"Knox happened to live in Pittsburgh, and his personal fortune . . . had been built on legal services in behalf of the Pittsburgh steel empire and its leaders," McCullough wrote.
"In the plan as it presently stood, a total of six double locks was called for and these would require gigantic gates -- gates that would be built of steel. This was a point that neither Knox nor anyone else happened to raise publicly, and how strenuously the steel interests may also have been lobbying for the lock plan is impossible to determine."
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