Engineering Wonders of the World. Vol. I

c. 1908

Webber Collection

London: Thomas Nelson and Sons

This article on the Suez Canal describes it as a ‘colossal piece of engineering work’; and so it was. The proposed cost of £8,000,000 ballooned out to over double that, with most of the money coming from France. In all, over 70 million cubic metres of sand, rock, and earth was removed by some tens of thousands of workers under forced labour. It was a painfully slow process, and when Egypt banned the use of forced labour in 1863, giant, steam-powered excavators took over. When it opened in 1869, the Suez Canal had ‘an immediate and dramatic effect on world trade’. It has continually needed improvements and upgrades to accommodate more and more maritime traffic.