David McCullough’s historical book, The Path Between the Seas, is a fantastic and detailed examination of the building of the Panama canal, beginning with the moment the French completed the Suez and turned their eyes on the narrow isthmus in central America. The French folly really did pave the way for the success of the United States.
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Agree about the ivermectin, but if you’re dealing with malaria, hydroxychloroquine is not actually a quack remedy – it used to be the drug of choice and still is in various places (although today it is less useful than it was due to increasing resistance, and we have better medications now, too).
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Makes sense, there’s a lot of cross-over: They both make irritating noises, they both suck, they both spread disease…
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Eh. Not exactly.
The Americans were well acquainted with yellow fever and malaria - both diseases affected the US.
The reason they came prepared with nets while the French did not was because it wasn’t until 1900 that experiments by the Yellow Fever Commission proved mosquitos were a disease vector for yellow fever (or any other disease).
The terrain and climate were also well-known to the Americans as they had built and operated a railway across the isthmus for a half century.
Even more, Ulysses S. Grant sent survey teams in 1869 to map the terrain. That survey team proposed a Panama canal route that ended up being nearly identical to what we ended up using 30 years later.
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Good point. Makes it even more ironic that HCQ is a treatment for malaria, which directly helped in the construction of the canal in 1900, becomes the subject of conservative and anti-vaxxer fixation in 2020 is completely disproven as either a cure or effective treatment for Covid
35,000 people may have died from mosquitos during the canal construction but Durr Hairpiece is responsible for the deaths of upwards 1 million Americans due to his incompetent response to Covid.
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Whiney, irritating, spreading infections, tiny hands…
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As a Canadian who loves palindromes and humour that is based on the use of unexpected words, this has me giggling uncontrollably.
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Another connection could be an enormous, junked, decomposing, water-filled tire — but I’m not 100% sure.
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Panama only exists as a nation because TR whipped up a rebellion against Colombia.
I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. I’m wrong because America had been there before and thus didn’t learn anything from the French attempt?
Okay, I guess. Whatever. 
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That’s more of a viscous mosquito
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No? We just didn’t learn about disease or terrain from the French attempt.
We did learn not to try and build a sea-level canal however.
Great, whatever Internet Points you wanted to win, I award them to you. You win this and all subsequent arguments.
Good lord this board has become exhausting.
Originally intended as a means of getting cargo across what was then a hugely trafficked river, the Thames Tunnel ran out of money before it was able to build the extended entrance necessary to get horses and carts underground. Instead, the tunnel was opened for pedestrian use in 1843. It quickly became a major tourist attraction, with two million people a year paying a penny to walk through.
It sounds pretty successful but folks were also paying a penny to use any of the other ways to cross the Thames and the tunnel. Being new and daring, this was seen as pretty scary. To try to scare up some more payback for the massive investment, the tunnel opened up some of the very first tourist tat shops, selling Thames Tunnel memorabilia and souvenirs like cups and plates – so you could prove you were brave enough not only to walk the tunnel, but to stop and browse along the way.
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The mosquito? My libido!
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