Cutting Through Geography! This is how Vic’s PaPaw, like VP Vance’s, made a passage between seas in 1913!

A century before anyone started worrying about getting Saudi oil around the Strait of Hormuz, America confronted its own inconvenient geography.

Getting from one American coast to the other by sea meant going all the way around South America and Cape Horn.
So America did something characteristically immodest.

We cut through the continent.

Grandfather James Burr Reddig arrived in Panama in 1913 while that enormous undertaking was nearing completion. His photographs show what the phrase building the Panama Canal actually meant: mountains excavated, valleys flooded, gigantic locks poured in concrete and steel gates built on a scale that makes the men beside them nearly disappear.
Reddig had a somewhat smaller excavation in mind.

While everyone else was digging the Panama Canal, Grandfather was digging a much shallower canal for telephone cables.

His job was communications—helping install the telephone system that allowed the people operating this extraordinary new machine to talk to one another.

That little trench mattered.

Because the great canal wasn’t merely concrete, locks and water. It was a system, and the pieces had to communicate for the whole enormous thing to work.

Today Saudi Arabia is trying to solve another problem imposed by geography: moving oil west to the Red Sea and toward Suez rather than depending entirely upon Hormuz.

Different century. Different engineering. Different scale.

Same stubborn geography.

And somewhere in those remarkable 1913 photographs is Grandfather Reddig, standing between the enormous canal America was digging for ships—and the little one he was digging for the telephone wires.

Copyright 20226 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com