Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

________ _____ 248 ____ ___________________________ _________ __ ______ ______ ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. of commencing the work, and on November 17 following the Canal was The opened for OhfihI . . , traffic. As M. completed. de Lesseps de- clared at the time, the project had demanded of him five years of study and meditation in his closet, four years of investi- gation on the spot, and eleven years of patient toil. On December 31, forty-four days after the opening of the Canal, when in several places the depth was less than 20 feet over a width of 60 feet, the Company issued the following statement as to the cost of the undertaking :— General expenses of the constitution, cost of negotiations, commission, stamps, and expenses as to shares.................. £561,380 Cost of management for eleven years....... 567,300 Interest, dredging construction, including sinking fund........................... 3,316,520 Service of health, telegraph, and transit... 533,538 Cost of construction....................... 11,654,223 ___________ £16,632,961 The cost thus exceeded more than twice the original estimate. A HUGE BUCKET DREDGER. {Messrs. Lobnitz and Company, Limited, Renfrew^) A LONG-SHOOT DREDGER TIED UP IN GARE TO ALLOW A SHIP TO PASS. {By courtesy of the Suez Canal Company.) M. de Lesseps was sufficiently sanguine to estimate that the tonnage of the ships pass- ing through the Canal would be three millions in the first year, and probably twice as much during the second year. How far his expec- tations exceeded the actual results may be gauged from the following table of the num- ber of ships and their tonnage that passed through the waterway during the first three years of its existence :— Year. No. of Vessels. Gross Tonnage. 1870 491 436,618 1871 761 761,875 1872 1,082 1,439,166 Need for Im- provements. It was not until 1877 that the tonnage of the vessels reached the 3,000,000 mark. In 1883 there was a univer- sal admission that a radical improvement in the man- agement of the Canal was needed if the scheme was to be a success. This was brought about by the Com- pany suddenly increasing the toll on the steamers using the Canal, and by the startling augmentation in the traffic due to the adoption of iron steamers on the Red Sea