Assume the following: Its the 1879 Panama Canal Congress in Paris. De Lesseps is on track to drag everyone along with his ultimately unworkable scheme to build a sea level canal. De Lépinay (auto-correct put the accent in there, good siri) has his plan for a lock canal with an artificial lake, again, as happened historically. However, a compromise plan is concocted to get the Americans on board:
Historically, when the French project started to fall apart, an ingenious solution was devised to get construction going again: dig a lock canal, and then use that as your infrastructure to build a sea level canal, basically digging down until you didn’t need the highest level of locks, so you could remove them. Then, do it with the next-highest level, and so on. In this version, de Lépinay comes up with this as a compromise idea, as a way to get Lesseps to put his weight behind his plan.
If need be, we justify this by saying that the Panama Railroad was giving them more difficulty than historically. Now, the Americans, seeing a French plan that is closer to their vision for Nicaragua, start to come on board, and the project turns into a joint operation, with American and French investors (and maybe government support from the US).
So, something akin to the historical Panama Canal is built by the early 1890s (to be conservative). It has locks, and de Lesseps spends his final years trying to get the canal ‘finished’ even if everyone else is perfectly happy with the results. American interests likely will push out French interests, since the canal is a private enterprise, and the US has far more at stake with the Canal than the French do (and some Frenchmen fully expected the Americans to buy them out and take over anyway).
What do we see happen?
Historically, when the French project started to fall apart, an ingenious solution was devised to get construction going again: dig a lock canal, and then use that as your infrastructure to build a sea level canal, basically digging down until you didn’t need the highest level of locks, so you could remove them. Then, do it with the next-highest level, and so on. In this version, de Lépinay comes up with this as a compromise idea, as a way to get Lesseps to put his weight behind his plan.
If need be, we justify this by saying that the Panama Railroad was giving them more difficulty than historically. Now, the Americans, seeing a French plan that is closer to their vision for Nicaragua, start to come on board, and the project turns into a joint operation, with American and French investors (and maybe government support from the US).
So, something akin to the historical Panama Canal is built by the early 1890s (to be conservative). It has locks, and de Lesseps spends his final years trying to get the canal ‘finished’ even if everyone else is perfectly happy with the results. American interests likely will push out French interests, since the canal is a private enterprise, and the US has far more at stake with the Canal than the French do (and some Frenchmen fully expected the Americans to buy them out and take over anyway).
What do we see happen?