I enjoy reading about the turn of the century quite a lot. Not the last turn of the century, that one was a cosmic let-down. I’m talking about the ten or fifteen years on either side of the line dividing the 1800s and the 1900s. It’s easily the most interesting history of modern humankind. On one side you’ve got a steam-powered civilization that still believed disease was caused by marsh gas or loose virtue, and on the other side you’ve got science, electricity and the growing belief that human ingenuity would rid the globe of all pestilence and create a shiny, bright future for everyone.

Unfortunately, the next fifteen years after that is war, revolution, economic ruin and fearing fear itself. That’s why I like to stick to the turn of the century. It was a time in which it seemed as though humankind was poised on the brink of being able to do literally anything we set our most brilliant minds to. The Panama Canal, for instance. The best engineers of the School of Bridges and Roads, a science academy in France that was second to none in all the world, thought nothing of the task when they set out to cut a sea-level canal across the isthmus of Panama. Oh, those mountains? Pay them no mind. We’ll have your canal running straight through them in just a few years.

Too bad the guy who dreamed up the project had dreams bigger than the science of engineering could accommodate at the time. Even more unfortunately, the science of medicine hadn’t advanced as far as engineering had. Twenty thousand dead men later, mostly victims of yellow fever and malaria, the bankrupted French beat a hasty retreat from the isthmus and waited for Teddy Roosevelt to take a poke at the Colombians with a Big Stick.

Maybe Teddy didn’t handle the political situation exactly as it should have been, but he had everything he needed to get the job done. Most importantly, he had a doctor who knew how to eliminate yellow fever by wiping out the mosquitoes that carry it, an idea that most other doctors still thought was batshit crazy. And he had engineers who knew how to literally move mountains. The secret was choo-choo trains. Write that one down in your notebook for the next time you’re on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Once Teddy got these guys down to the isthmus, the completion of the canal, and David McCullough’s six-hundred page book The Path Between The Seas, was almost anticlimactic. Loved every page.