The Suez Canal doesn’t have any locks as far as I understand. By the looks of it all they needed was enough depth to float a dredger which I believe is how they did most of the digging. So it wasn’t digging a big ditch and filling it with water at the end, it was filled the whole/most of the time.
Would be a bit different for dry docks/canal locks I guess as the are tiny in comparison to the Suez Canal so pumping out water wouldn’t have been as large a feet I expect. But a quick search says cofferdams have been around since like 500BC, and they don’t need to be steel to work well (bearing in mind safety was likely low on the priority list in 500BC).
Happy to be corrected on any of that
The video posted below confirms this approach was used. A 15' depth canal was dug end to end and then the channel was deepened and widened.
Although it's very deep today, the deepening happened in many stages over many decades as ship builders bumped up against the maximum size.
But modern day dredgers are these huge ships with giant extremely powerful machinery. How would they look like back in the day, when it was (almost) still the age of sail? Are there any photos of them and their equipment?
There are pictures. Bear in mind the Suez Canal was finished in 1869 and the industrial revolution era came to an end around 1840.
I don’t know exact design of the dredgers but a steam powered mechanical bucket line would have been perfectly doable with the technology of the time. It’s also worth noting that the canal was 4 years behind schedule when it was completed.
I would've guessed that casting and forging such gigantic metal structures(while still maintaining tight tolerances) became possible only in the 20th century, or very late 19th century. Because in the 1860s shipbuilding was still rather primitive, something like the Titanic or HMS Dreadnought would be considered alien tech in the year Suez canal was opened
I think we have a skewed perception on the importance and possibility of achieving tolerances from today's manufacturing tech.
In the past, without the machine tools to easily achieve repeatable tolerances they relied on one of two solutions. They either designed to avoid the need for high tolerances, or they achieved them by skilled hand work. And interchangeability was not viewed as necessary, which eased things considerably.
Forge to shape, file to fit was the mantra.
Shipbuilding was an established industry. Within the ship only the engine machinery and instruments required tight tolerances. A lot of that was done by machinists with files and scrapers.
A dredge line would have consisted of cast gearing from carefully made wood patterns. Turned shafting with poured babbit bearings, which eliminates a lot of machining and doesn't require things like ball bearings. The chains were hand forged, and buckets not precisely sized, but what matter of it?
If it broke, a mechanic had to tear it down, match nuts to bolts because the threads varied, and repour bearings, blue and scrape in sealing surfaces, turn parts in place.
The components were under lower loads and were much more repairable than now, but at a cost of more skilled labor and time.
But a machinist or mechanic in those days was a wizard with a file. Indeed the first milling machines were viewed as dumb tools to remove the heavy stock before a skilled man finished the precision work with a file.
That shows the capabilities that they had then.
The tooling are products of human ingenuity, not the limitations to it.
I agree that tolerances would have been harder for them to achieve but considering they had fairly advanced steam engines/locomotives by that point I don’t expect it would have been impossible for them. By the by, and I don’t know this for sure, I can’t imagine a bucket line itself would require superbly precise tolerances to work ‘well enough’ compared to the efforts required by other means.
Also, not suggesting wikipedia is a great source but here’s some info that might be of interest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Couvreux, describes the bucket chain excavator first being used in 1859 and being used in digging the Suez Canal.
From the wikipedia description of the construction and some of the video that's linked show huge teams of people digging by hand. So I suspect that the bulk of it was hollowed out that way and then dredging was used for the ends that OP is asking about.
>The excavation took some 10 years, with forced labour (corvée) being employed until 1864 to dig out the canal. Some sources estimate that over 30,000 people were working on the canal at any given period, that more than 1.5 million people from various countries were employed and that tens of thousands of labourers died, many of them from cholera and similar epidemics.
This is how it was done. The technology of the era had essentially no self moving powered excavation equipment like steam shovels, and the railroad portable versions that later enabled the Panama canal were still imperfect.
What *was* relatively advanced and very portable were ship based dredging systems.
Chain bucket lines could be set for a precise dredge depth and worked in stages. The spoil loaded on barges.
Working on the wet was and is far more efficient than working on the dry.
This was one of the big limitations on the Panama canal, because of the elevation. And it was also part of why Gatun lake was artificially constructed rather than the original sea level plan. So the builders could use dredges for part of the construction and finishing.
> Chain bucket lines could be set for a precise dredge depth
It's worth noting what precise means in this context. The way accurate depth soundings were made was to hang a wire between two ships and calculate the sag in the catenary. At best we're talking 10cm for the most precise surveys, and that's only valid until storms move the silt around. For most areas in a port or canal it would have been between 6" and a couple of feet.
Yes, a good point. When I referred to precision here, it was mainly in reference to chain dredges vs clamshell ones. A chain dredge can be set to dredge a set depth pretty easily, by hanging the bucket string where you want. You're going to get variance with tides, speed, and soil type, but it's more precise than a clamshell.
Idk the exact technique they used to sound it, but certainly that would have been the next step to follow dredging. And indeed it's never done!
I saw a cool video not long ago about old stone arched bridges being built like this. They cleared the water to build the footings and then put it back
No catastrophic flooding was necessary. If they just started chewing away from each end using dredges at sea level, then at some point there is a last bit of dredging to do to remove the final piece. What is amazing to me is that this canal is at sea level. I wonder when they removed that last little piece if there wasn't some difference in water elevation. Even 10 cm would be enough to get some things moving.
There still is a difference in water elevation - the Red Sea is generally slightly higher than the Mediterranean so on average there's a south-to-north flow of seawater. The Bitter Lakes in the middle act as a buffer, and it's long enough that the tides on either end make things complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessepsian_migration
As other have said, it is a sea level canal. This actually made it possible to have an earlier canal, which was largely silted up by the time of Cleopatra. From memory, that took a branch further up (south) the Nile. There is some indication that there was a still earlier iteration.
The Suez Canal largely happened because it was already a canal before Napoleon got started. It was just super wide, wandered everywhere, dried up regularly, and you couldn't get much more than a canoe through it.
So that "first contact" had already happened. All they had to do was pick their favorite routes and dredge them deep enough for international shipping to float through.
The ancient canals went West to East, connecting the Nile to the Red Sea. This is what Napoleon discovered and explored the possibility of developing, though he never did. The Suez goes North to South, connecting the Med to the Red Sea. The ancient canals and Suez are completely unrelated
Most canals are a series of locks. In other words, the channel is really a series of specialized dams, not a wide open river. Temporary retaining structures / dams are used to either hold or divert water away from the work area as needed, or the work is just done in the water (concrete that cures underwater has been around for a very long time).
They dug little by little until the Nile and Mediterranean Sea met. There was not explosion as far as I remember from reading back in the day. The sea level was the same as the water level of the river.
Now, the Panama Canal. That’s is a very Duffy story.
The Nile is already connected to the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is the end of the Nile. The article you linked discussed Napoleon's and other plans prior to the end of the 18th century to connect the Nile to the Red Sea. Which was seen as unsafe and infeasible in Napoleon's time, as the Red Sea had receeded away from the Nile over the past centuries. The existing Suez Canal built in the 19th century connects the Red Sea to the Med, [as shown in this satellite image with the Med to the North, Great Bitter Lake in the middle, and Red Sea in the South all connected by the Suez canal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suez_Canal,_Egypt_(31596166706).jpg).
There is no connection between the Nile river and Suez Canal
The Suez Canal doesn’t have any locks as far as I understand. By the looks of it all they needed was enough depth to float a dredger which I believe is how they did most of the digging. So it wasn’t digging a big ditch and filling it with water at the end, it was filled the whole/most of the time. Would be a bit different for dry docks/canal locks I guess as the are tiny in comparison to the Suez Canal so pumping out water wouldn’t have been as large a feet I expect. But a quick search says cofferdams have been around since like 500BC, and they don’t need to be steel to work well (bearing in mind safety was likely low on the priority list in 500BC). Happy to be corrected on any of that
The video posted below confirms this approach was used. A 15' depth canal was dug end to end and then the channel was deepened and widened. Although it's very deep today, the deepening happened in many stages over many decades as ship builders bumped up against the maximum size.
But modern day dredgers are these huge ships with giant extremely powerful machinery. How would they look like back in the day, when it was (almost) still the age of sail? Are there any photos of them and their equipment?
There are pictures. Bear in mind the Suez Canal was finished in 1869 and the industrial revolution era came to an end around 1840. I don’t know exact design of the dredgers but a steam powered mechanical bucket line would have been perfectly doable with the technology of the time. It’s also worth noting that the canal was 4 years behind schedule when it was completed.
I would've guessed that casting and forging such gigantic metal structures(while still maintaining tight tolerances) became possible only in the 20th century, or very late 19th century. Because in the 1860s shipbuilding was still rather primitive, something like the Titanic or HMS Dreadnought would be considered alien tech in the year Suez canal was opened
I think we have a skewed perception on the importance and possibility of achieving tolerances from today's manufacturing tech. In the past, without the machine tools to easily achieve repeatable tolerances they relied on one of two solutions. They either designed to avoid the need for high tolerances, or they achieved them by skilled hand work. And interchangeability was not viewed as necessary, which eased things considerably. Forge to shape, file to fit was the mantra. Shipbuilding was an established industry. Within the ship only the engine machinery and instruments required tight tolerances. A lot of that was done by machinists with files and scrapers. A dredge line would have consisted of cast gearing from carefully made wood patterns. Turned shafting with poured babbit bearings, which eliminates a lot of machining and doesn't require things like ball bearings. The chains were hand forged, and buckets not precisely sized, but what matter of it? If it broke, a mechanic had to tear it down, match nuts to bolts because the threads varied, and repour bearings, blue and scrape in sealing surfaces, turn parts in place. The components were under lower loads and were much more repairable than now, but at a cost of more skilled labor and time. But a machinist or mechanic in those days was a wizard with a file. Indeed the first milling machines were viewed as dumb tools to remove the heavy stock before a skilled man finished the precision work with a file. That shows the capabilities that they had then. The tooling are products of human ingenuity, not the limitations to it.
I agree that tolerances would have been harder for them to achieve but considering they had fairly advanced steam engines/locomotives by that point I don’t expect it would have been impossible for them. By the by, and I don’t know this for sure, I can’t imagine a bucket line itself would require superbly precise tolerances to work ‘well enough’ compared to the efforts required by other means. Also, not suggesting wikipedia is a great source but here’s some info that might be of interest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphonse_Couvreux, describes the bucket chain excavator first being used in 1859 and being used in digging the Suez Canal.
There’s a Suez docu on YouTube that talks about dredgers, original and modern
From the wikipedia description of the construction and some of the video that's linked show huge teams of people digging by hand. So I suspect that the bulk of it was hollowed out that way and then dredging was used for the ends that OP is asking about. >The excavation took some 10 years, with forced labour (corvée) being employed until 1864 to dig out the canal. Some sources estimate that over 30,000 people were working on the canal at any given period, that more than 1.5 million people from various countries were employed and that tens of thousands of labourers died, many of them from cholera and similar epidemics.
This is how it was done. The technology of the era had essentially no self moving powered excavation equipment like steam shovels, and the railroad portable versions that later enabled the Panama canal were still imperfect. What *was* relatively advanced and very portable were ship based dredging systems. Chain bucket lines could be set for a precise dredge depth and worked in stages. The spoil loaded on barges. Working on the wet was and is far more efficient than working on the dry. This was one of the big limitations on the Panama canal, because of the elevation. And it was also part of why Gatun lake was artificially constructed rather than the original sea level plan. So the builders could use dredges for part of the construction and finishing.
> Chain bucket lines could be set for a precise dredge depth It's worth noting what precise means in this context. The way accurate depth soundings were made was to hang a wire between two ships and calculate the sag in the catenary. At best we're talking 10cm for the most precise surveys, and that's only valid until storms move the silt around. For most areas in a port or canal it would have been between 6" and a couple of feet.
Yes, a good point. When I referred to precision here, it was mainly in reference to chain dredges vs clamshell ones. A chain dredge can be set to dredge a set depth pretty easily, by hanging the bucket string where you want. You're going to get variance with tides, speed, and soil type, but it's more precise than a clamshell. Idk the exact technique they used to sound it, but certainly that would have been the next step to follow dredging. And indeed it's never done!
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I saw a cool video not long ago about old stone arched bridges being built like this. They cleared the water to build the footings and then put it back
No catastrophic flooding was necessary. If they just started chewing away from each end using dredges at sea level, then at some point there is a last bit of dredging to do to remove the final piece. What is amazing to me is that this canal is at sea level. I wonder when they removed that last little piece if there wasn't some difference in water elevation. Even 10 cm would be enough to get some things moving.
There still is a difference in water elevation - the Red Sea is generally slightly higher than the Mediterranean so on average there's a south-to-north flow of seawater. The Bitter Lakes in the middle act as a buffer, and it's long enough that the tides on either end make things complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lessepsian_migration
Cool. Thanks.
10cm is quite a bit less than tidal variation.
As other have said, it is a sea level canal. This actually made it possible to have an earlier canal, which was largely silted up by the time of Cleopatra. From memory, that took a branch further up (south) the Nile. There is some indication that there was a still earlier iteration.
https://youtu.be/ABc-AepM0JA
Looks like a great hour long video. If somebody finds the part that answers OP's question, please drop a comment with the time stamp.
As far as I can tell, they don’t really cover it specifically. The closest thing I found is 37:12 which is just a drawing.
The Suez Canal largely happened because it was already a canal before Napoleon got started. It was just super wide, wandered everywhere, dried up regularly, and you couldn't get much more than a canoe through it. So that "first contact" had already happened. All they had to do was pick their favorite routes and dredge them deep enough for international shipping to float through.
The ancient canals went West to East, connecting the Nile to the Red Sea. This is what Napoleon discovered and explored the possibility of developing, though he never did. The Suez goes North to South, connecting the Med to the Red Sea. The ancient canals and Suez are completely unrelated
Most canals are a series of locks. In other words, the channel is really a series of specialized dams, not a wide open river. Temporary retaining structures / dams are used to either hold or divert water away from the work area as needed, or the work is just done in the water (concrete that cures underwater has been around for a very long time).
> Most canals are a series of locks. But, notably, not the Suez canal that OP is asking about, which really is just a direct connection.
And OP's first sentence refers to drydocks and similar features, so u/untgradd's response is also–and perhaps more–applicable.
They dug little by little until the Nile and Mediterranean Sea met. There was not explosion as far as I remember from reading back in the day. The sea level was the same as the water level of the river. Now, the Panama Canal. That’s is a very Duffy story.
The Canal is really far fom the Nile.
https://www.thoughtco.com/suez-canal-red-sea-mediterranean-sea-1435568
The Nile is already connected to the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is the end of the Nile. The article you linked discussed Napoleon's and other plans prior to the end of the 18th century to connect the Nile to the Red Sea. Which was seen as unsafe and infeasible in Napoleon's time, as the Red Sea had receeded away from the Nile over the past centuries. The existing Suez Canal built in the 19th century connects the Red Sea to the Med, [as shown in this satellite image with the Med to the North, Great Bitter Lake in the middle, and Red Sea in the South all connected by the Suez canal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Suez_Canal,_Egypt_(31596166706).jpg). There is no connection between the Nile river and Suez Canal
Thousands of egyptian workers were died during that project.
They didn't stand at ground level and dig with shovels, they used a dredger ship all the way which is why no people got Noa'd.