29.
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30.
America's visionary canal builder was New York's De Witt Clinton (29), who celebrated the 1825 completion of the Erie Canal with a ceremonial wedding of the Lake Erie's water with the Atlantic Ocean at the Hudson River's mouth. By providing an economical east-west route across the Appalachian Mountains, the 363-mile-long Erie Canal (30) transformed America's destiny by linking New York and the eastern seaboard to the Mississippi Valley and the vast resources of the continental interior.
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31.
The arrival of abundant, clean freshwater from a new aqueduct network in upstate Croton in 1842 relieved celebratory New Yorkers of their chronic water scarcity and affliction by waterborne diseases.
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32.
English leader Benjamin Disraeli championed the sanitary reforms that triggered the industrial world's public health revolution. Disraeli later seized the opportunity that enabled England to gain influence over the vitally strategic Suez Canal, which linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean.
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The entrepreneurial genius behind the 1869 Suez Canal was French Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps. De Lesseps' later effort to build an interoceanic canal between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans failed, but galvanized events that ultimately led to the creation of the Panama Canal.
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34.
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35.
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36.
The driving force behind the Panama Canal was America's greatest water president, Teddy Roosevelt (35), who got behind the controls of huge steam shovel (34) during his heralded visit to the canal zone to make good on his promise to make "the dirt fly." The first steamer sailed through the canal's famous Culebra Cut in August 1914 (36).
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37.
Dust storms, like the one of April 14, 1935, approaching Rollo, Kansas, and created partly by man's mismanagement of a fragile water environment, ravaged the plains during the Great Depression. Pumping water accumulated over eons in huge, deep underground aquifers soon transformed the Great Plains into one of world history's great breadbaskets, but raised doubts about its long-term sustainability.
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38.
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39.
"I came, I saw, I was conquered . . ." President Franklin Roosevelt's September 30, 1935, dedication (38) of the Boulder (later renamed Hoover) Dam (39) inaugurated one of the great eras of water history. Giant, multipurpose dams transformed America's arid Far West, helped the country win World War II, and spread the worldwide Green Revolution.
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40.
Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was adulated by Arabs throughout the Middle East. He triggered a crisis with the great Western powers when he nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and contracted with the Soviet Union to construct the multipurpose high dam on the Nile at Aswan, a project he likened to the great pyramids.
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41.
Like great dynastic founders throughout Chinese history, Mao Zedong launched massive development waterworks to reengineer China. Today, the nation has nearly half the world's 45,000 large dams, including the controversial super giant at Three Gorges on the Yangtze, and a continentalscale south-to-north river water diversion scheme.
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