The canal has been the catalyst for a technical revolution : in the early stages, the canal has been dug in a pharaonic way by thousands of fellahs handling shovels and pickaxes ; by the end of the project, huge steam-driven monsters had taken over.

Fellahs on one of the canal's sites		Man is replaced by machine

It was in Egypt, land of pyramids and temples, that machines first replaced manual labour on a grand scale.

.

Mohammed-Saïd and Lesseps had chosen a direct route defined by Linant and Mougel Bey. This route was a straight one, between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, but the challenge was that it passed through a total desert.

A complete desert – not a waterhole and not any track – bordered to the south by a fishing village and to the north by a swampy coast without any port or shelter.

The top priority was to supply the work sites with fresh water. So first, water from the Nile was channelled into the isthmus.

Port-Saïd : View of a part of the town		Port-Saïd - Lesseps Square
Port-Saïd : naval dockyard		Port-Saïd : the harbour

The town of Ismaïlia, the canal's administrative centre, also grew up out of the desert.

Ismaïlia : Housing for the company's employees		Ismaïlia : Champollion Square

The town of Suez already existed. In 1880 it was a small and virtually
forgotten fishing port. Construction of the canal had very littleimpact on the
town : for geological reasons, a new town, Port-Tewfik was built just besides.

Suez		Port-Thewfik

The isthmus being a desert, where to find the workers to dig the canal ? According to the firmans, Egypt had to provide the necessary manpower by the mean of forced labour (“corvée”). At that time, that was a classical method of carrying out public works. It was a tax in kind. However, working conditions on the canal were not bad and relatively advanced for the time. The 1856 workers' regulation proved it – workers were paid, housed and fed. Neither were there any uprisings or protests.
		Fellahs working on the canal

And then, for political reasons, "corvee", forced labour, was brutally abolished.

Rising to the challenges

Geographical challenges

To provide the 16 000 litres of water daily required in late 1859, the Company initially imported three distillers from The Netherlands, each producing 5000 litres a day. These distillers were steam driven and powered by water and coal.

Another solution was to deal with a boat owner with a number of small boats which brought water into Port-Saïd, across lake Menzaleh. Then the water was distributed to the work sites, using camels. But these were only makeshifts, before the Nile water be channelled into the isthmus.

The initial project was to divert the river in Cairo and to dig the canal from there. This plan was abandoned as being too ambitious. Finally, the freshwater canal, linked to the irrigation system of the delta, was dug from Zagazig to Ismaïlia. In 1862, freshwater began to be supplied to the isthmus and the canal also enabled some materials to be transported. The freshwater canal still supplies the isthmus today.
		The freshwater canal

Another - and impressively modern - response to the geographical challenges was the creation from nothing of the port of Port-Saïd.

Natural blocks of stone were used to form rocks upon which the landing stage of the future pier would rest. The blocks were shipped by a fleet of a dozen boats from quarries located to the west of Alexandria. Later, from October 1863 onwards, this mean of transport being too difficult and slow it will be replaced by a more revolutionary method : instead of carrying blocks of stone, artificial concrete blocks were directly cast on site.

In Port-Saïd, the first artificial blocks were laid in August 1865. The two piers (1900 and 2200 meters long) were completed in January 1869 and required 250 000 cubic metres concrete.

Political challenges and replacement of man by machines

The abolition of “corvée” left a situation which seemed rather dramatic. But very soon, steam-powered machines were used at a large scale to continue the work and manpower did not disappear completely. Instead of the 20 000 workers previously employed, there remained approximately 4 000, all volunteers.

The engineers

The first engineers, Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds and Eugène Moigel had worked on the project from the origin. Civil servants of the Egyptian government, they were seconded to the Company. Voisin, engineer from the French Highways Department, managed the works right to the end.

The entrepreneurs

Work was divided up and entrusted to different companies. They were responsible for much more than carrying out work; they also played a part in developing some new and sometimes revolutionary machines. Although Lesseps was not an engineer and was not involved in technical decisions, he was always present on the work sites and co-ordinated all activities.

The machinery
Up to 1863, most of the work on the canal had been done by labourers with baskets (there were no wheelbarrows in the East). In 1860, 50 000 shovels and pickaxes were ordered in France. It was only after 1863 that really revolutionary machines appeared on work-sites.

Dredger widening the canal.		Photo: Channel-dredger : heavy buckets of the machine scrape away the soil and empty the waste material into a metal gutter.
A long-channel dredger measuring 45 metres. Channels spill Waste soil out on to the bank where workers help to spread it out.		A long-gutter dredger. At the canal's broadest points, the gutters could be up to 60 m long.
Rock-clearing dredger. This dredger can penetrate very resistant grounds. Under the water, the rock is crushed by power hammers.		Overflow dredger. These are used for leveling.