Ferdinand de Lesseps

Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps was a French diplomat who turned developer and in 1869 delivered the Suez Canal, joining the Mediterranean and Red Seas and collapsing the voyage from Europe to East Asia. The triumph made him attempt the same in Panama during the 1880s, this time at sea level. Malaria and yellow fever tore through the workforce, the money collapsed, and the canal was never finished. The United States bought the wreckage, redesigned it with locks instead of his flat-water vision, and opened it in 1914. He died in 1894, seven months short of his eighty-ninth birthday.