← Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
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Tim Harford
Foreign you're listening to an iHeart podcast. Behind every successful business is a vision. Bringing it to life takes more than effort. It takes the right financial foundation and support. That's where Chase for Business comes in. With convenient digital tools and helpful resources and personalized guidance, they can help your business forge ahead confidently. Learn more@chase.com business chase for business make more of what's yours the Chase Mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. JP Morgan Chase Bank NA Member FDIC Copyright 2025 JPMorgan Chase & Co. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-IHeart. 1886 A train near Paris Two men are sitting in silence. One decides to strike up a conversation. What's your line of work? He asks his fellow passenger. It's a mundane, everyday question. Almost everyone in France would have been astonished to hear it. How has this man failed to recognize who he's talking to? Twinkling black eyes and walrus moustache under a shock of thick white hair, this is one of the most famous faces in the country, the Grand Francais. They call him the great Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps. He looks far younger than he is. You'd Never guess he's 80. Here's how the New York Herald had once described Le Grand. He bears his years with ease and grace, showing no signs of age in his movements. His face is tanned and ruddy, with the evidence of perfect health. His bearing is erect, his manner suave, courteous and polished. Ferdinand de Lesseps might be surprised that the other passenger hasn't recognized him. But he's not offended. He's amused. His line of work. He flashes a smile and says, isthmuses. Ferdinand de Lessep built the Suez Canal. Everyone told him it couldn't be done. A waterway slicing 120 miles through the Egyptian isthmus. It was too ambitious. But Ferdinand de Lesseps did it. The new canal was an instant hit. It slashed journey times between Asia and Europe. Instead of going thousands of miles around the southern tip of Africa, ships could pay to take the shortcut from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Today, 12% of global trade goes through Suez. De Lesseps made a lot of French investors very, very rich. And now he's trying to do it all over again. In Panama. But for Ferdinand de Lesseps, Panama will not be a happy isthmus. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Ferdinand de Lesseps was born in 1805 in Versailles into a distinguished family. His cousin would later become Empress Eugenie, the wife of Napoleon iii. Like his father, De Lesseps became a diplomat. He served in Portugal, Spain and Tunisia. He spent five years in Egypt as France's vice consul. De Lesseps was charming and charismatic. He made friends wherever he went. It is wonderful, said his first wife, to have a husband so liked by everyone. Fernand de Lessep was a fine horseman, a crack shot, an accomplished fencer. He was not an engineer or a financier or an administrator. All skills you might expect someone to need if they were going to embark on a ground breaking 120 mile canal. So how did de Lesseps get put in charge of Suez? In his five years in Egypt, he had become firm friends with the ruler's son. By the time the ruler's son took over, De Lesseps had left the diplomatic service and recently been widowed. He went to visit his old friend. They talked about canals. The idea had been around for years, but nobody had ever got very far with it. I'll put up some money, the ruler told de Lesseps. If you can raise the rest. As the historian David McCulloch puts it, De Lesseps had no experience faintly related to such an undertaking. He had no backing from France's government or from banks. But why should that stop him? De Lesseps convened a committee of experts to come up with a plan. He formed a company and he barnstormed around France, selling his scheme to small investors. He was magnetic, a compelling speaker. Thousands of French families entrusted him with their savings. The British Prime Minister called the Lesseps a swindler and a fool. But then he would say that if the canal were actually to happen, the British didn't want it controlled by a French company. But could you really cut a canal right across the Egyptian desert? It can't be easy to dig in sand. De Lesseps had no time for the doomsters and gloomsters. They never achieve anything who do not believe in success, he liked to say. By 1867, they'd been digging for eight years and gone way over budget. De Lesseps was running out of cash. He went back to the French public with another scheme to raise more money. Lottery bonds, Invest in finishing the Suez Canal with a chance of winning big cash prizes. The public snapped up the bonds. And two years later, the very first ship steamed through the newly opened canal. The state yacht of Empress Eugenie. Somehow de Lesseps had pulled it off. The two sides of the world approached to greet one another, said one commentator. Another gave de Lessep his new nickname, Le Grand Francais. The triumph made him a symbol of France's self image and the age of globalism and technological progress. In the words of Matthew Parker, the author of Hell's Gorge, he represented a new patriotism based around not war, but achievement for all mankind. De Lesseps married again. He was 64, his glamorous new wife just 20. Soon they had a child, then a another and another. The photogenic family was never out of the newspapers. The Grand Francais set his heart on conquering another isthmus. As with Egypt, the idea of a canal across Panama had been discussed for years. As with Suez, such a canal would save ships. A detour of thousands upon thousands of miles. Instead of sailing all around South America, they'd be able to shortcut between the Pacific and Atlantic. Surveyors had scoped out the lie of the land in Panama. Various routes were proposed for locks that might convey a ship over the hills between the oceans like a set of steps. De Lesseps had strong views about locks. He hated them more. The ship and close one set of gates, open another, wait for the water to gush in or out. Locks make canal journey slow and cumbersome. And as far as de Lesseps was concerned, there was only one right way to build a canal at sea level. That's what he'd done at Suez. You sail in at one end and out the other. Simple. The suez Canal was 120 miles. It's only 40 odd miles across the Panama isthmus. How hard could it be? In 1879, de Lesseps had the Societe de Geographie convene a congress in Paris to study all the possible routes. He invited delegates from 22 countries. Explorers, economists, engineers and expert after expert explained very clearly why the sea level canal that had worked in Egypt was never going to work in Panama. For a start, Egypt was pretty flat. Panama was hilly. How much earth would you have to dig? How much would it cost? How long would it take? And Egypt was dry. Panama's river chagres cut across any route the canal might take. Have you ever seen the chagres? Asked one delegate to de Lesseps conference. I have. I've watched it after a storm rise 10ft in an hour. I've seen it gushing like a torrent 1500ft across. What's going to happen to the ships in your sea level canal when all that flood water hits them? Problems, problems, problems, said De Lesseps. Of course there are problems. There were problems at the at Suez too. People had said you could never dig through sand. But men of genius came forward to solve every problem by inventing machines, massive steam powered dredges. Men of genius will invent whatever is needed for Panama too. The congress ended with a vote on which plan to support a surprising number of delegates were nowhere to be found. One later explained that it was obvious which way de Lesseps wanted the vote to go, and he didn't agree with it. But he'd also dined very well in Paris and he'd hate to upset his hosts. Others were braver. In order not to burden my conscience, said one with unnecessary deaths and useless expenditure, I say no. De Lessep got up to cast his vote and make an announcement. I vote yes and I have accepted command of the enterprise. The room erupted. Lessep was 74 years old. It has been suggested, he said, that after Suez I ought to take a rest. But I ask you, when a general has just won one battle and is invited to win another, why should he refuse? By the end of the vote, yes had a resounding majority. Look more closely and the result seems less reassuring. Most of the yes delegates were French, not many were engineers. And of the engineers, only one had ever actually been to Panama. And he had a financial interest in de Lesseps plan. Still now de Lesseps could go to the French public to seek investment and claim the backing of experts, just as he'd done with Suez. De Lesseps's son from his first marriage, his loyal right hand man Charles, wasn't sure this was wise. You succeeded at Suez by a miracle, he said to his father. Should not one be satisfied with completing one miracle in a lifetime? Cautionary tales will be back in a moment. If Ferdinand de Lesseps was going to persuade ordinary French families to invest in his Panama Canal Company as they had in Suez, it would probably help if he'd actually been to Panama. On December 30, 1879, his ship docked in the small town of Colon. Down the ramp walked De Lessep with his beautiful young wife and three of their little children. In a white linen suit, De Lesseps gave a rousing speech. The canal will be made, he said again and again. The canal will be made. Colon was a railway town and not somewhere travelers liked to linger. Unpaved streets strewn with garbage, a couple of seedy hotels, and that was about it. You landed in Colon only to get the train to Panama City. The railway across Panama had been built by American invention investors in the mid 19th century, when the easiest way to get from the east coast of America to the west was not to go through America at all. Instead, you'd take a ship down to Panama, make your way by land across the 40 mile isthmus and take another ship back north. De Lessep had arrived at the start of the dry season. The skies were blue, the breeze was pleasant. It was the perfect time of year to visit Panama if you wanted to enjoy a vacation. The most uninformative time if you wanted to understand how hard it might be to build a canal. De Lessep and his entourage boarded the train for Panama City. It took them across a swamp, through a jungle and up into the hills. The scenery was stunning, and on board the train the champagne flowed freely. De Lessep was captivated. La pluper regent du monde, he declared, the most beautiful place in the world. Then the train ground to a halt. Everybody out. It was time to cross the Chagres river, which flowed gently down a valley 40ft below. There was, however, a problem. A few months earlier, after a storm in the rainy season, the river had swelled 46ft. The railway bridge, huge and sturdy and made from iron, had been battered and mangled out of shape. It wasn't safe to take a train across it. But another train was waiting on the other side to take them on to Panama City if they'd care to cross the bridge on foot. Some of the passengers looked down at the drop and across the twisted bridge and decided they'd had too much champagne to risk it. De Lessep gathered up his small children and led them happily across. It was all a big adventure. If the destructive power of the floods had impressed him, he kept it to himself. Writing back to France, he mentioned only that there'd been a small delay on the railway in Panama City on New Year's Day. They'd arranged a boat for the three mile trip to the bay where the canal would meet the ocean. De Lesseps had brought a shiny new pickaxe from France to strike the symbolic flag. First blow. But heads were sore from the night before and the boat was late to leave. After more champagne, they neared the bay and realised they'd missed the tide. They couldn't land. No matter, said De Lesseps. If the first blow is only symbolic, we can do it right here on the boat. He handed the pickaxe to his seven year old daughter and lined up an old champagne crate emptied of bottles. The Bishop of Panama blessed the work and the little girl brought the pickaxe swinging down onto the wooden box. Construction of the Panama Canal had begun, sort of. And after his trip across the Isthmus, Ferdinand de Lessep was in a confident mood. Our work, he declared, will be easier at Pan Panama than at Suez. The congress in Paris had made a rough guess at what might be involved. How much earth they'd have to shift, how long it would take and how much it would cost. De Lesseps had brought with him to Panama a technical committee to give those numbers a sense check. They decided they'd need to do even more excavation, half as much again. But they also decided, oddly, that this would be quicker. Not 12 years, but eight. And cheaper, too. De Lesseps once again barnstormed around France, drumming up interest in shares in his Panama company. Everywhere he went, he flew the flags of France and America, though the French government had nothing to do with his scheme. And the Americans were just as wary of this Panama project as the Brits had been of Suez. A single share in the company would cost something like a year's wages for a typical worker. But shares in the Suez company had cost the same, and now they were trading at four times as much and paying dividends of 17% a year. The French public had a question to resolve. Why had Suez succeeded? Was it because of Le Grand Francais? The sheer force of personality of Ferdinand de Lesseps? If so, it might be worth betting that he'd put it off again. But there was an alternative explanation. Perhaps everyone had initially overestimated how challenging Suez would be. Maybe, with hindsight, it wasn't that hard. If that were the case, we shouldn't be quite so impressed that de Lesseps had managed it. Psychologists now have some jargon for thinking about questions like this. We have to weigh up two types of dispositional and situational. We might attribute an event to someone's disposition, what type of person they are, or to their situation, chance and circumstance. For example, suppose someone's late to a meeting. Sorry, they say, stuck in traffic. That's a situational explanation. Do you believe it, or do you suspect that they're probably just the type of person who's late to everything? Researchers have found that humans are innately biased. We're too quick to jump to the dispositional explanations, too slow to believe the situational. Even if we know the traffic was bad on some level, we tend to think that it must have been their fault. In one famous experiment in 1967, subjects read articles that either praised or damned for Fidel Castro. The experimenters told them how the articles had come about. It was an exercise, they explained. We flipped a coin heads and we told the writer they had to make the case for Castro. Tails. And we told them to argue against. Then they asked, what do you think the writer's attitude is towards Fidel Castro? The answer's obvious, right? You simply can't tell. But even though the experiment subjects knew the article came from a coin toss, they couldn't quite bring themselves to believe it. They were more likely to say that the writer of the pro Castro article probably liked Castro and the writer of the anti Castro article probably didn't. Psychologists call this the fundamental atrocity, attribution error. We're inclined to attribute things to people, not chance, and that leads us astray because it makes us too likely to expect the same outcome when the person's the same. But the situation is different. The sale of shares in the Panama Company was a huge success. Tens of thousands of ordinary French people applied to buy more than twice as many shares as were available. The world of finance had never seen anything like it. In January 1881, the first group of French engineers went out to Panama. Their task, hire local labourers and clear a path along the route the canal was to take. It soon became clear that Panama was nothing like Suez. The jungle was so dense, said one worker, you could only see a few yards in any direction, hacking away with machetes and axes. You had to watch out for the snakes, some of the world's deadliest species. And you couldn't avoid the mosquitoes, the spiders, the ants, the ticks and the jiggers that laid eggs under the skin. The workers would spend their evenings trying to pick them out. De Lesseps had enjoyed Panama in the dry season. When the rains came, said one engineer, it was like working in a steam bath. The tools rusted. Colourful mould sprouted up on belts and bags and boots. Not nothing dried. He'd sleep, then put back on the sweat soaked, rain drenched clothes you'd taken off the night before. After just six months, only one in 10 workers were still on the job. And the worst of it wasn't the climate or the bites. It was the illness. Typhoid, cholera, dysentery, pneumonia. The biggest cause of death, malaria, chills and shivering. Then fever, thirst and sweat. And often those who lived never really recovered. And yellow fever too, which we heard all about in another cautionary tale. Less common than malaria, but much deadlier. The cause of all these tropical diseases at the time, nobody really knew. There were vague ideas about bad air, hence mal area. But many people had no doubt the cause was moral turpitude. Workers in Panama didn't have much to do for entertainment. There were no theatres or concert halls or galleries. There were, however, plenty of brothels. You could gamble and you could drink. In fact, you probably should drink, because wine was a lot less likely to make you ill than the local water. Was all this debauchery being punished by the fates through disease and death? It's the fundamental attribution error again, that innate human tendency to look for explanations in people's characters, not their circumstances. One man was especially convinced Jules d' Anglais. He was France's top civil Engineer, and in 1883, with costs mounting and workers dying and nowhere near enough earth being dug, De Lesseps offered him a huge salary to go out to Panama and sort everything out. Was Jules d' Anglais afraid of disease? Not at all. I intend to show the world, he announced, that only the drunk and the dissipated will die of yellow fever. Cautionary tales will be back after the break. When Jules d' Anglais arrived in Panama, he found a mess of waste men, mismanagement and corruption. Some workers were collecting wages for five different jobs because nobody was tracking who was spending time on what. Somehow, more than 100 Thoroughbred racehorses had been shipped over from Europe and the canal company was paying the stabling costs. Although this particular extravagance seems not to have offended Danglais too much, as he promptly arranged for his own horses to be be shipped over as well. Along with his wife, his 20 year old son, his 18 year old daughter and his daughter's fiance, they rode in the hills, exploring the countryside. The work, meanwhile, was being done with a mishmash of badly planned tools. The company had built railroads to reach parts of the planned canal route, but they'd managed to to build them in six different gauges. Trucks from one couldn't run on the others. Danglais surveyed the route and found 17 types of rock formation, an engineering nightmare. The hard volcanic rock was bad enough. Even worse was the clay. Utterly impossible, said one engineer. For a man to throw off his shovel, he has to have a little square to shove it off. And then when the rains came, the sides of the ditch you'd dug would come slipping right back in again. Great avalanches of sodden clay that swept away train tracks. The only thing to do, Danglais realised, was make the sides less steep by digging them wider. Danglais did some sums. In total, he reckoned they'd have to shift 120 million cubic meters of earth. That'd be like digging two metres down across the whole of Manhattan. More to the point, it was also two and a half times the amount the Paris Congress had initially estimated. Back in Paris, De Lesseps took the news calmly. He decided there was no need to revise his estimates of the cost or the timescale. Everything, he said, is proceeding as planned. Tanglay, too, was optimistic. It only requires that we quadruple our efforts, he said, which is absolutely possible. And for a while it seemed it might be. New machines arrived, custom built for the challenge. Monstrous contraptions on wooden legs with a tall tower and a wheel, hauling huge buckets on a chain and great pipes spewing jets of water to fire the earth in the buckets far away from the ditch. It looked just like the sort of fantastic invention that de Lesseps had promised men of genius would come up with. Maybe, just maybe, Jules d' Anglais could turn the project around. But then Donglay's 18 year old daughter fell ill and died. Yellow fever. My poor husband is in a despair which is painful to see, wrote Madame Danglais. My first desire was to flee as fast as possible and carry far from this murderous country those who are left to me. But my husband is a man of duty. A month later, the son fell ill and died. Yellow fever. Madame d' Anglais controls herself with courage, wrote Monsieur Danglay, but she is deeply shaken. Then the daughter's fiance died. Yellow fever. And then yellow fever came for Madame d' Anglais too. After his beloved wife died, Jules d' Anglais ordered that the family's horses be shot. It was too painful to think of someone else riding them into the Panamanian hills. He quit his job and returned to France a broken man. The United States had never been keen on the idea of a French owned canal through Panama. It would, as President Rutherford B Hayes put it, be virtually a part of our coastline. American newspapers sent reporters to see how things were going. The news they sent back was dumbfounding. Hospitals with a 75% death rate. A ship that arrived with 33 workers and 27 died in the first three weeks. Corpses left on streets for buzzards to pick at, labourers dropping dead on the job and being unceremoniously rolled down the embankment to be covered up with excavated spoil. None of this made the newspapers in France. The French media had been onside ever since. They pushed that successful share issue. Oh, ye of little faith, wrote La Liberte. Hear the words of Monsieur de Lesseps and believe. They didn't ask many questions. When an earthquake struck Panama, journalists allowed de Lesseps to get away with blithely promising there will be no more earthquakes. By the time he entered his 80th year, de Lesseps was still as vigorous as ever. His wife was expecting child number 12, but he was being forced to divert his energies to maintaining the project's reputation. This wasn't easy. As a writer in the New York Tribune explained, every difficulty by which the company is beset requires two distinct efforts. It must be overcome and it must also be kept secret from the supporters of the project who would otherwise be discouraged. How long could the awful secret of the true situation in Panama be kept from France? Too many French families were starting to discuss how sons and husbands went out to Panama and didn't come back. The price of shares in the Panama Canal Company started to wobble. De Lesseps tried to shore up the situation with an upbeat speech at the annual shareholders meeting. The efforts actually put forth, he announced, may be considered as more than half the total efforts necessary. More than halfway there. It was a strange thing to claim. In fact, they'd dug only about 10% of the canal. Then de Lesseps casually proclaimed that they had changed the course of the Chagres River. He meant they'd come up with a new plan for a dam that would change the course of the river. But the newspaper reports made it sound like it had happened already. For all the Lesseps tried. The company's finances were becoming stretched. Every new bond issue got fewer and fewer takers. Borrowing money became more and more expensive. De Lesseps reached for another tactic from his Suez playbook a lottery bond France's laws said the government had to approve every lottery. Debate was fierce. The amount de Lesseps wanted to raise was more than he'd said the whole thing would cost. But the vote went in his favour and de Lesseps barnstormed round the country for one last time. His message was, you can't stop now. Hundreds of thousands of French men and women had money on the line in Panama. They'd mortgaged their houses. They'd sold off their jewellery. If the lottery bond failed, they'd be ruined. But if each one bought a bond, it would raise the cash to finish the canal. I appeal to all Frenchmen, he said. I appeal to all my colleagues whose fortunes are threatened. Your fates are in your Own hands decide. In December 1888, it fell to De Lesseps son and right hand man, the loyal Charles, to announce the results of the investment drive. They'd sold fewer than half the bonds they needed to. The company was bankrupt. It was over. A reporter tracked down Ferdinand de Lessep. The blood had drained from his face. C' est impossible, he said. C' est indigne. It's impossible. An indignity. All at once, Ferdinand de Lesseps age caught up with him as the liquidators picked over his company's books. Le Grand Francais holed up in his country house, his prodigious energies finally spent, the liquidators found a scandal. The company had bribed politicians to approve the lottery. For years they'd been paying newspapers not to print negative news. Over 2,500 editors had been secretly on the company's payroll, including not just the big dailies, but such unlikely outlets as Marriage Journal, the Beekeeper's Journal and the Choral Society's Echo. Some people had set up publications just to be able to take the company's money. The losses were astronomical. De Lesseps company had burned to the kind of money only usually spent on a war. It's hard to be sure about the cost in workers lives. A reasonable estimate is that 25,000 people died in the failure to build the canal. Of course, the canal does now exist and we'll pick up the story of how that happened in the next episode of this two part Panama special. Ferdinand and Charles de Lessep went on trial for fraud. Both were sentenced to prison. Charles served his time, but nobody had the heart to lock up his father, now a doddering, bewildered old man who spent his days at home staring blankly at the fire or out through the window. There was sympathy because amid all the corruption, Ferdinand de Lesseps had never tried to enrich himself. It was never about the money for Le Grand Francais. Instead, he'd been guilty of one big error. The fundamental attribution error. Having led one triumph, he assumed, like many others, that the essential ingredient for a second triumph was Le Grand Francais himself. You succeeded at Suez by a miracle, Charles had once told his father. De Lesseps had wrongly concluded that he could work a second miracle whenever he wanted. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes@timharford.com Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Ruthless. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends. And if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or@Pushkin FM. Plus. You're listening to an I Heart podcast.