Description A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Not only is this palindrome clever, it also gives a brief description of the Panama Canal. Before 1914, traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant going by land across the entire United States. To go by sea involved a long journey down and around South America and back north along the Pacific Coast. But then, in a dangerous and amazing feat of engineering, a forty-eight-mile-long channel was dug through Panama, creating the world's most famous shortcut: the Panama Canal!