“A man, a plan, a canal: Panama” — so wrote Leigh Mercer in 1948, imagining an election slogan for Theodore Roosevelt that was so well engineered it could be read both backward and forward. But though Roosevelt visited the UW, he went to school at some small liberal arts college back east, so we can’t claim him. However, that slogan could also describe Edward Schildhauer 1897, the Badger who served as the Panama Canal’s mechanical and electrical engineer from 1906 to 1914 — the last eight of the canal’s 10 years of construction. Schildhauer designed the gates for the canal’s locks — machines that rely on gear wheels that are 20 feet in diameter. He also designed the electrical locomotives that pull ships through the canal. The Panama Canal is 51 miles long and more than 50 feet deep, and Schildhauer’s locks help life vessels up 85 feet above sea level and then let them back down again. More than a million ships have passed through the canal, making it probably the most important ditch anyone in North or South America has ever dug, and we can thank Schildhauer for it.