ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1860s, when work on the Suez Canal was already fully underway, French and Bavarian engineers developed new plans for Corinth which they presented at the Academie des Sciences de Paris, thus attracting international attention. Financier of the syndicate was Jacques de Reinach, a Jewish banker from Germany who had co-founded the bank Kohn, De Reinach et Cie in Paris. Ferdinand De Lesseps prevailed with his plan for the Panama Canal to be built without locks or tunnels, despite the opposition of Bela Gerster. In 1881, Hungarian Istvan Turr received a 99-year concession to build the canal from the Greek government. Turr turned to France, the homeland of his wife, to find investors for his Canal of Corinth. In the case of Corinth, the engineer French engineer Guillaume-Vincent Dauzats had not even viewed the site of the proposed canal, but had simply based his assessment on the calculations made by Bela Gerster and another petrophysical evaluation.
