Why did a French Company start building the Panama Canal?

Question

I am doing a presentation on American Foreign Policy in a couple of days.
The building of the Panama Canal is one of the topics I will be talking about.
It says in my textbook that a French Company started building the Canal, that the work stalled due to financial mismanagement 8 years later and the rights were taken over by an American Company.

My questions is this - why would the French start building it? Isn't it mainly in American interest to build it (trade etc.)? 
And who's idea was it in the first place?
Roosevelt later said that it was one of the most important events in foreign affairs. 
So how come it wasn't an American company right from the beginning? 

Please help me, I'm confused and I don't want to provide my classmates with wrong information. 

Thank you!

yankee_sailor · Accepted Answer

The reason a French company go involved was an engineer  called de Lesseps..Frenchman,who built the Suez Canal, which waste Great Engineering Wonder of the World.....

after Suez he was the logical choice to build the other Great Engineering Wonder of the World...unfortunately for him and France's ego, building a sea level canal through a desert at Suez was nothing like building a canal through 350 foot high solid rock mountains in a jungle in Panama....de Lesseps had the wrong design, his people back home in France terribly mismanaged the money, and there was no known cure for malaria and yellow fever, which killed 40 thousands of Frenchmen......sometimes as much as 90% of a shipload within a month..so the French effort collapsed.

Why not the US in the original effort  since we would be the huge beneficiary of cutting the trip from NYC to SFO in half? Mainly because we were preoccupied with binding up the wounds of the Civil War and expanding west on the continent.

Once a generation passed from Appomattox, and we had colonies in the Pacific, and two generations of engineering and industrialization under our belts, it was our Destiny to build it.

and it wasn't an American company...it was a government agency, the Panama Canal Commission, which was to it's day what NASA was in the 50's and 60's.......first run by civilians who had built railroads, and then by the Army Corps of Engineers,who channeled the memory  and traditions of their English and Roman predecessors in building great civilizing works upon the world.....

the definitive history is David McCullough's "Path Between the Seas". Especially relevant with the recent announcement of China's plans to build a canal through Nicaragua, are the sections how the US looked at and rejected that plan 120 years ago.

Why did a French Company start building the Panama Canal?

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