Throughout history there have been many attempts to build a canal in Nicaragua to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. As early as the colonial era, there were proposals to build the waterway in this country. Many of these plans for the canal wanted to use the San Juan River as a connecting route to Lake Nicaragua. Historians also found that in the middle of the 19th century Napoleon III was interested in the construction, and even designed and wrote a plan to see how feasible could the plan be to implement.
The United States was also interested in the plan for the waterway in Nicaragua, but decided to abandon the project at the beginning of the 20th century after buying the French business interest to the Panama Canal. France was actually already breaking ground in the construction of the Panama Canal but failed to advance and eventually left the enterprise. Even though the Panama Canal presented a harder engineering challenge, it was a shorter route to unite the two oceans, this also contributed to the decision to leave the project of the Nicaraguan Canal.
After obtaining the rights to the construction of the canal from the French, The United States claimed that with their better technology, they could succeed were the French could not. Eventually, the waterway was finished and the US was able to enjoy technological superiority.
