THINKING BIG : Money : Creativity Starts With Financing : Once upon a time, the gold and grain of kings paid for public works. Now taxes, lotteries, bonds and private companies do the trick.

Ferdinand de Lesseps was an extraordinary chap, a 19th-Century French diplomat with charm and social grace but also a visionary whose heart burned with grand ideas.

But it takes more than vision to turn un grand projet from idea to reality. Someone--somewhere--has got to pay for it. And that’s where De Lesseps excelled. Some say his most important gift was the ability to raise big bucks.

De Lesseps was a young diplomat in Cairo when he first dreamed of building a 100-mile canal across the Isthmus of Suez, which at the time glued together the continents of Africa and Asia and forced ships bound for the East to spend months at sea rounding the southern tip of Africa.

Two decades later, in 1865, he launched a building company and brashly decided that all the major Western powers should share the burden of buying the 400,000 shares, at the modern-day equivalent of $100 a share. The United States and Britain refused to buy even one, but France took more than half and Egypt most of the rest.

When the Suez Canal opened four years later, the books showed a cost of $100 million--more than twice the original estimate. But De Lesseps was a world celebrity. Even the doubting British were on his side then, honoring him as a freeman of the City of London and inviting him to an audience with Queen Victoria.

The world is full of great structures, and rich stories are told of the renowned builders. But before the first spadeful of earth is turned, money must be found. And, when the tab runs into the hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars, the enterprise often requires creative financing.

In ancient times, kings and emperors footed the bill, using their stocks of everything from gold to grain. But in the past two centuries, more innovative sources have been developed, from taxes and lotteries to municipal bond issues and deficit spending.

The Statue of Liberty began as an idea advanced at a dinner party in Paris in 1865, the same year De Lesseps formed his Suez Canal company. Edouard de Laboulaye, a historian and French politician, was looking for just the right gift for the United States to mark the 100th anniversary of American independence, and the sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, who was at the same dinner party, liked the idea.

The Franco-American Union raised the money with lotteries and dinner parties, and since 1886 the copper-and-iron statue has rested on an island in New York Harbor, a symbol to generations of immigrants.

A few years later, Alexandre Gustave Eiffel built his controversial steel tower on the Left Bank of the Seine River in Paris. The $1.5-million structure, constructed by 230 people, was roundly criticized by French intellectuals, who called it, among other things, “a gigantic and somber factory chimney,” “a tragic lamppost” and a “grand suppository.”

But it stayed and, within the first year, three-fourths of the cost was recovered from the tens of thousands of visitors who paid 2 francs to ride to the first level and 5 francs (about $1) to the top.

So successful has the project been that the government happily gave the Eiffel Tower a $28-million face lift in the 1980s.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Work Projects Administration used Depression-era deficit spending to pay for the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, the world’s largest concrete dam. But big-pocketed companies and bond issues have paid for most of the other large structures in modern times.

The Walt Disney Co., for example, spent $1 billion to build the Epcot Center, at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. Its geodesic ball, dubbed “Spaceship Earth,” and reportedly sketched on a table napkin by Walt himself in 1959, stands the equivalent of 18 stories high and is the largest privately financed construction project ever undertaken.

Lotteries in Australia raised most of the money for the Sydney Opera House, the distinctive structure with the shell-shaped roof. But the Danish architect’s plans proved difficult to implement, and the original cost estimate of $5 million rose to more than $75 million before the building opened in 1973.

Officials in New Orleans figure the Superdome, the world’s largest indoor stadium, built in 1971-75, was worth the cost, which ran to $270 million, including construction, operations, interest and loan repayments, in the first 10 years. One study says the Dome, which has hosted Super Bowls, Republican conventions and even Pope John Paul II, has brought $1 billion in business into the area.

Luckily for Ferdinand de Lesseps, he is fondly remembered for the grand success of the Suez Canal. But in 1879, at age 74, he launched what turned out to be the major blunder of his life.

When the Geographical Society in Paris decided to build a canal across Panama, then part of Colombia, a swell of public opinion put De Lesseps at the head of the enterprise. The aging diplomat set out foolishly to build the canal without locks, just as he had the Suez. After eight years, $287 million and the deaths of 20,000 workers, the French company gave up, having crossed just 19 miles of the 30-mile-wide isthmus.

Two decades would pass before Theodore Roosevelt resuscitated the project. Paying $10 million to the newly independent government of Panama, the United States completed the project--with locks.

And, since then, the canal has paid off handsomely. At its peak in the 1970s, 15,000 ships a year were paying a tariff to pass through the locks.