Today, let's tunnel our way through history. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
So much technology expresses
basic human urges. We want to fly through the air,
communicate with each other, travel about. And I
remember, as a small boy, wanting to tunnel -- to
hollow a house out of a snow bank, to dig a cavern
in the back yard, to explore the huge sandstone
caves down along the Mississippi River.
Sure enough, we find that tunneling has drawn one
great engineer after another into startling
excesses of construction. The ancients were greater
tunnelers than most of us realize, and I don't mean
just catacombs and crypts. In 525 BC the Greeks cut
a six-foot square water supply tunnel, two-thirds
of a mile long, on the island of Samos. The Romans
connected two towns with the mile-long Posilipo
road-tunnel in 36 BC. It was thirty feet wide.
The great civil engineers of the nineteenth century
were drawn into really grand tunneling. Two new
kinds of transport created a need for tunnels.
Railways had to lie on almost flat ground, and so
did England's huge canal system. By the early 1800s
those canals had become England's primary
commercial trade network. Canals and railways, like
the Roman aqueducts before them, spawned heroic
tunneling through obstacles.
Take Marc Brunel's tunnel
under the Thames River:
Brunel was first to work in the really soft soil
under a river. He began the Thames Tunnel in 1825,
and it opened to foot traffic in 1843. During those
eighteen years Brunel, and his son Isambard Kingdom
Brunel, single-handedly invented the new technology
of soft-soil tunneling. They also suffered cave-ins
and personal injury. Workers died. In the end, the
Brunels bankrupted their company. The tunnel didn't
open to train traffic until 1865, forty years after
tunneling began. Yet it's still in use
today.
The star-crossed Hoosac Tunnel through a
mountain in western Massachusetts began as a canal
tunnel in 1851. It also turned into a rail tunnel
before it was finished in 1876. That 26-foot
square, five-mile-long tunnel consumed 199 lives,
and it almost bankrupted Massachusetts. But the
effort provided all kinds of new tunneling
technology. That one gave us the now-common
pneumatic drill.
Today those technologies are highly refined, and
remarkable tunneling goes on without fanfare. Who's
heard of the 85-mile-long Delaware Aqueduct
Tunnel, carrying water from the Catskill
Mountains to New York City? It was finished in
1942.
Tunnels have evoked amazing engineering. But when I
was a boy in cold Minnesota, my favorite tunnel was
more modest. It was the one in John Greenleaf Whittier's
poem, Snowbound. To get from the farmhouse
to the barn after a northern blizzard, Whittier
says,
We cut the solid whiteness through
And where the drift was deepest, made
A tunnel walled and overlaid
With dazzling crystal.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
See, e.g., Bobrick, B., Labyrinths of Iron:
Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and
War. New York: Henry Holt And Company, 1981/1986.
An extensive discussion of these matters is to be
found in the Proceedings of the Smithsonian
Institution's Symposium on its Tunneling
Exhibition, Down Under: Tunnels Past, Present,
and Future, at the National Museum of American
History, Saturday, October 23, 1993. (These
proceedings were still in press at this writing.)
Whittier, J. G., Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl,
New York: The Limited Editions Club, MCMXXX, see
especially, pp. 9-10.
This is a revised version of Episode 51. I say more about
tunneling as a metaphor in Episodes 58, 664,
849 and 855. For more technical looks at
tunneling, go to the Engines SEARCH function, using the word
"tunnel".
Representation of a medieval mining
tunnel in Agricola's De Re Metallica, 1556
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1998 by John H.
Lienhard.
