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The first schemefor the construction of a tunnel beneath the English Channel was put forward in France, in 1802, by a mining engineer named Albert Mathieu, who that year displayed plans for such a work in Paris, at the Palais du Luxembourg and the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines. Mathieu's tunnel, divided into two lengths totaling about eighteen and a half miles, was to be illuminated by oil lamps and ventilated at intervals by chimneys projecting above the sea into the open air, and its base was to be a paved way over which relays of horses would gallop, pulling coachloads of passengers and mail between France and England in a couple of hours or so of actual traveling time, with changes of horses being provided at an artificial island to be constructed in mid-Channel. Mathieu managed to have his project brought to the attention of Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul, who was sufficiently impressed with it to bring it to the attention of Charles James Fox during a personal meeting of the two men during the Peace of Amiens. Fox described it as "one of the great enterprises we can now undertake together." But the project got no further than this talking stage. In 1803, a Frenchman named de Mottray cameup with another proposal for creating a passage underneath the Channel. It consisted of laying down sections of a long, submerged tube on top of the sea bed between England and France, the sections being linked together in such a way as to form a watertight tunnel. However, Mottray's project petered out quickly, too, and the subject of an undersea connection between the two countries lay dormant until 1833, when it attracted the attention of a man named Aimé Thomé de Gamond, a twenty-six-year-old French civil engineer and hydrographer of visionary inclinations.

Thomé de Gamond was to turn into an incomparably zealous and persistent projector of ways in which people could cross between England and France without getting wet or seasick; he devoted himself to the problem for no less than thirty-four years, and had no hesitation in exposing himself to extraordinary physical dangers in the course of his researches. Unlike the plans of his predecessors, Thomé de Gamond's were based upon fairly systematic hydrographic or geological surveys of the Channel area. In 1833 he made the first of these surveys by taking marine soundings to establish a profile of the sea bottom in a line between Calais and Dover; on the basis of this, he drew up, in 1834, a plan for a submerged iron tube that was to be laid down in prefabricated sections on the bed of the Strait of Dover and then lined with masonry, the irregular bottom of the sea meanwhile having been prepared to receive the tube through the leveling action of a great battering-ram and rake operated from the surface by boat. By 1835, Thomé de Gamond modified this scheme by eliminating the prefabricated tube in favor of a movable hydrographic shield that would slowly advance across the Channel bottom, leaving a masonry tube behind it as it progressed. But the rate of progress, he calculated, would be slow; the work was to take thirty years to complete, or fifteen years if work began on two shoressimultaneously. Thomé de Gamond moved on to schemes for other ways of crossing the Channel, and between 1835 and 1836 he turned out, successively, detailed plans for five types of cross-Channel bridges. They included a granite-and-steel bridge of colossal proportions, and with arches "higher than the cupola of St. Paul's, London," which was to be built between Ness Corner Point and Calais; a flat-bottomed steam-driven concrete-and-stone ferryboat, of such size as to constitute "a true floating island," which would travel between two great piers each jutting out five miles into the Channel between Ness Corner Point and Cap Blanc-Nez; and a massive artificial isthmus of stone, which would stretch from Cap Gris-Nez to Dover and block the neck of the English Channel except for three transverse cuttings spanned by movable bridges, which Thomé de Gamond allowed across his work for the passage of ships. Thomé de Gamond was particularly fond of his isthmus scheme. He traveled to London and there promoted it vigorously among interested Englishmen during the Universal Exhibition of 1851, but he reluctantly abandoned it because of objections to its high estimated cost of £33,600,000 and to what he described as "the obstinate resistance of mariners, who objected to their being obliged to ply their ships through the narrow channels."

Such exasperating objections to joining England and France above water sent Thomé de Gamond back to the idea of doing the job under the sea, and between 1842 and 1855 he made various energetic explorations of the Channel area in an attempt to determine the feasibility of driving a tunnel through the rock formations under the Strait. Geological conditions existing in the middle of the Strait were, up to that time, almost entirely a matter of surmise, based on observations made on the British and French sides of the Channel, and in the process of finding out more about them,Thomé de Gamond decided to descend in person to the bottom of the Channel to collect geological specimens. In 1855, at the age of forty-eight, he had the hardihood to make a number of such descents, unencumbered by diving equipment, in the middle of the Strait. Naked except for wrappings that he wound about his head to keep in place pads of buttered lint he had plastered over his ears, to protect them from high water pressure, he would plunge to the bottom of the Channel, weighted down by bags of flints and trailing a long safety line attached to his body, and a red distress line attached to his left arm, from a rowboat occupied also by a Channel pilot, a young assistant, and his own daughter, who went along to keep watch over him. On the deepest of these descents, at a point off Folkestone, Thomé de Gamond, having put a spoonful of olive oil into his mouth as a lubricant that would allow him to expel air from his lungs without permitting water at high pressure to force its way in, dived down weighted by four bags of flints weighing a total of 180 pounds. About his waist he wore a belt of ten inflated pig's bladders, which were to pull him rapidly to the surface after he had scooped up his geological specimen from the Channel bed and released his ballast, and, using this system, he actually touched bottom at a depth of between 99 and 108 feet. His ascent from this particular dive was not unremarkable, either; in an account of it, he wrote that just after he had left the bottom of the Channel with a sample of clay

... I was attacked by voracious fish, which seized me by the legs and arms. One of them bit me on the chin, and would at the same time have attacked my throat if it had not been preserved by a thick handkerchief.... I was fortunate enough not to open my mouth, and I reappeared on top of the water after being immersedfifty-two seconds. My men saw one of the monsters which had assailed me, and which did not leave me until I had reached the surface. They were conger eels.

Thomé de Gamond's geological observations, although they were certainly sketchy by later standards, were enough to convince him of the feasibility of a mined tunnel under the Channel, and in 1856 he drew up plans for such a work. This was to be a stone affair containing a double set of railroad tracks. It was to stretch twenty-one miles, from Cap Gris-Nez to Eastwear Point, and from these places was to connect, by more than nine miles at each end of sloping access tunnels, with the French and British railway systems. The junctions of the sloping access tunnels and the main tunnel itself were to be marked by wide shafts, about three hundred feet deep, at the bottom of which travelers would encounter the frontier stations of each nation. The line of the main tunnel was to be marked above the surface by a series of twelve small artificial islands made of stone. These were to be surmounted with lighthouses and were to contain ventilating shafts connecting with the tunnel. Thomé de Gamond prudently provided the ventilation shafts in his plans with sea valves, so that in case of war between England and France each nation would have the opportunity of flooding the tunnel on short notice. The tunnel was designed to cross the northern tip of the Varne, a narrow, submerged shelf that lies parallel to the English coast about ten miles off Folkestone, and so close to the surface that at low tide it is only about fifteen feet under water at its highest point. Thomé de Gamond planned to raise the Varne above water level, thus converting it into an artificial island, by building it up with rocks and earth brought to the spot in ships. Through this earth, engineers would dig a great shaft downto the level of the tunnel, so that the horizontal mining of the tunnel as a whole could be carried on from four working faces simultaneously, instead of only two. The great shaft was also to serve as a means of ventilating the tunnel and communicating with it from the outside, and around its apex Thomé de Gamond planned, with a characteristically grand flourish, an international port called the Étoile de Varne, which was to have four outer quays and an interior harbor, as well as amenities such as living quarters for personnel and a first-class lighthouse. As for the shaft leading down to the railway tunnel, according to alternate versions of Thomé de Gamond's plan, it was to be at least 350 feet—and possibly as much as 984 feet—in diameter, and 147 feet deep; and, according to a contemporary account in the Paris newspaperLa Patrie, "an open station [would be] formed as spacious as the court of the Louvre, where travelers might halt to take air after running a quarter of an hour under the bottom of the Strait."

From the bottom of this deep station, trains might also ascend by means of gently spiraling ramps to the surface of the Étoile de Varne,La Patriereported. The newspaper went on to invite its readers to contemplate the panorama at sea level:

Imagine a train full of travelers, after having run for fifteen minutes in the bowels of the earth through a splendidly lighted tunnel, halting suddenly under the sky, and then ascending to the quays of this island. The island, rising in mid-sea, is furnished with solid constructions, spacious quays garnished with the ships of all nations; some bound for the Baltic or the Mediterranean, others arriving from America or India. In the distance to the North, her silvercliffs extending to the North, reflected in the sun, is white Albion, once separated from all the world, now become the British Peninsula. To the South ... is the land of France.... Those white sails spread in the midst of the Straits are the fishing vessels of the two nations.... Those rapid trains which whistle at the bottom of the subterranean station are from London or Paris in three or four hours.

In the spring of 1856, Thomé de Gamond obtained an audience with Napoleon III and expounded his latest plan to him. The Emperor reacted with interest and told the engineer that he would have a scientific commission look into the matter "as far as our present state of science allows." The commission found itself favorable to the idea of the work in general but lacking a good deal of necessary technical information, and it suggested that some sort of preliminary agreement between the British and French Governments on the desirability of the tunnel ought to be reached before a full technical survey was made. Encouraged by the way things seemed to be going, Thomé de Gamond set about promoting his scheme more energetically than ever. He obtained a promise of collaboration from three of Britain's most eminent engineers—Robert Stephenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and Joseph Locke—and in 1858 he traveled to London to advance the cause of the tunnel among prominent people and to promote it in the press. Leading journals were receptive to the idea. An article in theIllustrated London Newsreferred to the proposed tunnel as "this great line of junction," and said that it would put an end to the commercial isolation that England was being faced with by the creation on the Continent of a newly unified railway system that was making it possible to ship goods from Central to Western Europewithout breaking bulk. The article added that the creation of the tunnel

... would still preserve for this country for the future that maritime isolation which formed its strength throughout the past; for the situation of the tunnel beneath the bed of the sea would enable the government on either coast, in case of war, as a means of defense, to inundate it immediately.... According to the calculations of the engineer, the tunnel might be completely filled with water in the course of an hour, and afterwards three days would be required, with the mutual consent of the two Governments, to draw off the water, and reestablish the traffic.

Thomé de Gamond's visit to England was climaxed by a couple of interviews on the subject of the Channel tunnel that he obtained with Prince Albert, who supported the idea with considerable enthusiasm and even took up the matter in private with Queen Victoria. The Queen, who was known to suffer dreadfully from seasickness, told Albert, who relayed the message to Thomé de Gamond, "You may tell the French engineer that if he can accomplish it, I will give him my blessing in my own name and in the name of all the ladies of England." However, in a discussion Thomé de Gamond had earlier had with Her Majesty's Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who was present at one of the engineer's interviews with Albert, the idea of the tunnel was not so well received. The engineer found Palmerston "rather close" on the subject. "What! You pretend to ask us to contribute to a work the object of which is to shorten a distance which we find already too short!" Thomé de Gamond quoted him as exclaiming when the tunnel project was mentioned. And, accordingto an account by the engineer, when Albert, in the presence of both men, spoke favorably of the benefits to England of a passage under the Channel, Lord Palmerston "without losing that perfectly courteous tone which was habitual with him" remarked to the Prince Consort, "You would think quite differently if you had been born on this island."

While Thomé de Gamond was occupied with his submarine-crossing projects, other people were producing their own particular tunnel schemes. Most of them seem to have been for submerged tubes, either laid down directly on the sea bed or raised above its irregularities by vertical columns to form a sort of underwater elevated railway. Perhaps the most ornamental of these various plans was drawn up by a Frenchman named Hector Horeau, in 1851. It called for a prefabricated iron tube containing a railway to be laid across the Channel bed along such judiciously inclined planes as to allow his carriages passage through them without their having to be drawn by smoke-bellowing locomotives—a suffocatingly real problem that most early Channel-tunnel designers, including, apparently, Thomé de Gamond, pretty well ignored. The slope given to Horeau's underground railway was to enable the carriages to glide down under the Channel from one shoreline with such wonderful momentum as to bring them to a point not far from the other, the carriages being towed the rest of the way up by cables attached to steam winches operated from outside the tunnel exit. The tunnel itself would be lighted by gas flames and, in daytime, by thick glass skylights that would admit natural light filtering down through the sea. The line of the tube was to be marked, across the surface of the Channel, by great floating conical structures resembling pennanted pavilions in some medieval tapestry. The pavilions were to be held in place by strong cables anchored to the Channel bottom; they were also to contain marine warning beacons. This project never got under the ground.

In 1858, an attempt to assassinate Napoleon III brought France into the Italian war against Austria, and when word spread in France that the assassin's bombs had been made in Birmingham, a chill developed between the French and British Governments. This led to a wave of fear in England that another Napoleon might try a cross-Channel invasion. All this froze out Thomé de Gamond's tunnel-promoting for several years. He did not try again until 1867, when he exhibited a set of revised plans for his Varne tunnel at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. In doing so he concluded that he had pushed the cause of the tunnel about to the limit of his personal powers. Thirty-five years of work devoted to the problem had cost him a moderate personal fortune, and he was obliged to note in presenting his plan that "the work must now be undertaken by collective minds well versed in the physiology of rocks and the workings of subterranean deposits." After that, Thomé de Gamond retired into the background, squeezed out, it may be, by other tunnel promoters. In 1875, an article in the LondonTimesthat mentioned his name in passing reported that he was "living in humble circumstances, his daughter supporting him by giving lessons on the piano." He died in the following year.

Although Thomé de Gamond's revised plan of 1867 came to nothing in itself, it did cause renewed talk about a Channel tunnel. The new spirit of free trade was favorable to it among Europeans, and everybody was being greatly impressed with reports of the striking progress on various great European engineering projects of the time that promised closer communication between nations—the successful cutting of the Isthmus of Suez, the near completion of the 8.1-mile-long Mount Cenis rail tunnel, and the opening, only a few years previously, of the 9.3-mile-long St. Gotthard Tunnel, for example. Hardly any great natural physical barriers between neighboring nations seemed beyond the ability of the greatnineteenth-century engineers to bridge or breach, and to many people it appeared logical enough that the barrier of the Dover Strait should have its place on the engineers' list of conquests. In this generally propitious atmosphere, an Englishman named William Low took up where Thomé de Gamond left off. Shortly after the Universal Exhibition, Low came up with a Channel tunnel scheme based principally upon his own considerable experience as an engineer in charge of coal mines in Wales. Low proposed the creation of a pair of twin tunnels, each containing a single railway track, and interconnected at intervals by short cross-passages. The idea was a technically striking one, for it aimed at making the tunnels, in effect, self-ventilating by making use of the action of a train entering a tunnel to push air in front of it and draw fresh air in behind itself. According to Low's scheme, this sort of piston action, repeated on a big scale by the constant passage of trains bound in opposite directions in the two tunnels, was supposed to keep air moving along each of the tunnels and between them through the cross-passages in such a way as to allow for its steady replenishment through the length of the tunnels. With modifications, Low's concept of a double self-ventilating tunnel forms the basis for the plan most seriously advanced by the Channel Tunnel Study Group in 1960.

After showing his plans to Thomé de Gamond, who approved of them, Low obtained the collaboration of two other Victorian engineers—Sir John Hawkshaw, who in 1865 and 1866 had had a number of test borings made by a geologist named Hartsink Day in the bed of the Channel in the areas between St. Margaret's Bay, just east of Dover, and Sangatte, just north-east of Calais, and had become convinced that a Channel tunnel was a practical possibility in geological terms; and Sir James Brunlees, an engineer who had helped build the Suez Canal. In 1867, an Anglo-French committee ofChannel-tunnel promoters submitted a scheme for a Channel tunnel based on Low's plan to a commission of engineers under Napoleon III, and the promoters asked for an official concession to build the tunnel. The members of the commission were unanimous in regarding the scheme as a workable one, although they balked at an accompanying request of the promoters that the British and French Governments each guarantee interest on a million sterling, which would be raised privately, to help get the project under way, and took no action. But apart from the question of money the promoters were encouraged. In 1870 they persuaded the French Government officially to ask the British Government what support it would be willing to give to the proposed construction of a Channel railway tunnel. Consideration of the question in Whitehall got sidetracked for a while by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in the same year, but in 1872, after further diplomatic enquiries by the French Government, the British Government eventually replied that it found no objection "in principle" to a Channel tunnel, provided it was not asked to put up money or guarantee of any kind in connection with it and provided that ownership of the tunnel would not be a perpetual private monopoly. In the same year, a Channel Tunnel Company was chartered in England, with Lord Richard Grosvenor, chairman of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, at its head, and with Hawkshaw, Low, and Brunlees as its engineers. The tunnel envisioned by the company would stretch from Dover to Sangatte, and its cost, including thirty-three miles of railway that would connect on the English side with the London, Chatham & Dover and the South-Eastern Railways, and on the French side with the Chemin de Fer du Nord, would be £10,000,000. Three years later, the English company sought and obtained from Parliament temporary powers to buy up private land at St. Margaret's Bay, in Kent, for the purpose of going ahead withexperimental tunneling work there. At the same time, a newly formed French Channel Tunnel Company backed by the House of Rothschild and headed by an engineer named Michel Chevalier obtained by act of the French legislature permission from the French Government to start work on a tunnel from the French side at an undetermined point between Boulogne and Calais, and a concession to operate the French section of the tunnel for ninety-nine years. Thecahier des chargesof the French tunnel bill dealt in considerable detail with the terms under which the completed tunnel was to be run, down to providing a full table of tariffs for the under-Channel railroad. Thus, a first-class passenger riding through the tunnel in an enclosed carriage furnished with windows would be charged fifty centimes per kilometre. Freight rates were established for such categories as furniture, silks, wine, oysters, fresh fish, oxen, cows, pigs, goats, and horse-drawn carriages with or without passengers inside.

The greatest uncertainty facing the two companies, now that they had the power to start digging toward each other's working sites, consisted of their lack of foreknowledge of geological obstacles they might encounter in the rock masses lying between the two shores at the neck of the Channel. However, the companies' engineers had substantial reasons for believing that, in general, the region and stratum into which they planned to take the tunnel were peculiarly suited to their purpose. Their belief was based on a rough reconstruction—a far more detailed reconstruction is available nowadays, of course—of various geological events occurring in the area before there ever was a Channel. A hundred million years ago, in the Upper Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic era, a great part of southern England, which had been connected at its easterly end with the Continental land mass, was inundated, along with much of Western Europe, by the ancient Southern Sea. As it lay submerged, this sea-washedland accumulated on its surface, over a period of ten million years, layers of white or whitish mud about nine hundred feet thick and composed principally of the microscopic skeletons of plankton and tiny shells. Eventually the mud converted itself into rock. Then, for another forty million years, at just the point where the neck of the Dover Strait now is, very gentle earth movements raised the level of this rock to form a bar-shaped island some forty miles long. By Eocene times this Wealden Island, stretching westward across the Calais-Dover area, actually seems to have been the only bit of solid ground standing out in a seascape of a Western Europe inundated by the Eocene sea. When most of France and southern England reappeared above the surface, in Miocene times, this island welded them together; later, in the ice age, the Channel isthmus disappeared and emerged again four times with the rise and fall of the sea caused by the alternate thawing and refreezing of the northern icecap. When each sequence of the ice age ended, the land bridge remained, high and dry as ever, and it was over this isthmus that paleolithic man shambled across from the Continent, in the trail of rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, giant boars, and other great beasts whose fossilized bones have been found in the Wealden area.

Encroaching seas made a channel through the isthmus and cut the Bronze Age descendants of this breed of men off from the Continent about six thousand years ago. Then fierce tidal currents coursing between the North Sea and the Atlantic widened the breach still further until, as recently as four thousand years ago (or only about a couple of thousand years before Caesar's legions invaded Britain by boat), the sea wore away the rock of the isthmus to approximately the present width of the Strait, leaving exposed high at each side the eroded rock walls, formerly the whitish mudbank of Cretaceous times—now the white chalk cliffs of the Doverand Calais areas. Providentially for the later purposes of Channel tunnelers, however, the seas that divided England from the Continent also left behind them a thin remnant of the old land connection in the form of certain chalk layers that still stretched in gentle folds across the bottom of the Strait, and it was through this area of remaining chalk that the Victorian engineers planned to drive their tunnel headings. Even more providentially, they had the opportunity of extending their headings under the Channel through a substratum of chalk almost ideal for tunneling purposes, known as the Lower Chalk. Unlike the two layers of cretaceous rock that lie above it—the white Upper Chalk and the whitish Middle Chalk, both of which are flint-laden, heavily fissured, and water-bearing, and consequently almost impossible to tunnel in for any distance—the Lower Chalk (it is grayish in color) is virtually flint-free and nearly impermeable to water, especially in the lower parts of the stratum, where it is mixed with clay; at the same time it is stable, generally free of fissures, and easy to work. From the coastline between Folkestone and South Foreland, north-east of Dover, where its upper level is visible in the cliffs, the Lower Chalk dips gently down into the Strait in a north-easterly direction and disappears under an outcropping Middle Chalk, and emerges again on the French side between Calais and Cap Blanc-Nez. Given this knowledge and their knowledge of the state of Lower Chalk beds on land areas, the Victorian engineers were confident that the ribbon of Lower Chalk extending under the Strait would turn out to be a continuous one. To put this view to a further test, the French Channel Tunnel Company, in 1875, commissioned a team of eminent geologists and hydrographers to make a more detailed survey of the area than had yet been attempted. In 1875 and 1876 the surveyors made 7,700 soundings and took 3,267 geological samples from the bed of the Strait and concluded from their studies that, except for a couple of localities near each shoreline, which a tunnel could avoid, the Lower Chalk indeed showed every sign of stretching without interruption or fault from shore to shore. However, when thesestudies were completed, Lord Grosvenor's Channel Tunnel Company did not find itself in a position to do much about them. The company was having trouble raising money, and its temporary power to acquire land at St. Margaret's Bay for experimental workings had lapsed without the promoters ever having used it. William Low, who had left the company in 1873 after disagreements with Hawkshaw on technical matters—Low had come to believe, for one thing, that the terrain around St. Margaret's Bay was unsuitable as a starting place for a channel tunnel—had become the chief engineering consultant of a rival Channel-tunnel outfit that called itself the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company. But the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company wasn't getting anywhere, either. It remained for a third English company, headed by a railway magnate named Sir Edward Watkin, to push the Channel-tunnel scheme into its next phase, which turned out to be the most tumultuous one in all its history.

M.P.'s Bride."Oh! William dear—if you are—a Liberal—do bring in a Bill—next Session—for that Underground Tunnel!!"This cartoon depicting the horrors of the Channel crossing originallyappeared inPunchin 1869. In 1961, 92 years later,Punchfound itas timely as ever.

M.P.'s Bride."Oh! William dear—if you are—a Liberal—do bring in a Bill—next Session—for that Underground Tunnel!!"

This cartoon depicting the horrors of the Channel crossing originallyappeared inPunchin 1869. In 1961, 92 years later,Punchfound itas timely as ever.

THE GREATTUNNEL SCHEMERSAimé Thomé de Gamond

THE GREATTUNNEL SCHEMERS

Aimé Thomé de Gamond

Sir Edward Watkin

THE GREAT ANTI-TUNNELERLt.-Gen. Sir Garnet Wolseley, 1882

THE GREAT ANTI-TUNNELER

Lt.-Gen. Sir Garnet Wolseley, 1882

Sir Garnet Wolseley's fears of a French invasion through the tunnel asseen in the United States in 1882 byPuck.

Hector Horeau's tunnel scheme of 1851 involved layingdown a prefabricated submerged tube on the Channel bottom.The pavilions are ventilating stations.

Thomé de Gamond's plan in 1856 for a Channel tunnel by way of theVarne, which would be built up into an international harbor.

The Channel tunnel workings at Shakespeare Cliff in 1882.The entrance is by the smokestack near the twin portals,which are unconnected with the tunnel workings.

Diagram of the tunnel workings at Shakespeare Cliff in 1882.The Admiralty Pier at Dover is in the distance.

TUNNEL PARTIES IN THE 1880sEverybody who was anybody went down into the tunnel to inspect the new undersea road to France.

TUNNEL PARTIES IN THE 1880s

Everybody who was anybody went down into the tunnel to inspect the new undersea road to France.

1. Guests preparing for the descent.2. Being lowered 163 feet below the surface to the gallery.3. Champagne party in the tunnel.

4. Inspecting the Beaumont tunneling machine as it bores toward France.5. Tunnel oratory at champagne lunch at Dover.

An early Napoleonic vision of the invasion of Englandby air, sea, and a Channel tunnel.

Sir Edward Watkin, at the sluice-gates, vanquishes the French invadersmarching on England through the tunnel. A London newspaper cartoon at the timeof the great tunnel controversy.

THREE SOLUTIONS TO THE INVASION PROBLEMHow to have a tunnel and still keep England safe from invasionis a problem that has attracted the attention of artists since the eighties.

THREE SOLUTIONS TO THE INVASION PROBLEM

How to have a tunnel and still keep England safe from invasionis a problem that has attracted the attention of artists since the eighties.

TheIllustrated London News, 1882, shows how, at the first sign of invasion, the tunnelcould be bombarded from the Admiralty Pier at Dover, from the Dover fortifications,and from positions offshore.

Viaduct for the French tunnel entrance proposed in 1906. At signs of French intentions toinvade, the British fleet would sail up and blow this viaduct to smithereens, thus blockingthe tunnel from the French end.

David Langdon inParis Match, 1960, suggests another way of handling the invasion problem.

PROPOSED METHOD OF CONSTRUCTING A SUBMERGED TUBEUNDER THE CHANNELThe illustration shows the proposed laying of a "cut and cover"prefabricated tunnel on the Channel bottom with the aid of aDeLong self-elevating construction platform.

PROPOSED METHOD OF CONSTRUCTING A SUBMERGED TUBEUNDER THE CHANNEL

The illustration shows the proposed laying of a "cut and cover"prefabricated tunnel on the Channel bottom with the aid of aDeLong self-elevating construction platform.

Artist's impression of the boring of the double Channel tunnel,with its extra service tunnel and cross-passages, as proposed by the ChannelTunnel Study Group in 1960.

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