Today, we try to cross the English Channel. 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.
For thousands of years the
English Channel has been a barrier that's
tantalized us. That neck of cold, forbidding waters
between England and France is, at one point, as
little as twenty-one miles wide. We hear
Shakespeare thinking aloud about Henry the Fifth's
army as they prepare to cross the Channel to make
war on France:
And thence to France shall we convey you
And bring you back, charming the narrow sea,
to give you gentle pass.
In fact, crossing that cold, treacherous neck of
sea has seldom been a gentle pass. It's never been
easy to charm those waters.
So it's not surprising that people have looked at
many means for crossing it. The first time the
channel yielded to anything other than a boat was
in 1785. The French balloonist Blanchard crossed it soon after
the first balloon ascent in Paris.
The most primitive means for crossing the Channel,
of course, is swimming. And it seems odd that we
have no records of anyone trying to swim the
Channel before 1872 -- a century after it
was flown. The first person to succeed was
Matthew Webb, who swam it three years later, in
1875. It took him twenty-two hours.
Like ballooning, heavier-than-air flight was
immediately drawn to the Channel. In 1908 the
London Daily Mail offered a £1000
prize for the first Channel flight. That was only
five years after the Wright Brothers and two years
after the first European flight. The French flyer
Louis Bleriot won the
prize a year later.
Then, in 1979, a strange 75-pound airplane called
the Gossamer Albatross won the
£100,000 Kremer prize for the first
human-powered airplane to fly the Channel. For
three hours, pilot Bryan Allen pedaled its
propeller and flew it into the record books.
Most recently, we've crossed the English Channel
from below by tunneling under it. But that grand
engineering feat is really old wine in a new skin.
The idea goes all the way back to the time of
Napoleon. The English and French actually began a
tunnel as long ago as 1881, but the British aborted
it for fear it could serve the French as an
invasion route. The British started another tunnel
in the late 1970s, but they had to abandon it for
lack of money.
In the end, England and France put their fear of
one another aside and completed a joint Channel
Tunnel in 1994. To build that Chunnel, as it's
called, they drilled two main train tunnels, with a
smaller access tunnel between them, through the
chalk marl beneath the water. The French drilled
their tunnels out from Calais, the British from
Folkestone. And they joined in the middle.
So what's left? I suppose the next project will be
a bridge, not that it strikes me as practical -- it
just seems like the kind of challenge that
engineers won't be able to resist indefinitely.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
For more on the matter of tunneling, see the
proceedings of the Smithsonian Institution's
symposium on its tunneling exhibition, Down Under:
Tunnels Past, Present, and Future, National
Museum of American History, Saturday, October 23,
1993. (The proceedings are still in press at this
This is a revised version of Episode 58. I say more about
tunneling as a metaphor in Episodes 51, 664,
849 and 855. For a more technical look at
tunneling, try the Engines SEARCH function, using
the word "tunnel".
For more on the Chunnel, see the website,
Photo of Louis Bleriot's XI airplane flying
the English Channel on July 25, 1909
Bleriot's Airplane where it landed near Calais
A contemporary artist's flawed impression
of the Jean-Pierre Blanchard/John Jeffries
Channel crossing in 1785.
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