Title: The Channel Tunnel Story by Michael R. Bonavia
Abstract: TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 701 coal industry, and the economic, social, and political effects of these advancements on the workers and on society. It is a gentle reminder that we must maintain a liberal perspective on technology and not allow ourselves to become oblivious to its application. Gay Bindocci Dr. Bindocci is an assistant professor in Mining Extension Service, College of Mineral and Energy Resources, at West Virginia University. She is currently working on annotated bibliographies on women in the American coal industry and women in technology. The Channel Tunnel Story. By Michael R. Bonavia. Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1987. Pp. 173; illustrations, appendixes, index. $24.95. Since the commencement of the tunnel’s construction in 1987, at least half a dozen books have purported to tell the history of the project to tunnel beneath the English Channel. Michael Bonavia’s slim volume constitutes an honest, informative contribution to “the full story” promised on the jacket. For seven crucial years, the author headed the channel tunnel-planning team of British Railways. He writes, therefore, with considerable knowledge of the 1967—74 period of railway research and preparation that culminated in the 1974-75 episode of actual construction. The early chapters cover the history of the scheme from the hrst known proposal—by Albert Mathieu-Favier in 1802—to the definitive revival in 1957 by the Channel Tunnel Study Group. In view of the welter of material extant on 19th-century schemes and initiatives, Bonavia tells the tale with rare and reliable discernment. For the more recent history, I suspect we must all await either publication or improved availability of records of the companies in the study group and of government archives. In its broad outlines, the chapter entitled “The Project Reborn” has got it right. There are a few understandable errors of detail, owing perhaps to uncritical acceptance of journalistic accounts that were more imaginative than factual. For instance, it is not accurate to aver (p. 60) that two French sisters living in the United States “experienced the misery of a really bad Channel crossing” and implored their husbands to build a tunnel! (A 1962 book by Joseph Gies, Adventure Underground, published in London by Robert Hale Ltd., carries a more precisely researched account of the formation of Technical Studies, Inc., the U.S. company that joined the Suez Canal Co. to establish the study group whose design, as Bonavia correctly tells us [p. 155], is essentially the project under construction today.) Curiously, the main outlines of the design that won government endorsement were set forth in a 1959 report to the study group by Bechtel Corporation, Brown and Root, and Morrison-Knudsen Co. The “full story” of the affair would have to mention the vital 702 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE contributions of Americans such as George W. Ball, a future under secretary of state, whose shrewd counsel led to employment of the traffic engineers on whose favorable assessment banking support largely depended. Even the “mousehole”—the single-tunnel proposal so ably described in Bonavia’s chapter 15—had a transatlantic history: this concept helped revive diplomatic contacts after the British government abandoned the project and halted construction in 1975. The book is excellent in its treatment of the influence of British in sular psychology on the decisions, at the highest level, affecting the “fixed link” with the Continent. On a financial level, it can be said that a project estimated to cost $100 million in 1959 is now destined to cost much more than fifty times that (without allowing for the effects of in flation). But viewing the matter more broadly, future historians may regard the decision to proceed with the channel tunnel as a harbinger of intercontinental tubes for trains racing at supersonic velocities— perhaps from Liverpool to Boston, as Jules Verne once speculated in a short story in The Strand Magazine. A proliferation of intercoastal as well as intercontinental “fixed links” will have a profound effect on ev eryday life on whatjay Forrester has called ”our tightly coupled planet.” This useful book, while not definitive, can help us understand the dynamics of an era when macroengineering, while not always wel comed, offers portentous options. Frank...
Publication Year: 1989
Publication Date: 1989-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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