TUNNELLING TO THE NORTH POLE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2273, 23 September 1897, Page 50

TUNNELLING TO THE NORTH POLE.

Astounding Engineering feats.

The engineer's greatest enemies are time and money. If both were as easy to grapple with as Nature the things he could do on this earth could hardly be imagined.

An Atlantic tunnel I Impossible? Yes, i£ we cannot raise the money ; but possible if we can. A prominent member of the London Institute of Mechanical Ecglneers has been busy preparing plans for boring a tunnel from Valentia. iv Ireland, to Cape Cod, near Boston, U.S.A, "regardless of expense." "I don't say it will be done," said this gentleman to the writer, " but it can be done with money. The distance between Valentia and Cspe Cod by tunnel would be some mile* less than the sea route, reckoning the curvature of the earth. The shafts at either end would therefore be two miles in depth, and the tunnel itself would be cut on an incline, the bottom of wnich would be, in midAtlantic, about four and a-half miles below the level of the sea. "The greatest difficulty to be overcome would be the air supply ; bat by means of revolving fans placed ia shafts at points near the land where the water is shallow, suffocation could be prevented. There are many engineers who would undertake the construction of an Atlantic tunnel, granted time asd money. Time, 200 years ; money, £350.000,000.

" If every nation in the world," continued my informant, " were to subscribe £12,000,000 towards constructing a tunnel through 500 Wiles of snow and ice, engineers could bore

with much less difficulty to the North Pole, thongh they would be little the wiser when they got there. The snow and ice would not be crashed away by machine, but melted, and tha water drained off through pipes into the sea.

" Bat we advooate the construction of something more useful to man kind than tha tunnel to the North Pole. Nothing less than a million of money would be required to build a ship, wedge-shaped, with 35 immense fcur-bladed screwa at the thick end or stern. The inventor, a friend o£ mine, ia a Canadian, and he told me that, according to his model — which, by the way, cost £200 — the ship would travel at laatt 45 knots an hour.

"Twenty years ago a speed of GO miles an hour on railways was an everyday accomplishment, but 30 knotß an hour on sea was deemed impossible. Yet acceleration of speed on sea has made much more rapid progress than that of speed on land, and people often ask why don't we build faster railway engines? So we conld, if we could also ensure safety. If the railway companies care to go to the expense of widening all their rails, bridges, tunnels, stations, &'.*., we could construct a locomotive three tim-is the Bizs of the largest now running, which would travel at the rate of 170 miles per hour.

" The old atmospheric railway that used to run from London to Croydon would never have been abandoned if it had cot been for the want of money ; otherwise it would today bear about the same relation in point of speed to the' locomotive as the locomotive bears to the stage c^acb. Ten million sterliDg would be enough to baild a pneumatic tube from. London to Manchester — a tube ia which we could be whizz :d iff to our destination, not in a few hours, but in a few minutes.

" Just about the same amount of money would pay engineers to fit every house in Great Britain with ssa-water, hot or cold, aud half that sum would be ample to sink taps in stormy places like the Goodwin Sa.ndf, wh<>re they could be turned on from the land, and oil allowed to run on the troubled waters. What may seem to you to be the wildest flight of the imagination is one of the things that conld be accomplished with less difficulty and at a smaller cost. Dif-pereing the clouds so that rain thculd not fall from them has already been done abroad. Hug;o mortars, almost as destructive as nitro-glycerine bombs, are throwa some thousands of feet in the air, which burst when surrounded by the dense atmosphere and break up the clouds so that they lose their strength."