Today in 1843, the opening of the Thames Tunnel in London, the first tunnel of its kind, and one inspired by a mollusc known as a shipworm.
The engineer who led the project was Marc Brunel, a French national who had settled in London after fleeing his country’s revolution.
At that time London had a big problem: the city couldn’t easily get all the goods coming into its port to people who lived on the other side of the River Thames.
London Bridge was seeing one traffic jam after another.
And building another bridge would have hurt shipping.
Brunel came up with a different kind of solution after spotting a piece of wood that had been infested with shipworms.
As they ate through the wood, they lined their little tunnels with a kind of protective coating, so predators couldn’t get to them.
So he decided to build a tunnel under the river, and to avoid the kinds of problems other would-be tunnelers had encountered, he used a big metal protective coating for his digging team called a tunneling shield.
An iron frame braced the area above and around the crew; there was also a set of wooden planks.
One worker would pull out one plank, dig out the open space ahead and then put the plank back in place so the next worker could do the same in another park of the plank grid.
Once they’d all had a turn, the whole apparatus could move forward, and masons would line the area behind them with brick.
It was pretty effective but extremely slow work: after almost two decades the tunnel was ready, and by that point it was perhaps best known as a place where people without homes could pay a small toll to sleep.
They nicknamed it the Hades Hotel.
Still, Brunel had proven that you could build a tunnel under a river.
And the Thames Tunnel eventually found its place as a part of London’s rail system.
Today in 2024, a story from Cheshire Live about a woman who came to the local animal hospital with a baby hedgehog in need of rescuing.
Or at least that’s what she thought: when the professionals took a look they found it was not a hedge at all, but the pom pom from the top of a winter hat.
But hey, hats’ off for the effort!
The Epic Struggle to Tunnel Under the Thames (Smithsonian)
Woman mistakes bobble for baby hedgehog and rushes it to Cheshire animal hospital (Cheshire Live)
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