Napoleon’s engineer planned it in 1802. An attempt was made
in 1880 but abandoned. In June 1988, work began in earnest.
On this day in 1994, the Chunnel opened.
Connecting Britain and the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age, the Channel Tunnel links Folkestone, England, with Coquelles, France. It cut travel time between England and France to thirty-five minutes and made it possible to travel from London to Paris in two-and-a-half hours.
The Chunnel runs under water for twenty-three miles, making
it the world’s longest undersea tunnel. Millions of tons of earth were moved to
build the two rail tunnels—one for northbound and one for southbound
traffic—and one service tunnel.
England’s Queen Elizabeth II and French President Francois Mitterrand presided over the ceremony that officially opened the Chunnel. In 1996, the American Society of Civil Engineers identified it as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
John Donne famously observed, “No man is an island,
entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.” The Chunnel
validated his assertion, both geographically and practically.
At the peak of the construction, fifteen thousand people
were working on the Chunnel. It required the cooperation of two nations and
multilayered corporate structures. One person obviously could not have dug a
tunnel from England to Europe.
‘No man is an island, entire of itself’
As Helen Keller noted, “Alone we can do little;
together we can do so much.”
This fact contradicts the existential individualism our
culture so prizes, however. Postmodern relativism has convinced many that truth
is personal and subjective. There is no objective meaning to the world or to
our lives. We are each left to make of ourselves what we…
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