THE FOREST REPUBLICAN — AUGUST 19, 1896
The Chairman of the Tower Bridge Committee, London, is said to have once received a letter from a Belfast genius, with a proposal which completely puts in the shade any possible imaginable way of bridging or tunneling the English Channel. He declared that he had invented nothing less than a submersion railway and locomotive engine to cross the Atlantic. Much details as the provision of air for the passengers and coal for the engine appear to have been too trivial for him to condescend to consider, but doubtless in due course these trifles will he provided for. A very similar absurdity is the proposal of a French physician to form a syndicate—but what can that blessed business, a syndicate, not do—for the purpose of constructing a submarine railway along the bottom of the channel, the cars to be provided with air tubes reaching to the surface.
A more genuine engineering proposal is that for the postal tubes between France and England. Each tube is projected to have a diameter of three feet, to be suspended by steel cables at a height of 120 feet above the water. The cables are to be fixed to pillars reaching from the bottom to tho required height, erected at intervals of 800 yards apart. Miniature trains, each with a suitable load of mail matter, will run through the tubes. A bigger development of this postal tube is the idea of a Spaninrd to transmit letters in pneumatic tubes laid from South America to Europe, by which a letter deposited in the tube at Rio Janiero would arrive in Europe the same day.
From—The Forest Republican. (Tionesta, Pa.), 19 Aug. 1896. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
