Word: billecocq
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With those words French Secretary of State for Transportation Pierre Billecocq co-signed the historic 1973 treaty committing France and Britain to support the construction of a 32-mile train tunnel under the English Channel. Plans to link the two nations by "chunnel" had graced the drawing boards of imaginative engineers for nearly 200 years; French Engineer Albert Mathieu's 1802 design shows a coach-and-four trotting through a candlelit tube with ventilating pipes reaching above the waves. But whenever the 19th century pipe dream threatened to come true, Britain got skittish. A characteristically insular reaction came from...
...dispensation of Providence has cut her off by that streak of silver sea . . . partially from dangers, absolutely from the temptations which attend upon the local neighborhood of the continental nations." As for the French, it would still have been a long way to Tipperary, anyway. Unless, of course, Monsieur Billecocq was looking ahead to the even greater improbability of an Anglo-Irish chunnel...
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