JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2041

Full and massive and creative engineering dreams are the stuff of rich possibilities and the created demands of the created future.  Sometimes they lead to the wonderful and essential, and sometimes they don’t–pieces of these ideas may go places and lead full lives, but the overall big picture may have been just a little (or a lot) too big.  The later may be the case for these ideas below–they include outlines for a trans-Atlantic ship tunnel (1927), the Cotherell/Eads 130-mile overland railway transport for transit across the Tehuantepec isthmus in Nicaragua, monumental masonry bridges supporting a car in which a battleship was driven, and others. 

[Cross-section of the Atlantic Tunnel, found in Luigi Motta, Il tunnel sottomarino, published in Milan in 1927, and found while reading in the magnificent Dictionary of Imaginary Places by Alberto Mangule and Gianni Gudalupi/]

This is the story of a mostly-submarine adventure, due to the work of  a French engineer named Adrien Geant, who constructed a mostly-floating 4,700 km tunnel connecting Europe to America.  Problems ensue and the tunnel fails, the resulting adventure of the survivors taking them to Atlanteja, which was a lost city constructed by the survivors of the lost city of Atlantis.  Anyway, it is an interesting story of engineering, as the ideas behind the design of the tunnel were pretty good.  The book was written by Luigi Motta (1881-1955), a man of active mind who wrote over 100 adventure/sci-fi stories.