Slide-Rule Dreams

Engineers are probably more grandiose in their dreams than most major poets or opium smokers. Since that ambitious and ill-fated building project, the Tower of Babel, they have thought up endless projects to improve the universe, and an astonishing number of them have become reality, from the pyramids to Grand Coulee Dam. From those that have not yet come true, popular-science Writer Willy Ley has compiled a new book, Engineers' Dreams (Viking; $3.50). In it, he tells some of the projects modern engineers might accomplish--if they could get rid of political, social and economic "ifs."

The Tunnel. Ley leads off with the tunnel under the English Channel. The first proposal (1802) was ahead of its time, but practical. Work began at both ends in about 1880. The English pilot tunnel (6,500 ft. long) had electric lights and hand-drawn cars in which Gladstone, Disraeli and Queen Victoria rode on sightseeing trips. Then the British War Office, aided by the London Times, killed the channel tunnel. England, they warned, would be an island no longer; some enemy might grab the tunnel and pour troops through it. By 1884 the British stopped digging, and nothing has been done since then, although there is no doubt about the tunnel's feasibility. The two pilot tunnels are still there, each of them watched by a single man and as dry as when the good

Queen made her inspection more than 70 years ago.

Volcanic Heat. A more colorful project is getting power out of "tamed volcanoes." Ley tells how the Italians have used volcanic steam in Tuscany for more than a century. New Zealand has recently drilled for steam and has already found enough of it to supply power for a city of 200,000 people. In many parts of the world are places where the earth's crust grows hot a few hundred feet below the surface. It would not take much brains or money, Ley thinks, to harness this energy.

Second Nile. Ley does not bother with dams across ordinary rivers; he picks the Congo, .which drains much of Africa's rain forest through a steep-sided valley near its mouth. A dam at this point, says Ley, would form a lake big enough to cover California, Nevada and Oregon. The water would flow northward to fill an even bigger lake (the Chad Sea) in the Sahara, and eventually drain into the Mediterranean. The lakes would presumably improve the climate of much of Africa, and boats would reach the continent's heart through the "second Nile."

Damned Sea. Ley also likes hydraulic engineering that works in reverse. If the Red Sea, for instance, were dammed at the Strait of Bab El Mandeb (its southern extremity) and the Suez Canal were closed, its level would fall through evaporation at a rate of more than 12 ft. a year. After the sea had sunk 50 ft., the water of the Indian Ocean, flowing into it through turbines, would generate as much electricity per day as 200,000 tons of coal. The biggest such project is damming the Mediterranean at the Strait of Gibraltar. In a century its level would fall 330 ft., exposing 90,000 square miles of new land. Inflow from the Atlantic could then generate power, but other effects might be even more interesting. Ley thinks that the cold water that now flows out of the bottom of the Strait of Gibraltar keeps the Gulf Stream away from the coast of France. With this barrier removed, Western Europe might have a balmier climate.

There might be disadvantages too. The 350,000 cubic kilometers of water taken out of the Mediterranean would have to go somewhere else. Added to the other oceans, it would raise all their levels about three feet, flooding most of the world's waterfronts.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.