Aimé Thomé de Gamond

Aimé Thomé de Gamond

Aimé Thomé de Gamond (November 1807, Poitiers – 1876) was a French eccentric engineer and entrepreneur. He is called the "father of the tunnel between France and England".

He studied to become a mining engineer in the Netherlands and then came back to France. In 1834 he proposed his first projects for a tunnel beneath the English Channel. Gamond spent all his wealth and 30 years of his life promoting this 200-year-old dream. However, at the time both England and France thought that separation made better political and economical sense.

In 1856, he presented a proposal to the emperor Napoleon III for a mined railway tunnel from Cap Gris-Nez to Eastwater Point with a port/airshaft on the Varne sandbank at a cost of 170 million francs, or less than £7 million.[1] He would propose in total seven designs.[2] His proposal was finally accepted in 1867 by Napoleon III and Queen Victoria but the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 brought an end to the project.

Thomé de Gamond's plan for a Channel tunnel, with a harbour mid-Channel on the Varne sandbank

Gamond's fiercest supporter was his daughter Elizabeth, who actually rowed the boat from which he dived to the seabed to perform geological surveys. Even after his money dried up, she taught music to finance his chimeric enterprise. However, the tunnel was not to be; Gamond died ruined and humiliated in 1876.[3]

References

  1. ↑ "The Proposed Tunnel Between England and France" (PDF). The New York Times. 7 August 1866. Retrieved 3 January 2008.
  2. ↑ Eurotunnel : history Archived January 3, 2010, at the Wayback Machine.
  3. ↑ Harvey, Edmund. Ed. Reader's Digest Book of Facts. Reader's Digest Association, Pleasantville, N.Y., 1987, p. 237.

External links

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