Cheap Building Big - Tunnels (Video) (Building Big, David Macaulay) Price
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Nothing much is glamorous about tunnels, particularly the way they're built. In the Building Big series' "Tunnels" episode, we're told the process was maddeningly slow, desperately scary for workers, and often prohibitively expensive, that is until the introduction of Frenchman Mark Brunel's tunneling shield in the early 19th century for use in scooping out the silt beneath the mucky Thames River. Take the railroad tunnel through Massachusetts's Hoosac Mountain, for instance, which took two years to map, 21 years to build, and caused 200 deaths, or the early Romans' aqueducts, which claimed the lives of thousands of slaves because of poisonous gas generated by firesetting, a digging method engineers devised to pick up the pace when their patience ran out on chiseling and hammering. Technology has come a long way, as this documentary demonstrates in an easy, even pace through interviews with experts, tunneling footage, and crisply drawn diagrams. But the only recently completed Chunnel, the 32-mile tube connecting England and France, isn't changing a lot of minds about the tediousness of tunneling. It took eight years to build and tallied up a $21 billion price tag. As urban sprawl pushes more and more of us underground, the tape suggests, tunnels are taking a turn for the bigger and brighter. That's encouraging, and a good note to close on, since most everybody still shuffles into tunnels with the sole objective of seeing the light at their ends. --Tammy La Gorce
| ACTORS: | Building Big, David Macaulay |
| CATEGORY: | Video |
| THEATRICAL RELEASE DATE: | 01 January, 2000 |
| MANUFACTURER: | Wgbh Boston Video |
| MPAA RATING: | NR (Not Rated) |
| FEATURES: | Color, Closed-captioned, NTSC |
| TYPE: | Documentary |
| MEDIA: | VHS Tape |
| # OF MEDIA: | 1 |
| UPC: | 783421322530 |
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Customer Reviews of Building Big - Tunnels
Technology, history, safety, digging through mud, and more Good history of tunnels is given along with the account of several major achievements. The progression of tunnels can be clearly seen, as technological breakthroughs became available, up to the huge tunnel making machines used for the Chunnel (English/French Channel/Tunnel). The viewer sees the difficulties that all tunnel builders faced when going under rivers, and how they were overcome. Safety concerns are a big part of the package. This is a worthy addition to the Building Big series.