This is a facsimile of the 1885 book "Tunneling Under the Hudson River: Being a Description of the Obstacles Encountered, the Experience Gained, the Success Achieved, and the Plans Finally Adopted for Rapid and Economical Prosecution of the Work" by S. D. V. Burr, written in 1885 and originally published by John Wiley and Sons that same year.
Readers should note that as a document over 110 years old, as well as being a technical document, the grammar and phraseology will appear unusual and stilted to modern readers. Yet educated people actually did write (and talk) like that in those days.
Typography conventions of the time have semicolons set off from the preceding word by a space. I have maintained that convention for this web presentation. Also, this book uses a large number of "em dashes" which may not appear properly if you are using a speaking web browser or saving the text in an ASCII file.
This book had illustrations ("plates") bound in. Rather than including them in the text of this web presentation, they are clickable wherever they are referenced in the text, as well as in the List of Illustrations near the beginning of the document.
I have preserved the page breaks of the original document, even when they were in the middle of sentences. While this may appear awkward when you first view the text, it allows discussion such as "the next to last sentence of page 20" to mean the same thing to both viewers of this web presentation as well as to people reading the original book (or photocopies).
Click here to view the book.
Editor's Note: Works published in the United States prior to 1923 are (as of this writing) now in the public domain. The markup, layout, and presentation of this electronic version is Copyright © 1998, 1999 Teresa M. Kennedy. Permission is granted to download and store copies of this work for personal use only. For more information about the U.S. Copyright Law, visit the U.S.Copyright Office.