Tunnel boring machines had been grinding toward each other from Folkestone and Sangatte since 1988. A 50-millimetre pilot hole had already linked the two halves of the service tunnel without ceremony on October 30, 1990. On December 1, with television cameras watching, workers opened the breakthrough wide enough for Fagg and Cozette to meet, shake hands and step across. A BBC commentator called Fagg the first man to cross the Channel by land for 8,000 years.
Engineers had proposed tunnels under the Channel since the early 19th century, and two earlier attempts were started and abandoned: boring machines dug more than a kilometre from each shore in 1882-83, and Britain cancelled a second project in 1975. The project that finally succeeded was a private venture, financed by the Anglo-French company Eurotunnel and dug by consortia on both sides of the water.
The finished system has three bores: two rail tunnels and, between them, a smaller service tunnel for maintenance and emergencies. It was the service tunnel that was holed through on December 1, 1990. Getting the two sides to meet within a small margin of error after years of drilling through chalk marl was itself a feat of surveying.
The main rail tunnels were joined the following year, and Queen Elizabeth II and President François Mitterrand opened the Channel Tunnel on May 6, 1994. At 50.46 kilometres long, with 37.9 kilometres under the sea, it has the longest underwater section of any tunnel in the world.
Key people: Graham Fagg, Philippe Cozette