The Financial Engineer

  The Tunnel That Ate Its Investors: The Wild Story of the Channel Tunnel In 1802, a French mining engineer named Albert Mathieu proposed digging a tunnel under the English Channel complete with a mid-sea island for changing horses and an artificial harbor for ships to shelter from storms. Napoleon Bonaparte actually liked the idea. Britain, mid-war with France and deeply suspicious of any tunnel that might let French soldiers march straight into England, did not. That's how long people had been dreaming about connecting Britain and mainland Europe by land. It took another 190 years, several abandoned attempts, two world wars, and one of the largest private financing gambles in engineering history before it actually happened. A 31-Mile Bet Nobody Government Wanted to Pay For By the 1980s, the tunnel idea was back on the table but this time with a catch. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand agreed the project should go ahead, but only...

In 1957, a 38-year-old Danish architect named Jørn Utzon sat in his office in Denmark and sketched something no one had ever figured out how to build. He'd never even seen Sydney Harbour in person. He just had a photograph, a vision, and a competition brief asking for a national performing arts center. What he handed in looked like a fleet of ships' sails frozen mid-billow, or a cracked-open orange, or shells washed up on a beach depending on who you asked. Judges pulled his entry out of the rejected pile, took one look, and named it the winner anyway. Nobody, including Utzon, knew how to actually build it. That's not an exaggeration. This wasn't a case of an architect handing engineers a tricky but solvable problem. The concrete shell shapes he'd drawn had no consistent geometry no formula existed that could describe their curves. You can't pour concrete into a shape nobody can define with math. For years, the world's best structural engineers stared at ...