Underground by Will Hunt

Will Hunt has been fascinated with underground places since his childhood discovery of an abandoned tunnel in his hometown. Perhaps abandoned isn’t quite right; Hunt found signs of occasional human occupation in the old tunnels. He pursued his interest in underground places and the way people used and experienced them around the world. He describes these experiences, and what these hidden chambers mean, in Underground.

Hunt’s explorations took him into both manmade spaces and natural caves. He retells adventures from the Paris catacombs and a trip across the city that was almost entirely underground. He entered mines and saw shrines miners created for the spirits (or monsters) that live in them, beings that are sometimes generous and sometimes dangerous. Perhaps these are relatives to the spirits, strange creatures and gods reputed to live in natural caves.

Caves and tunnels are important to varying degrees to almost all religions. Shamans, priests and philosophers have long traveled under the earth to seek insight or communication with other worlds. Hunt ties this to the hallucinations and distorted sense of time humans experience when they are deprived of sensory stimulation. He does not denigrate these experiences, but sees them as something universally human. The altered state of consciousness one might enter in the utter darkness of a cave is simply another way the mind works, and possibly the root of all religion.

People did not always understand what was underground, and we are still making discoveries. Even two centuries ago, the world under our feet was a mystery. As a fan of Missouriana, I was attracted to Hunts telling of the life John Cleves Symmes. A St. Louis-based trader and former Army officer, Symmes was a proponent of a hollow earth theory. We were not living in the inner world, but he imagined there were worlds within ours existing on a series of concentric spheres. From 1818 until his death in 1829, he traveled the country lecturing on this theory and raising money to mount an expedition. He never made that trip to inner worlds, but he was an inspiration to the authors of hollow earth stories such as Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank L. Baum.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Second Chronicles

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Hunt, Will. Underground: A Human History of the World Beneath Our Feet. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

Clarence King was probably the most well-known American scientist of his time. It doesn’t hurt that his scientific reputation was built on exploration of the then still wild west of the United States of that he could spin a tale. Robert Wilson recounts the life of the accomplished geologist in The Explorer King.

King was born in 1842. He was raised in Newport, Massachusetts. He was educated at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.

As a young man, King was enamored of art critic John Ruskin. Ruskin thought the rugged Alps of Europe to be the best subject of art for their beauty, colorfulness, ruggedness and variety. When he met western geologists and mountaineers through mentors at Sheffield, he wanted to be part of it.

He headed out for California in 1863 and became part of the state’s geologic survey. He would spend the next decade studying the geology and geography of the American west, especially its mountains. He showed great physical prowess and courage as a mountaineer.

After working on the California survey, he went on to lead surveys. In 1864, he was chosen to lead a survey of Yosemite.

He built on his reputation from the Yosemite survey to lobby Congress to fund a survey of the 40^th Parallel, roughly the route the transcontinental railroads would follow. Though it was under the auspices of the Army Corp of Engineers, it was the first federally-funded scientific endeavor that was completely staffed by civilians. While working on this survey, he was the first to discover active glaciers in the U.S. His team published new methods of silver smelting to make the mines for productive (the survey’s first report dealt with mining in order to show the commercial value of their research to money-conscious Congressmen).

The 40^th Parallel survey made King famous, though not because of the many contributions to science that came from it. King’s team heard rumors of a diamond discovery in Colorado. It would have been very embarrassing for them to have walked over such a valuable mineral resource without observing it. They tracked down the site of the discovery and determined it was a hoax; the site had been planted with rough diamonds and other uncut gemstones that the con men had bought mostly with money from their marks. Stories of massive fraud sells newspapers, especially when the names of big money men in San Francisco and New York are attached to it. King was the hero of the story.

When the U.S. Geological Survey was created, King was appointed to be its first director. His career as a scientist was already on the decline. He would turn his attention to making money in mining, but he would not be successful. He would have no money when he died.

This leads to an interesting point about King, though it is not the focus of Wilson’s biography. King had nothing to leave for his secret family. He was married to a black woman. This was a very unusual thing at the time. To protect his reputation, he kept the marriage a secret. He did not even reveal to his wife his real identity until shortly before he died (she knew him as James Todd). His friend John Hay provided for Ada Copeland Todd (and the five children she had with King) after King died in 1901.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Sea of Glory by Nathaniel Philbrick

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose

Wilson, Robert. The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax—Clarence King in the Old West. New York: Scribner, 2006.

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Harris, Robert. Canals and Their Architecture. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969.

Water has always been an important part of human life. Drinking water is a necessity, but that is only the beginning of our uses of it. Water is also an element in agriculture, industry, transportation and commerce.

It is water’s role in transportation and commerce that Robert Harris focused on in Canals and Their Architecture. At times, artificial or modified waterways have been major means of transporting products in bulk.

Harris mentions canals from continental Europe and North America, especially the United States, but his book is mainly about the canals of Britain. This is an appropriate focus because the canal boom in Britain both fed and was fed by the Industrial Revolution that started there.

The boom began with the Duke of Bridgewater’s famous canal, construction of which began in 1760. The duke owned coalmines and wanted a cheaper way get coal to the mills and factories in Manchester. The canal was by no means an easy or inexpensive project, but it was greatly successful and the wealth put into it was regains many times over.

Bridgewater recognized the talents of millwright James Brindley, who went on to become the most prominent canal engineer of his day. Harris discussed the works of several British engineers who were successors of Brindley including Thomas Telford, John Rennie, and William Edwards.

As the title of the book suggests, it is organized mainly by the types of structures found on canals. In addition to the canal cut, Harris wrote about bridges and auqueducts, locks , tunnels, boats, buildings and unique ways of handling elevation changes on a canal route. Early canals followed the contours of the land to avoid the use of expensive and complex equipment and, where needed, were crossed by utilitarian bridges of wood or brick. As canals became straighter, and more lucrative, they added locks and other mechanisms for raising and lowering boats. The materials became more varied and complex, including stone and iron. Spectacular aqueducts carried canals over low lands. Tunnels were well-made features of canals early on because the technology for building them was readily adapted from mining.

The older canals are impressive in that so much was done with manpower and simple tools. As canals aided other industries, the improvements those industries spawned, especially in iron construction and railroads, returned to canals and the way they were made. The construction of modern canals is the work of enormous equipment.



Canals and Their Architecture includes many illustrations and photographs. These are very helpful for the laymen to see the types of structures discussed in the text, though even an engineer familiar with the terms will likely appreciate the images.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp
Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury
Water by Marq de Villiers

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Discover the secrets of KC’s sewers (I went down in one of Kansas City’s large combined sewers several years ago. I also got to work a little with Charles Raab and can confirm he has an amazing knowledge of the history of Kansas City’s sewers.)
Interesting Stuff April 7, 2010
Kruse:Resource program is worth every state dollar (From a fellow Stoddard Countian, though I’m an expat.)
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Interesting Stuff Aug. 14, 2009

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Water by Marq de Villiers

I originally posted this review at Infrastructure Watch, where I write about civil infrastructure, the environment and other matters of technology.

de Villiers, Marq. Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource. 1999. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Marq de Villiers serves as a guide on a tour of water problems, conflicts and occasional solutions around the world. Though he is not an alarmist, his book seems to indicate that the problems have so far greatly outpaced the solutions.

There are several aspects of water problems and conflicts that de Villiers considers: natural, technological and political. In each area, he provides specific examples of water in or nearing crisis.

The natural distribution of fresh water in the world is uneven. That may be the fundamental aspect of water problems: even where it’s seemingly abundant, it doesn’t occur where and when people want it to make use of it. In parts of the world, this is a dire situation.

The technological solutions people have applied to correct this distribution have resulted in some amazing works of engineering since early in human history. It has also had many unintended consequences. Irrigation that made marginal land productive has made some of that land useless, even desert, through increased salinity. Dams, drainage and transfers have created ill effects in regional climates. Water mining, pollution and other human activity are also threatening the quantity and quality of water even in developed nations. There is hope in the technological area in that much of this harm may be reversible and the human ingenuity that created these technologies might also create sustainable solutions to our water needs.

Political considerations are very important to water issues, particularly when considering the possibility of conflict, even outright war, because of water scarcity. The Middle East and North Africa come to mind as hot spots where water is a critical issue; de Villiers enlightens both the current situation and history of these regions. Though mistrust runs deep between the nations in this region, even seemingly friendly ones, there is hope for solutions to their water problems. North America has its water problems to, and the problems on the Colorado River are surprisingly similar to those on the Nile. The differences in water availability in the United States, Mexico and Canada also makes for interesting relations between these close and usually friendly neighbors. China may present the largest political problems related to water and it’s food production and population that threatens to push it into crisis.

The book closes with four general strategies for dealing with the world’s water problems. First, get more water by either bringing it in from elsewhere or making it (i.e. desalination). Next is conservation and pricing to reduce demand and encourage using water in the most valuable ways. Third is population control; de Villiers seems relieved that world populations have been growing more slowly without major intervention. Finally, you can steal water from others. Since 40 percent people worldwide live in watersheds that cross national boundaries, it becomes a complicated matter of who has what right to the water and this is a potential source of water conflict, though not insurmountable.

Order this book here.

P.S., here is a little something extra for those of you interested in China, especially the probably fictional Emperor Yu the Engineer.

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Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest. 1929. New York: Vintage, 1992.

“I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit.” These opening lines of Red Harvest are the first time the Continental Op will make a joke of Personville, and it’s the only funny one. The city is poison, run by criminals in every sector. They were brought in by the mining company to break the union, and now the head of the company is ready to be rid of them. The Continental Op is the man for the job.

He does it by turning the leaders of the various gangs, including the corrupt police department, against each other. Cozy relationships give way to war. Even the Continental Op becomes infected. He’s not above bending the rules, but he finds himself taking a bloodthirsty joy from the vengeful mayhem.



The lead character doesn’t have a name, but he is a prototypical hardboiled detective, written by an author who made the mold many others have used. He is tough, smart, aggressive, willing to do what it takes. He has a sense of justice, but doesn’t think it is always found in the justice system. In the Continental Op’s world of 1920’s California, police and court corruption are rampant. That goes double for Personville.

Violence and corruption are the theme of the book. It’s a story with roots deep in selfishness and pride. No one is above breaking the law to serve his or her own interests. The sins of one man beget a host of others. The sad conclusion is that a violence and deception is needed to break a violent and corrupt system, pushing into collapsing on itself.

Of course, no one picks up this book expecting a sweet romance of good overcoming evil. When, in closing, the Continental Op says Personville “was developing into a sweet-smelling thornless bed of roses,” one suspects he is speaking with the same dark, ironic humor with which he started the tale.