The idea of digging a hole to China surfaces as early as 1872 in a Chamber’s Journal fiction piece about beavers and engineers. Unfortunately, digging from almost anywhere in the United States would lead you to open water on the other end. To dig straight through to China, you’d have to start shoveling in Northern Argentina. There’d also be a few pesky physics problems to work out, like the fiery, molten mass at the center of the Earth. Here’s how to find out where you’d end up when you start digging from anywhere on the planet, and how to make an earth sandwich with your antipodes. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Digging to China”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Pete Owens calling from Big Sky, Montana.
Well, hi, Pete. What’s going on?
Yeah, I had a question for you guys that arose when I was working with a guy that I work with, and we were digging through snow to a doorway. And we started joking around about the term digging to China. And we thought it’s silly that we were digging in the snow to China, but it’s just as silly as you were digging through the earth to China. And then we started talking about, do people in China say dig to America? And what goes on there? And how did we get this? So I gave you guys a call. And here we are.
Here we are. So you know digging to China is probably something you’ve been saying your whole life, right?
Oh, when I was a kid, my mom would tell me, you know, I’d go outside and she’d ask me what I was doing. Oh, digging a hole to China. Yeah, my whole life, absolutely.
Yeah, I actually tried to do that. We got about five feet deep before we gave up. We had a ways to go. And I can tell you that we check out a lot of library books in my house to read to my son. There are a lot of kids’ books where the whole premise of the book is somehow built around a kid trying to dig to China. Lots of them.
No kidding. Well, there are lots of cartoons, too. You know, Yosemite Sam and Family Guy. There are a lot of cartoons. You can Google the question of what people in China say when they’re talking about digging through to the earth. I think there are different answers. They usually just pick another well-known place.
Well, they do talk about tunneling to the United States. Like if you miss a plane to the United States, you might say to somebody, well, you could just go through the earth too. But a lot of people around the world, particularly from European culture, say they’re digging to China, even though it’s not perfectly on the other side of the earth.
Well, and in Britain, and I know in Austria as well, they say digging to Australia.
Yeah, there we go. But the problem is that if you dig a hole through the earth from the United States, from almost any place in the United States, you’re going to hit water.
Oh, so don’t dig a hole through the earth then?
No, don’t. Don’t. Stop your son, Grant.
No. But what’s really interesting, so I’ve done some digging on this, so to speak. So to speak. Looking in the historical archives of newspapers and books and what have you. And I can trace this idea back as far as the 1870s. There was a fiction piece that appeared in the Chambers Journal from 1872. And it’s a funny little piece. It has a bunch of beavers, you know, who build dams and creeks here in the United States and have the flopping tails. They are what engineers become after they die. And so there’s like this one beaver is telling a newcomer what all these other people used to be when they were human engineers. He’s talking about one villain and he says, did you ever hear of the projected tunnel to China that was to be built under the sea and lined with porcelain? That was the very man who brought it out. So it was about a guy who had invented this fanciful tunnel to China to get all this money and just kind of ripped off his investors. And that’s the earliest use I could find. I bet if I spent way too much time on this.
Digging. Digging. I could probably find out a lot more. But we at least know, what are we talking there, 140 years?
Yeah, yeah. That’s a good long haul. Probably longer.
Probably longer. And Peter, if you do want to dig to China, the place that you need to start is in northern Argentina.
Oh, okay. That’s good to know.
Yeah, yeah. How long would that take?
A while, and there would be a lot of physics involved, you know, falling through, and it gets pretty complicated. And at some point you melt, don’t you?
Exactly. You’re atomized by the heat of the earth.
Yeah, but once you get on the other side, then you’re good.
You know what? We need to call them myth busters. They can handle this.
You would have thought that they did that. There is a guy who has a project online called If the Earth Were a Sandwich. And he encourages people to find their antipodes, who are the people on the other side, exactly opposite the Earth. And then you put a piece of bread on the ground, and each of you is made an Earth sandwich. And you take a picture and make a sandwich, and then you eat it.
That’s just crazy. And so, Peter, you got your leisure time activity. Why don’t you finish all that digging?
I know. It sounds like it.
Yeah, it’s cool, though. I’ll try to find my antiquity. I guess there’s going to be somebody in a boat, though.
Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. Maybe there’ll be an Indian boy with a tiger in a boat.
That’d be cool. That’s where we’ll start.
Thanks, buddy. Thanks for digging all that up for me.
No worries. Take care now. We can shovel with the best of them.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
877-929-9673.
