In early Victorian England, he built the lngest bridge, the fastest railway, and the biggest ship the world had ever seen. He had some crowing misfortunes which eventually which eventually broke his indomitable spirit. On September 15, 1859 Isambard Kingdom Brunel died. So ended the career of an extraordinary personality, a career of commercial failure but of engineering triumph. The man and his three great ships are now only a memory, but his railway works still stand for later generations to marvel at. Moreover, no man contributed more than did Brunel to the task of forging those links of transport and communication that tie the two halves of the English-speaking world together.
At Milwall in 1858, the pioneer of modern engineering, clad in the vestments of early Victorian England, stands before the anchor chains of his last and proudest work, the steamship Great Eastern.
Aside from his material achievement, what we should admire about Brunel in our over-specialized age is the astonishing versatility of intellect and imagination that ranged so freely and with such assurance over the whole field of art and science. He reminds us that there was then no gulf fixed between the arts and sciences, and he makes us reflect a little sadly that the world might be a better place today if that gulf had never opened and people had not grown so specialized an animal, knowing more and more about less and less.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel ( 1806-1859 )was not only one of the greatest engineers in history, but one of the most versatile and dynamic personalities the modern world has known. His ideas translated into material achievements that astonished the world; a great railway system on which mile a minute speeds were achieved for the first time and three steamships, each in turn the largest ever built, one of which established the first regular transatlantic steamer service.
Brunel. Clifton ( Bristol ) Suspension Bridge. Still in his 20s, Isambard Kingdom Brunel designs the Clifton Suspension Bridge at Bristol. Two hundred feet above the River Avon, the bridge is 700 feet long.
Brunel pursued engineering as his profession because in early nineteenth-century England it offered him the most satisfying outlet for his prodigious creative powers. It is significant that his most intimate friend was not a fellow engineer but his artist brother-in-law John Horsley. Horsley knew nothing of engineering and said that what he loved in Brunel was his high courage and his artistic gifts; his love of painting, music, and drama.
Brunel held courageously to a principal of absolute personal responsibility throughout a comparatively brief career, checkered by failure as well as triumph, in which he took the engineering world of his day by storm. Having once decided that a scheme was correct in principle, he would pursue it regardless of commercial considerations, while a single-minded quest for perfection frequently led him to ask too much of the men and the machines under his command. To put it simply, he set his heights too high, and it was this fault that drove him to his tragic death when he was at the height of his career.
His first great project was a bridge over the deep and narrow gorge of the Avon River at Bristol; a suspension bridge of over 900 feet which would spring from lip to lip of the gorge. Unfortunately, owing to lack of capital, Brunel’s was not completed until after his death, but it established his fame as an engineer; despite the opposition of the greatest civil engineer of the day,Sir Thomas Telford, who thought so long a bridge might collapse and wanted to support it with Gothic towers; an idea of which Brunel poured such scorn upon its timidity that Telford’s design was rejected.
Brunel, next carried out a survey for a group of Bristol merchants planning a railway from Bristol to London in 1833. They wanted the cheapest route, but Brunel replied that he would undertake to survey only one route from Bristol to London and this would not be the cheapest but the best. In the opinion of many people, the construction of 118 miles of railway was wildly overambitious, yet Brunel saw this only as a small beginning; part of a network where his iron roads would monopolize the traffic of the west of England.
- ”Replica of the “Iron Duke”, designed and built by Daniel Gooch for Brunel’s Great Western Railway in 1847. The locomotive could haul trains from Paddington (London) to Bristol and Exeter at speeds up to 60 mph. By 1855 Gooch had produced twenty-one locomotives in this style.”
Thinking of speeds that no one had so far dared to contemplate, he laid out a superbly straight and level road, spanned the Thames at Maidenhead with two of the largest and flattest arches ever built, and drove a tunnel nearly two miles long under Box Hill near Bath. Contemporaries called the tunnel project monstrous and extraordinary, most dangerous and impracticable, yet it was completed in just over four and a half years. As for the bridge at maidenhead, its collapse under the first featherweight train was confidently predicted, but it still stands today.
Yet these controversies were trifling compared with the fury that raged around Brunel when he announced his intention of laying his road to a rail guage of seven feet. George and Robert Stephenson had already standardized the guage of 4 feet 8 1/2 inches; established for no better reason that they had used it befo
''Replica of Robert Stephenson's locomotive, the "Rocket". The "Rocket" took part in the Rainhill Trials in October 1829. Ten locomotives were originally entered for the Trials, but only five turned up and two of these were withdrawn during the first couple of days of the trials. A further two suffered mechanical problems, and by the third day, the "Rocket" was the only locomotive left in the competition. That day it covered 35 miles in 3 hours 12 minutes. Hauling 13 tons of loaded wagons, the "Rocket" averaged over 12 mph. On one trip it reached 25 mph and on a locomotive-only run, 29 mph.''
However, as an engineering tour de force, the broad guage accomplished all that Brunel claimed for it. Under the inspiration of Daniel Gooch, the Swindon shops built the ”Great Western” in thirteen weeks, a locomotive with single driving wheels eight feet in diameter and a boiler of unprecedented size. At the time, 1846, an averge speed of 35 mph was considered fast going on the Standard guage, yet the Great Western covered the 77 1/2 miles from London to Swindon in 78 minutes start to stop. She was the first of a long line of broad guage flyers that carried the proud names; Iron Duke, Great Britain,Lightning, Emperor, Pasha, Sultan, Land of the Isles. These were the locomotives that hauled the first express trains in the world, trains which themselves acquired names that were to become immortal; The Cornishman, The Flying Dutchman, and The Zulu.
Brunel's ''atmospheric'' system of traction. The trains were headed by a carriage equipped with a piston that ran in the pipe.
The last link to be forged on this long rail route from London was Brunel’s famous Royal Albert Bridge over the Tamar at Saltash. This great bridge, Brunel’s final masterpiece of railway engineering, stands today as his memorial. For in may, 1859, when the Prince Consort opened the bridge, and the long road from London to Penzance was complete, Brunel had only four months to live. It was from a couch carried on a platform truck that the dying engineer saw his finished work for the first and last time.
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