Isambard Kingdom Brunel

English engineer

• Born: April 9, 1806
• Birthplace: Portsmouth, Hampshire, England
• Died: September 15, 1859
• Place of death: London, England

Brunel was the most important developer of iron and steamship construction and the guiding force in the building of the Great Western Railway. Even more importantly, he continued the tradition begun by his father, Marc Isambard Brunel, of capturing the imagination of the public with great engineering projects and thus symbolized the budding age of modern technology.

Early Life

Perhaps the most famous English engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (brew-NEHL) was the son of Sophie Kingdom, the daughter of a Plymouth naval contractor. His father, Marc Isambard Brunel, was a French engineer who had fled the Terror for the United States in 1793. After considerable success as an engineer in New York, the elder Brunel went to England in 1799 and married Sophie Kingdom, whom he had met earlier in France. Isambard was the youngest of their three children and their only son.

In 1823, after attending private schools in England and the Henri Quatre College in Paris, the young Brunel entered his father’s business to serve his apprenticeship as an engineer. By that time, Marc Brunel was on the verge of beginning the project that would establish him and his son as the most famous engineers of their day: the Thames Tunnel.

Life’s Work

The tunnel was intended to relieve the pressure of traffic on London Bridge. It was obviously desirable, but also a difficult and dangerous undertaking. The younger Brunel, although only nineteen years old when the work began, soon became the superintendent in fact and finally in name. He was involved in two serious accidents that were fully reported in the press. On the first occasion, he was aboveground when the river broke into the tunnel. He had himself lowered by rope into the tunnel to rescue a drowning man. No one was killed then, but eighteen months later, in January, 1828, a second breakthrough resulted in the deaths of three men. Two of them and Brunel were actually at the face of the tunnel when the water burst through. He managed to survive but with internal injuries severe enough to prevent him from returning to the project. After several other accidents and financial crises, Marc Brunel saw the tunnel to completion in 1843 but without the active assistance of his son.

The younger Brunel’s fame rested on his accomplishments in three areas: ship construction, the building of the Great Western Railway, and bridge construction. His involvement with shipping began in Bristol, where he designed dock improvements. In later years, he continued the design of docks at other places, but the immediate consequence of the Bristol contract was to bring him into contact with railway promoters and investors interested in building a line between London and Bristol. From this association, there developed a scheme to build the most advanced ship of the day, and the results were the most important basis of his fame.

Steam engines had been used before as auxiliary power, but no ship had crossed the Atlantic solely under steam power. The problem was that a ship could not carry enough coal to make the crossing and leave enough room for freight to make the crossing profitable. Conventional wisdom held that bigger ships would not solve the problem, because they would require bigger engines using more coal. Brunel reasoned that bigger ships would work. As water resistance would be proportional to the cross section of the ship, greater length would not cause greater resistance.

In 1836, the largest ship then in existence was 208 feet long. Brunel’s backers in the Great Western Railway Company formed the Great Western Steam Ship Company to build a ship 236 feet long, displacing twenty-three hundred tons—the biggest ship of the time. After one year, the Great Western was afloat, and one year later it was ready to depart for New York. In the meantime, competitors had entered the race. In fact, a modified sailing vessel steamed into New York harbor a few hours before the Great Western arrived in the afternoon of April 23, 1838. The Great Western was twice the size of its rival, had two hundred tons of coal left rather than the fifteen tons of the other ship, and made the voyage three days faster.

The Great Britain was an even greater innovation. As soon as the Great Western had completed its voyage, Brunel proposed a much larger ship, but size was not as important as its other features. It was the first ship constructed entirely of iron, and it was the first ship intended for commercial use to employ a screw propeller instead of side-mounted paddle wheels. After its maiden voyage in July, 1845, it continued in service until it was damaged in a storm in 1886 and stopped in the Falkland Islands, where it remained until rescued in 1970 and returned to Bristol.

In 1854, work began on the Great Eastern—the last of Brunel’s great ships. None of these ships enjoyed commercial success, and the Great Western Steam Ship Company had already failed, but another company was formed to execute the new design. At 680 feet long, this ship was gigantic for its day, but again, its significance lay not so much in its size as in its innovative features. The double-hull design with watertight compartments is still a standard feature in shipbuilding.

Brunel claimed that the ship could break in two and both halves would float independently. No openings were allowed in the hull below the waterline, and the design included a modern-style bridge with a variety of instruments. Construction took five years to complete because of problems with contractors, workers, and critics. The problems did not end even after construction was complete. No one knew how to launch such a huge ship, and men were killed in the attempt, but it finally entered the water in January, 1858. It was used in laying the transatlantic cable and in other notable enterprises, but it, too, failed commercially and was broken up during the 1890’s.

As engineer for the Great Western Railway, Brunel surveyed its route in 1833 and determined its technical aspects for as long as he lived. He specified the type of rolling stock, engines, rails, and stations it was to have. His name became associated with a number of remarkable tunnels and other engineering feats along the line, but his railway activities were best known in connection with two controversies rather than those successes. The first was the debate over narrow versus broad-gauge rails.

No one knows how the rail gauge of four feet, eight and one-half inches became standard, but Brunel disapproved of it. He wanted wider spacing of the tracks so that rolling stock would be carried inside the wheels rather than hanging over them. Much larger wheels could then be used, as they no longer had to stay under the vehicles they were carrying. These large wheels meant a reduction in loss of power attributable to friction. From the beginning, the Great Western tracks were seven feet apart, and Brunel remained the most influential champion of the “broad” gauge throughout his life.

Whatever the advantages of the broad gauge, the system caused great difficulty where the lines that served the southwest of England met those in the rest of the country. Brunel devised a variety of plans to accommodate the difference and insisted on maintaining the broad gauge on any extension of the Great Western lines. Interestingly, he did not use the broad gauge on the two Italian railways he designed. The controversy reached a climax during the late 1840’s as a parliamentary gauge commission held hearings on the issue. The “Gauge War,” as it came to be known, ended with no standard being set, but the broad-gauge lines were converted soon after Brunel’s death.

Somewhat less controversial was the “atmospheric” railway that operated for about six months in 1848 from Exeter to Newton Abbot. Trains operated on this line without benefit of locomotives. A tube fifteen inches in diameter ran between the tracks, and stationary steam engines located along the tracks maintained a partial vacuum in it. Pistons on the underside of the railway carriages fit into the tube by means of a leather flap valve, and atmospheric pressure drove the trains. The system failed for several technical reasons. Most of the controversy involved Brunel’s failure to forecast accurately the cost of the project. He grossly underestimated construction costs, and the cost of maintenance proved astronomical. Detractors accused him of being impractical, the ultimate insult for an engineer, and too fanciful in his designs.

Brunel’s reputation as a builder of bridges is closely related to his activities in constructing the Great Western Railway, but he was interested in bridge design before the railway. In fact, his first important independent contract was in 1829 for the Clifton Bridge , near Bristol. Lack of funds prevented completion of the bridge until after his death, but the project brought him into contact with the Bristolians who were so important to the rest of his career. There were numerous others, but the Saltash Bridge crossing the Tamar on the Great Western line probably did the most to enhance his reputation with fellow engineers and the public.

The pier footings for this bridge had to be sunk eighty feet through water and mud. The task was accomplished by pumping and digging out the material inside an iron casing thirty-five feet in diameter that had been placed in the river. The two central spans of the bridge, each 455 feet long, were floated to the piers when they had reached above water level. As the stonework extended upward, the spans went up with them by means of two of three jacks located on each pier. Each span was in the form of a truss made with tubular arches, from which were suspended bridge chains, resulting in a shape resembling an oval on its side. It was complete in 1858.

Brunel seemed to attract attention even when he was not involved with such grand projects. He received press coverage for building a prefabricated hospital used in the Crimean War, improvements on large guns, a floating gun carriage also used in the Crimean War, his membership on the building committee of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and his testimony before numerous parliamentary committees. His testimony was nearly always the subject of debate in the press, both because of the importance of the issues involved and because of the force of his convictions. For example, he was a staunch opponent of patent laws, which he believed hindered progress.

Brunel was so well known that an accident that befell him became the subject of a story in R. H. Barham’s The Ingoldsby Legends: Or, Mirth and Marvels, by Thomas Ingoldsby, Esquire (1855). On April 3, 1843, he was playing with his children by pretending to make a coin go from his ear to his mouth. In the course of performing the trick he swallowed the coin, which lodged in one of his bronchial tubes. The efforts of the surgeons failed, and Brunel constructed a device to invert and shake him. Forty days after the mishap, the inverter finally worked. Brunel was so famous and the incident so well known that when word spread that “it was out,” Londoners knew what was out of whom without having to be told.

Brunel seemed to be accident-prone. As mentioned, he suffered severe internal injuries in the flooding of the Thames Tunnel, and one might speculate that these injuries contributed to the kidney failure that killed him at a relatively early age. During the trials of the Great Western, a fire broke out, and he tried to climb down a ladder to investigate. A fall of eighteen feet knocked him unconscious, and it took him some time to recover from his injuries.

In July, 1836, Brunel married Mary Horsley. They had two sons and a daughter. The Brunels combined office and home in a rather lavish London residence. Mary kept separate carriages for morning and afternoon use, and the servants, clerks, and apprentices, who paid for the privilege of observing Brunel at work, gave the impression of an important establishment. Brunel seems to have had little time for anything but his work. He was traveling much of the time in order to attend to his many projects. Photographs and descriptions depict him as a rather small, energetic man with a dark complexion. He had several bouts with kidney disease in the last years of his life and finally succumbed to it on September 15, 1859.

Significance

The Brunels were not the only famous father and son team of engineers during the early nineteenth century. George and Robert Stephenson were much in the public view. There were also other famous individual engineers, such as Thomas Telford and Richard Trevithick, but the Brunels, more than any others, established the professional engineer as a hero of the Industrial Revolution.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel used his tremendous engineering abilities to improve communications both within England and between England and North America. He oversaw construction of more than one thousand miles of railway tracks in central and western England, in Ireland, and in Wales, and he built two railroads in Italy as well. His innovations in shipbuilding made the transatlantic passage both cheaper and less time-consuming, and his ship the Great Eastern laid the first transatlantic cable. Finally, both directly and indirectly, Brunel increased the number of bridges linking England’s roadways.

Bibliography

Brunel, Isambard Kingdom. The Life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Civil Engineer. London: Longmans, Green, 1870. Reprint. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972. This biography was written by Brunel’s son. It is not an intimate family portrait, but rather a traditional nineteenth century formal biography, containing information available nowhere else.

Buchanan, R. Angus. Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. London: Hambledon and London, 2002. A recent biography, featuring information on some of the neglected areas of Brunel’s life, such as his training and connections to Bristol.

Fox, Stephen. Transatlantic: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard, and the Great Atlantic Steamships. London: HarperCollins, 2003. Narrative history of the transatlantic steamship, describing how Atlantic Ocean travel dramatically changed between 1820 and 1910. Fox traces the evolution of the steamship from Brunel’s Great Western in 1838 to Cunard’s Mauretania of 1907.

Gooch, Sir Daniel. The Diaries of Sir Daniel Gooch. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1892. Reprint. Newton Abbot, England: David and Charles, 1972. Gooch was one of Brunel’s colleagues in the construction of the Great Western Railway. His memoir provides information about Brunel’s involvement with the railway project.

Hadfield, Charles. Atmospheric Railways. Newton Abbot, England: David and Charles, 1967. This history of atmospheric railways includes a fairly extensive treatment of Brunel’s involvement with them.

Hay, Peter. Brunel, Engineering Giant. London: B. T. Batesford, 1985. A short paperback giving the essential details of its subject’s life. It has thirty-three useful black-and-white illustrations and is probably the best choice for someone desiring a brief account. No notes or other scholarly apparatus.

Hearn, Chester G. Circuits in the Sea: The Men, the Ships, and the Atlantic Cable. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. A history of the eleven-year effort to successfully lay a transatlantic telegraph cable, including Brunel’s participation in the process. Describes the ships used, technology involved, and the initial failures of the venture.

Pudney, John. Brunel and His World. Albuquerque, N.Mex.: Transatlantic Arts, 1974. Another popular account without footnotes. Pudney’s work relies mainly on its 140 illustrations. It maintains that Brunel surpassed contemporary engineers because of his ability to gain public attention through grand projects.

Rolt, L. T. C. Isambard Kingdom Brunel. London: Longmans, Green, 1957. The closest thing to a standard account. Rolt is the best-known modern scholar dealing with Brunel.

Rowland, K. T. The Great Britain. Newton Abbot, England: David and Charles, 1971. An account of the construction and career of the ship that was one of Brunel’s best-known creations.