Marc Isambard Brunel

British engineer and inventor

• Born: April 25, 1769
• Birthplace: Hacqueville, France
• Died: December 12, 1849
• Place of death: London, England

The most famous civil engineer of his day, Brunel was one of the leaders in mechanizing production during the early nineteenth century. He and his son have come to be seen as symbols for the technical achievements of the Industrial Revolution.

Early Life

Marc Isambard Brunel (brew-NEHL) was born into a family whose members had been tenant farmers in Normandy for generations. As a younger son, he was intended for the Church by his family. Consequently, he entered the seminary of St. Nicaise at Rouen in 1780. Even at the age of eleven, Brunel showed a strong interest in drawing and mathematics. For the classics, however, he had no interest whatsoever. The Superior of the seminary advised the elder Brunel against forcing the boy into a profession for which he was obviously unsuited.

In 1782, the Brunel family decided on a naval career for young Marc, and he went to live with the Carpentier family in Rouen to prepare for entrance into the navy. There, he studied mathematics, drawing, and other technical subjects. This academic regimen must have suited him, as he was appointed a cadet on a corvette headed for the West Indies in 1786. Little is known of his naval career, which ended in 1792 when his ship returned to France.

The French Revolution occurred during Brunel’s absence abroad, and by 1793, Paris was a dangerous place for royalist officers. Brunel must have been particularly outspoken or politically active, because he soon fled from Paris to Rouen in some danger. While visiting the Carpentier family in Rouen, he met his future wife, Sophie Kingdom, an English girl who was staying with the Carpentiers for a few months in order to learn French. The danger for Brunel was considerable. Not even love could detain him, and he managed to obtain a passport from the American vice consul at Le Havre. He arrived in New York on September 6, 1793.

Life’s Work

In America, Brunel first began to practice his profession. He obtained an appointment to survey a tract of land near Ontario, and subsequently he surveyed the route for a canal to connect the Hudson River with Lake Champlain. During these operations, he showed so much ability that he became director of the canal construction. His success in that position won numerous commissions for him. He designed several buildings and finally became chief engineer of New York in 1796. This appointment gave him an opportunity to display his skills as a mechanical engineer, because his duties included construction of an arsenal including an arms manufactory. During the construction, Brunel introduced a number of devices to improve both the boring and casting of cannon.

Brunel became an American citizen in 1796. This fact in combination with such promising prospects for a young man of twenty-nine make it rather surprising that he should have left the United States for England in January, 1799. There were, however, two compelling reasons for his departure. The first was Sophie Kingdom, who had returned to England from France in 1795 after several months of detention by French authorities. The second was his hopes for selling plans for block-making machinery to the Royal Navy.

Britain’s Royal Navy required 100,000 blocks every year for sets of blocks and tackles. On shipboard and in the shipyards, the block and tackle was the main source of motive power. Brunel believed that his machines could make better blocks with great savings in labor costs. He intended to convince the firm that had the contract for blocks, Fox and Taylor of Southampton, by means of models made for him by the London toolmaker Henry Maudslay—virtually the founder of the machine-tool industry. The block contractors were not convinced either by his plans or by his models, but their contract was soon due to expire. Brunel made use of letters of introduction from no less a personage than Alexander Hamilton to gain access to the authorities at the Admiralty. He found them easier to convince, and the government agreed to begin its own production in May, 1803, using machines of his design.

During this period of selling and negotiations, Brunel invented several machines for use in textile mills and a writing machine. He had also wasted little time in his pursuit of Sophie Kingdom. They were married in November, 1799. She was six years younger than he. Over the next six years, they had three children—two daughters and, in 1806, a son who was himself to become a great engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The block-making machinery was eminently successful. As Brunel had predicted, his blocks not only were much better made but also reduced the number of workers required to produce them to less than one-tenth the number formerly employed. Brunel had been so confident in his invention that his contract with the government stipulated that his fee would be the amount of money saved in one full year of production. Although the saving in the first year amounted to twenty-four thousand pounds, he actually received seventeen thousand pounds, and that only after considerable delay.

Brunel continued to patent various machines, but his interests were increasingly entrepreneurial. Between 1805 and 1812, he built a sawmill and supplied wood to the Royal Navy. In conjunction with this activity, he designed a number of woodworking machines. As his business contacts and interests expanded, he became involved in the manufacture of boots for the army, and by 1810 he had built machinery for producing boots.

All these enterprises came to a bad end. Brunel had chosen partners to run the business side of his affairs so that he could concentrate on invention. His choices were poor. Their lack of ability in combination with a series of disasters led to his financial ruin. The sawmill burned down in 1814. Soon thereafter, in 1815, the war with France came to an end, and he was left holding a large quantity of boots, which the government refused to buy. He still managed to survive financially, until his bankers failed in 1821. That was the final blow.

Unable to pay his creditors, Brunel and Sophie were imprisoned for debt between May and August, 1821. Their release apparently came about through the czar of Russia, who was interested in Brunel’s plan for building a tunnel under the river at St. Petersburg so that communication could be maintained when the river was frozen. The influence of the czar and other prominent people led the British government to award Brunel five thousand pounds for the payment of his debts. This period was referred to as “the Misfortune” by the family, and it had the effect of spoiling his taste for independent business ventures. Thereafter Brunel remained strictly an engineer.

As usual for Brunel, he was busily turning out inventions and schemes even during this time of trouble. He invented a knitting machine and two types of tinfoil, and he made improvements in printing machinery. If his business acumen had been greater, he might have solved his financial problems with these inventions, but they brought him little profit. He also designed several bridges. In fact, his proposed solution to the ice problem at St. Petersburg was ultimately a bridge design. Only a few of his bridges were built—all by the French government on the Island of Bourbon.

After his release from jail, Brunel spent the next three years working on plans for floating piers and swing bridges that were built at the Liverpool docks. He also made improvements in paddle wheels and marine steam engines. This interest in steam engines may have led him to the design of a new engine called the gas engine. It was based on the principle that increasing the temperature of liquified gas in a confined space will increase the pressure. He hoped to operate the engine by alternately raising and lowering the temperature of such a gas, but the design never succeeded, despite the expenditure of much time and money.

In 1824, Brunel began his best-known project, the Thames Tunnel. No one had ever built a tunnel large enough for traffic to use that ran under a river, though it had been attempted under the Thames around the turn of the century. A small one could be built but not a large one, because the timbers normally used in mines could not support the great weight of a large expanse of roof with the even greater weight of water above it. Brunel’s solution to the problem came to him in 1818 as he watched a beetle boring through a rotten timber. The creature ate the wood and then excreted waste to form a lining for its tunnel. It occurred to Brunel that an iron shield pressed against the face of a tunnel by hydraulic rams could keep the water from bursting through. The shield would have a wide rim extending back into the tunnel to support the walls and ceiling. As it moved forward, workers would construct brick or masonry walls behind it. He patented the idea in 1818.

Traffic congestion at London Bridge made the desirability of a tunnel under the Thames obvious, and by 1824, Brunel had persuaded a number of investors to form a company, endorsed by the duke of Wellington, for the purpose of digging a tunnel from Rotherhithe to Wapping. This time, Brunel was an employee with a salary of one thousand pounds per year. Digging began at Rotherhithe on February 16, 1825. A shaft fifty feet in diameter and seventy feet deep had to be dug before the tunnel could begin.

The tunnel drew enormous attention from the public. Over Brunel’s objections, the directors of the company allowed sightseers into the work area for a fee. Parliament, the press, the public, and friends of the directors all had ideas about how the project should be completed, but Brunel managed to retain control despite numerous battles among the directors. By 1826, his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, had become his second in command and actually oversaw the work. On May 18, 1827, the river broke into the tunnel. No one was killed and workmen managed to stop the flow of water by pouring clay into the hole from the river bed. After the tunnel was pumped dry, the Coldstream Guards played at a celebration dinner for fifty held inside the tunnel. On January 12, 1828, a second breakthrough occurred. This time, three men were killed and Isambard Brunel was severely injured. Such disasters in combination with strikes, panics, and strife within the company finally led to the abandonment of the undertaking for seven years in August, 1828. The public simply would not invest any more money in the company.

The company wanted a loan from the government to continue the work, but no loan was possible until the directors could end their quarrels. Finally, in 1832, the directors who questioned Brunel’s management were defeated and resigned. A government loan allowed the work to begin again in 1835. Despite the incursion of the river on three more occasions, the tunnel reached completion in November, 1841. Brunel was knighted in March, 1841, and appeared as a hero at the official opening ceremony on March 25, 1843. Contemporaries suggested that the strain of building the tunnel had ruined his health. The portrait of him in the National Portrait Gallery shows a bald, bespectacled man of slight build with a serene expression. Appropriately, if incongruously, he is shown seated at a desk located inside the Thames Tunnel. He obviously considered it the great work of his life, and it may indeed have taken its toll on his health.

Brunel had already suffered his first stroke shortly before the opening ceremony. His productive life was over. He had another stroke in 1845 and died four years later, on December 12, 1849.

Significance

Marc Isambard Brunel was one of the first to popularize the notion of professional civil engineering. The Thames Tunnel and the story of his block machinery captured the public imagination to an unparalleled extent. He and, to an even greater extent, his son, Isambard Brunel, came to stand almost as symbols for technical achievement in the Industrial Revolution. The fact that he was knighted for his accomplishments as an engineer not only indicated the importance of his activities to his contemporaries but also emphasized the changing spirit of the age. When he was born, in 1769, the idea of knighting someone for engineering accomplishments would hardly have been countenanced.

Bibliography

Beamish, Richard. Memoir of the Life of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel. London: Longmans, Green and Roberts, 1862. Most later accounts are based on this one. It is still probably the most useful source of information about Brunel’s professional life.

Clements, Paul. Marc Isambard Brunel. London: Longmans, Green, 1970. Most of this book is devoted to a discussion of the Thames Tunnel construction.

Lampe, David. The Tunnel. London: Harrap, 1963. As the title indicates, this book is devoted exclusively to the construction of the Thames Tunnel. The account is much the same as that given in Clements’s book (see above).

Noble, Lady Celia Brunel. The Brunels: Father and Son. London: Cobden Sanderson, 1938. The author was Isambard Brunel’s granddaughter, and Marc Brunel’s great-granddaughter. She provides information about their family life that is available no place else.

West, Graham. Innovation and the Rise of the Tunnelling Industry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Survey of technological innovations in the tunneling industry, from Brunel’s invention of a shield for the Thames Tunnel in 1825 to construction of a tunnel under the English Channel.