Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born in Portsmouth, 9th April 1806. He was the son of Sir Marc Isambard Brunel who fled to America from the French Revolution before coming to England in 1799. Like his father Isambard was an engineer, designer and builder of bridges, tunnels, railways and steamships.

Brunel started his working life with a tidy and clean appearence. He was olive skinned in colour (which was from his father and the french.) but was only just over 5 feet tall. He was quite nimble and not clumsy. He would wear smart clothes and top hats to help him look taller.

After the problems with th Great Eastern near the end of his career, which was having a lot of trouble and made Brunel worry a lot, he stopped being so neat and tidy and started to wear shabby clothes that were smothered in cigar ash (he is shown in different pictures with a cigar in his mouth).He would wear huge , top hats as well.

During the good part of his life he could come up with designs in a rush such as a gun turret or a portable hospital for the army in Crimea but he is best remembered for his work in railways and ships.

Railways

Until Victorian Times travelling anywhere was uncomfortable, and very slow. The vehicles were horse drawn, the carriages travelled on rough, uneven and muddy roads. The roads had to follow the lie of the land so if a steep hill was in the way the road went round it, which made the journey longer. The arrival of the railway was to change land travel dramatically as the table on the next page shows.

On the 7th March 1833 Brunel joined the G.W.R (the Great Western Railway ) at Bristol to bring the railway in from London . He was not at all a stranger to Bristol. His plans to build the Clifton Suspension Bridge and harbour improvements had been accepted but there was not enough money in the city to start building.

By August 1833 he had produced his plans for the railway and the estimated cost was £2,805,330.It took 2 years of a long hard argument in parliament, but at last on the 31st August 1835 the Bill for “the line laid down by Mr. Brunel” from Bristol to London with stations at Bath, Chippenham , Swindon, Maidenhead and Reading with branch lines to Trowbridge and Bradford on Avon it received the Royal Assent.

The railway is 118 miles long and it took 6 years to lay. The hardest part was the 2 mile long tunnel at Box between Bath and Chippenham. It took 5 years to dig ,1 year longer than had been planned and when the 2 tunnels from each side of the hill met, they were only 1 and a quarter inches out from each other even though the tunnel was built with a deliberate bend in it. The tunnel was another first for Brunel because it was the longest tunnel in the country when it was finished. On the 30th June 1841 the directors of the Great Western Railway left London and made the first train journey to Bristol in 4 hours.

During the next 20 years the Great Western Railway expanded so quickly that it covered almost the same area as it did 100 years later. It reached Weymouth in the south, most of Devon and Cornwall, South Wales and reached into Birmingham and the Midlands through, Cheltenham and Gloucester from Swindon.

SHIPS

During his career Brunel built 3 ships that were very important in the history of ocean travelling as each one was a first of its kind.

In 1838 he built a paddle steamer called the Great Western which was the first transatlantic passenger steamship in regular service. It made the Bristol- New York crossing in an amazing 15 days.

In 1845 he built the SS Great Britain which was the first propellor driven oceangoing steamship. This ship was rescued from the Falkland Islands near Argentina in the 1960s and has been restored in the very same dry dock in Bristol that it was built in. It is now a museum and I have been to see it.

In 1858 Brunel built the Great Eastern and it took 5 years to build. It had a displacement* of 22, 500 tons, a length of 693 FT, a width of 120 FT, and a depth of hull 58 FT. It was desighned to make a round trip to Australia, going past the Cape of Good Hope without being recoaled. It was designed like this because 5 years before in 1853 directors concluded that, because of the cost of maintaning coaling stations on the way, such a route would not pay unless the ships could carry enough coal for the voyage out and home.

The Great Eastern is best remembered as the ship that laid the first successful telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean as well as several other cables which greatly improved communications with the United States. The ship was eventually scrapped in 1889.

All of Isambard’s ships had a mix of sails and engines. That was so that on days when there was no wind they had an engine to power them and on windy days they could turn the engine off to save the amount of fuel used. They could also use them both at the same time so they could go faster. Below is a picture of the Great Eastern.

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