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Hall of Inventors & Engineers
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Great Western Railway, SS Great Britain, Clifton Bridge
- 1806 – 1859
- Inventors & Engineers · 7 of 12
Hall of Inventors & Engineers
Great Western Railway, SS Great Britain, Clifton Bridge
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (9 April 1806 – 15 September 1859) was an English civil and marine engineer considered "one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution", "perhaps the most eminent Victorian engineer", and one whose work "altered the lives of almost every person in Britain, and millions abroad". The first engineer of the Great Western Railway (GWR), he was responsible for the design and construction of its London–Bristol main line. His maritime career saw the construction of the largest steamships in the world at the time, the SS Great Western, SS Great Britain, and SS Great Eastern. His career was marred by continual financial and engineering setbacks.
His first major project, the Thames Tunnel, was cancelled after a collapse nearly killed him, and was only completed later without his involvement. While recovering, he began his work on the Clifton Suspension Bridge; after riots in Bristol around government policy, work on the bridge was cancelled and it was only completed after his death.
Brunel's time at the GWR saw ground-breaking advances in railway design and construction quality, yet was marred by frequent conflict with its board and figures such as Dionysius Lardner. Additionally, his choice to use a broad gauge of 7 ft 1⁄4 in (2,140 mm) became greatly problematic for the GWR in the long-term, and his attempt to convert parts of the network into an atmospheric railway was unsuccessful. His railway career involved his founding of many of the principles of a successful railway, with his route for the Great Western Main Line minimising curves and gradients. Brunel's construction of the Box Tunnel, the longest in the world at the time, was a success in spite of claims it would be impossible to construct safely. The Royal Albert Bridge was also eventually successful, but the lasting impact of the panic of 1847 meant Brunel had to simplify its design, and it was only completed shortly before his death.
Seeking to expand the GWR westwards toward the Americas, Brunel began looking at the prospect of developing steamships in the mid-1830s, and the three ships he built were each engineering marvels in their own right. The SS Great Western was the second ship to hold the Blue Riband, and her transatlantic crossings were commercially successful. The SS Great Britain was both the first iron-hulled and propeller-driven ship to make a transatlantic crossing, and was successful until her running aground in 1847 bankrupted her parent company. The SS Great Eastern was set back by conflict between Brunel and John Scott Russell and marred by financial and technical problems, with Brunel dying shortly after she suffered a huge explosion on her maiden voyage. She never saw commercial success except as a cable layer.
In 2002, Brunel was placed second in a BBC public poll to determine the "100 Greatest Britons", with a major programme of events celebrating the 200th anniversary of his birth in 2006. Brunel is remembered as an engineering genius and visionary, whose maritime works in particular were too far ahead of their time to see success. His obituary in the Morning Chronicle remarked that "the history of invention records no instance of grand novelties so boldly imagined and so successfully carried out by the same individual".
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born on 9 April 1806 in Britain Street, Portsea, Portsmouth, Hampshire. He was the third child of his parents, and only son; his elder sisters were named Sophia and Emma and born in 1801 and 1804 respectively. At the time of his birth, his father was working on various projects for the Royal Navy in the area, including block-making machinery which employed the world's first production line. He was named Isambard after his father, the French-British civil engineer Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, and Kingdom after the English family of his mother, Sophia Kingdom; both of his parents had links to Normandy, where the Brunel name had been recorded since the 1400s. Dr Steven Brindle calls Marc Brunel "the most remarkable and able inventor living in Britain at that date".
Sophia, Brunel's mother, was an orphan for most of her childhood; her father, the naval contractor William Kingdom, died when she was young. Brunel's father, Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, was born in France, but spent much of his childhood in England before returning in 1792. After making a royalist speech denouncing Maximilien Robespierre in January 1793, he was forced into hiding with a royalist family, where he met Sophia; the pair quickly fell in love and were engaged. Leaving for New York in September 1793, Marc spent 5–6 years in the United States finding work; in October 1793, Sophia was imprisoned in a convent for her royalist links and was only released upon Robespierre's fall in August 1794. The couple were reunited on 16 March 1799 and married on 1 November.
Shortly after Brunel's birth, the family moved to 4 Lindsey Row in Chelsea, London, which had been converted from Lindsey House. Marc Brunel devised many business ventures, such as making boots for the British Army in February 1809, which was successful until the government cancelled an order and refused to pay, leaving him with significant losses. Furthermore, the sawmill he had founded burnt down in August 1814, and he was unable to raise funds for its reconstruction.
On 14 May 1821, his father, who had accumulated debts of over £5,000 (equivalent to £475,000 in 2025), was sent to King's Bench Prison, a debtors' prison. Not wanting to abandon her husband, Sophia went with him. After three months went by with no prospect of release, Marc Brunel made public that he was considering working under Alexander I of Russia, which caused Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, to warn the Chancellor they could not lose such an engineer. In response, the Chancellor relented and issued Marc the £5,000 to clear his debts, in exchange for his promise to remain in Britain; the couple were released in August 1821. Dr Steven Brindle makes the comparison in this respect between Brunel and Charles Dickens: both were of a similar age; both were from Portsmouth; both had fathers sent to debtor's prisons; and both spent their early adulthood in London.
In spite of his family's tumultuous finances, Brunel had a happy childhood, with his father acting as his first teacher. His father taught him drawing and observational techniques from the age of four, and Brunel had learned Euclidean geometry by eight. During this time, he learned to speak French fluently and the basic principles of engineering. He was encouraged to draw interesting buildings and identify any faults in their structure, and like his father, he demonstrated an aptitude for mathematics and mechanics.
When Brunel was eight, he was sent to a school run by a local Reverend Weeden Butler. He was then sent to Dr Morrell's boarding school in Hove, where he studied classics. His father was determined that Brunel should have access to the high-quality education he had enjoyed in his youth in France. Accordingly, at the age of 14, the younger Brunel was enrolled at the Henri Quatre (Henry IV) College in Caen, where he remained for two years. During his time at the school, he was seen to be interested in helping his father with his work and was very proficient in calculations. Nevertheless, he was also fond of artistic drawings in addition to engineering-based ones. He then went to Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, which was known for its mathematics education. While abroad, he was easily sheltered from his parents' imprisonment, but having been imprisoned for his debts, it is impossible that Marc Brunel could have paid for his son's education; the benefactor who did remains unknown.
When Brunel completed his studies at Lycée Henri-IV in 1822, his father had him presented as a candidate at the renowned engineering school École Polytechnique, but as a foreigner, he was deemed ineligible for entry. At the time, there were no university degrees in the United Kingdom in engineering or mechanics, and so Brunel decided to stay in Paris and study under the prominent master clockmaker and horologist Abraham-Louis Breguet, because horology was the finest type of engineering. Breguet praised Brunel's potential in letters to his father; in August 1822, having completed his apprenticeship, Brunel returned to England.
Brunel continued his engineering education in England by becoming an assistant to his father from 1823, which allowed him to work on significant engineering projects. During this time, he helped his father with building the bridges on the French island of Réunion (then the Île Bourbon), a design for a potential Panama Canal, the concept of a floating pier for the Port of Liverpool, and working with Augustus Charles Pugin to design Kensal Green Cemetery. While during this time Brunel's career was calm and stable, he also became impatient that he was not yet prominent and successful.
In spring 1823, Brunel's father came up with an idea for a so-called Gaz Engine [sic] which was an alternate design to the steam engine. The idea was based on an experiment by Michael Faraday in which gases such as carbon dioxide could be liquefied under high pressure and, upon being heated, they would boil and massively expand in volume, hence producing the force to drive the engine. The benefit of this in comparison to the steam engine was that there was no smoke released, making it more pleasant to run, and that it would supposedly be significantly more efficient.
Brunel and his father then tried to produce this Gaz Engine at a huge cost, yet Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot's work on thermodynamics at around the same time would prove such an engine impossible. However, this work was not yet understood in the United Kingdom, and so Brunel and his father continued to work on it in vain, receiving funding from the Admiralty and Faraday himself. By January 1833, he had finally abandoned his ideas of the Gaz engine, having spent £15,000 on the project, equivalent to £1,410,000 in 2025. He wrote in his diary that "All the time and expense both enormous devoted to this thing for nearly ten years are therefore wasted".
Brunel's chance to become a prominent engineer arose in July 1824, when his father was appointed as the engineer of a project to build a tunnel under the river Thames. Described by Annabel Gillings as the "most ambitious engineering project of the time", and hailed as an extreme feat in science and engineering, it was designed to alleviate the pressure on London's ferries and on its bridges, of which there were none near the London Docks. The biggest challenge was the softness of the soil below the river: a tunnel between Rotherhithe and Limehouse had been proposed by Robert Vazie in 1802, but after it collapsed inwards twice due to quicksand, the project was abandoned. The composition of the riverbed by Rotherhithe was itself little more than waterlogged sediment and loose gravel.
Marc Brunel's idea for overcoming these challenges came from the shipworm family of molluscs: their hard shell grinds and softens the wood in front of them, which they then eat and, using their faeces to fill in their own path and thus prevent the wood from collapsing. This inspired his tunnelling shield, which he patented on 20 January 1818, wherein twelve workers mined from within a huge cast-iron shield and the spoil was converted to bricks behind them to form the tunnel walls. Only one person would mine at a time, and that person would only uncover, mine, and recover one of their sections at once; the shield was moved forward once this had been done for all thirty-six sections. On 19 February 1824, one day after Marc Brunel met with the Institution of Civil Engineers, the formation of the Thames Tunnel Company was announced.
The plan for the Thames Tunnel involved digging two separate bores as a dual carriageway, and to construct it very close to the riverbed to avoid the dangerous quicksand beneath. The project ceremonially began on 2 March 1825, and Brunel laid the second brick, after his father. Brunel was given the job of assistant to John Armstrong, the resident engineer of the project, a role Brunel had hoped to have himself. Due to early setbacks, the company pressured for the tunnelling to happen faster, and so the construction became more dangerous. The sewage in the Thames polluted and poisoned the workers below, and yet Brunel and his father helped to work the tunnelling shield.
In April 1826, when John Armstrong resigned due to illness, Brunel took over as resident engineer; his father then stepped down from leading the project after contracting pleurisy, with Brunel taking full charge of the engineering from 3 January 1827. At one critical point in September 1826, he refused to leave the tunnel for a total of 96 hours, which he spent working with occasional breaks to sleep. As a token of respect for the toil of the workers and their trying conditions, he moved to a cabin inside the tunnel with one of his assistants, spending his time monitoring the progress and quality of construction and ensuring the workers' discipline.
On many occasions, Brunel risked his life swimming out to rescue workers. After one such incident, he visited the workmen during their dinner and was received with applause, with their wives cutting pieces off of his coat to keep as relics. His most challenging task was dealing with the Thames Tunnel Company, which prioritised the progress of construction over workers' safety; for example, all of Marc Brunel's designs for a drain to protect the tunnel from flooding were rejected due to cost.
By April 1827, the tunnel was so close to the riverbed that discarded items were falling from the river into the tunnel, and the conditions were so polluting that one of Brunel's assistant engineers died and another was left blind in one eye. On 18 May, the river broke through into the tunnel, but luckily no one was killed, as Brunel and his assistants pulled the men out of the water. A team of engineers, including Brunel, dived into the Thames from the surface; they could see the inside of the tunnel from the river. The workers filled in the hole and drained the water, with Brunel commenting unaffected in his diaries:
I wish I had kept this journal with me even at work on the river. What a dream it now appears to me. Going down in the diving bell, finding and examining the hole, standing on the corner of No12! The novelty of the thing, the excitement by the occasional risk attending our subaquatic excursion, the crowds of boats to witness our works... what sensations!
— Brunel's private diary, 13 October 1827
Text from the Wikipedia article “Isambard Kingdom Brunel”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.