Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a prime inventive force behind the three most innovative ocean steamships built before 1870. Yet he spent most of his career on other projects ashore; he was not a naval architect or shipbuilder or any sort of marine engineer. As a landlubber, prone to seasickness, he never even took a major ocean voyage until the last year of his life. His steamships seem still more imposing as the off-hand products of a very busy engineer usually focused in other directions. During his lifetime of great fame and achievement, brunel was often called a genius for the crunching power, range and originality of his mind. More successfully than any of his contemporaries, he straddled the widening split between civil and mechanical engineering, resisting the modernist specializing trend. He deplored ‘the benumbing effect of rules laid down by authority’, as he put it, ‘this tendency to legislate and to rule, which is the “fashion” of the day’ No strict categories or conventions could ever contain him.
He made his first reputation as the engineer to the Great Western Railway. brunel surveyed its route – a winding course that ran 117 miles west from London to the port city of Bristol – and then planned every detail of its construction, from the locomotives and rolling stock down to the lamp-posts and stations. ‘No one can fill up the details,’ he explained. ‘I am obliged to do all myself.’ He made lavish use of all the canal builders’ methods for remaking a resistant landscape, so levelling the grade that the line was known as ‘brunel’s billiard table’. The Box Tunnel east of Bath ran for 1.8 miles through an insurmountable hill, much of it solid rock. The digging and blasting on this single project engaged up to 4000 workmen and 300 horses at a time, consumed a weekly ton of gunpowder and ton of candles, and killed nearly 100 men in five years. On completion it was the longest railway tunnel in the world. (The rising sun is said to shine clear through the tunnel on one day of the year, 9 April, brunel’s birthday. Given the usual spring weather in southwest England, this intriguing legend can seldom be tested, which may explain its survival.)
Queen Victoria chose the Great Western for her first trip by railway. In June 1842, returning to London from a sojourn at Windsor Castle, she and Prince Albert boarded a special train at Slough. The royal party, in six carriages, was greeted at the station by the Great Western’s top brass, and brunel personally took charge of the locomotive. The train reached Paddington Station in twenty-five fast minutes. Victoria and Albert alighted on a crimson carpet that stretched across the platform, and were cheered by crowds at the station and along the avenue outside. ‘Free from dust and crowd and heat,’ the queen noted of her railway baptism, ‘and I am quite charmed with it.’ A year later, Albert flew from Bristol to London in just over two hours, averaging a breathtaking fifty-seven miles an hour. Nothing could have better advertised the Great Western Railway – and its chief engineer.
brunel became a celebrity, an engineering superstar at a time when the public works of engineers were remaking everyday life in large, visible ways and sparking the popular imagination as never before. ‘Even to shake hands with one so remarkable,’ an acquaintance later wrote of meeting brunel, ‘was a thing to be remembered for a lifetime.’ He loved any spotlight, courting it and capering in it, presenting himself in dramatic ways. He was a small man, about five feet four inches tall, with an olive complexion and blazing dark eyes under a strong brow. He moved about quickly under clouds of cigar smoke, vital and vigorous, gesturing expansively with his hands as he spoke. brunel worked killing hours, even by engineering standards, but maintained a boyishly playful disposition, fond of jokes and pranks. Regardless of any contrary fashions, he wore a tall, cylindrical silk hat everywhere, even in his own travelling carriage. He explained, perhaps seriously, that it would protect his head from any blow by collapsing before the skull was struck. ‘It is at once warm and airy,’ he elaborated, ‘and you cannot improve upon it.’ (It also made him look taller.)
The extent of his fame was revealed in the spring of 1843 when, performing a coin trick for the children of a friend, he accidentally swallowed a half sovereign. It settled in his windpipe, causing pain in the chest and fits of coughing, and could not be dislodged. brunel designed an apparatus for holding himself upside down, hoping that gravity would help expel the coin. He was inverted and tapped on the back, causing such convulsive coughing that the experiment was abandoned. Sir Benjamin Brodie, a prominent physiologist and surgeon, was summoned. He performed a tracheotomy and poked around with his forceps, but without success. Newspapers issued regular bulletins. Even the august Times, which liked to define serious news coverage, kept its readers well informed. ‘Mr. brunel passed a quiet night,’ The Times reported. Four days later: ‘He was able on Thursday to take a small quantity of fish.’ And three days more: ‘Mr. brunel is going on favourably.’ At last, after almost six weeks, he was again turned upside down, with the incision in his windpipe kept open. Hit gently between the shoulder blades, brunel coughed twice, and the coin dropped from his mouth. The Times published a detailed final report (‘And thus, under Providence, a most valuable life has been preserved’).
Over his career, brunel contrived great triumphs and equally great failures. Everything about him was exaggerated; he vividly displayed both the strengths and deficiencies of genius. He reasonably believed that he knew more, across a wider range of engineering fields, than almost anybody he encountered. Among railway men, only Robert Stephenson, the accomplished son of George Stephenson, was greeted as a peer. ‘Stephenson is decidedly the only man in the profession that I feel disposed to meet as my equal, or superior, perhaps,’ brunel noted. ‘He has a truly mechanical head.’ Anyone else was expected to defer to brunel’s authority. His unorthodox mind and dead-sure tenacity pushed him through any obstacles into bold, original achievements – and also made him a quite difficult associate and boss. It was generally best not to resist or disagree with him. ‘Admit him to be absolute,’ one colleague noticed, ‘and he was not only reasonable, but kind. Hint to him that you had rights, and he was inexorable.’
As an engineer, he most valued ‘usefulness’, he insisted, ‘that characteristic of which we are most proud, and for which we have the vanity to think we are peculiarly distinguished.’ But ‘usefulness’ to brunel meant deploying the newest, strongest materials and methods, as called for by the most extravagant engineering standards available. The Great Western was the fastest, most solidly built railway of its time, but also the most expensive at £6.5 million, well over twice brunel’s initial estimate. He characteristically would brush aside budgets and spiralling expenses, preferring not to think about money, wanting only to be left free to do his finest work – thereby distressing his helpless financial associates, endangering and sometimes wrecking the whole enterprise. ‘He was the very Napoleon of engineers, thinking more of glory than of profit, and of victory than of dividends,’ a harsh contemporary estimate in the Quarterly Review concluded. ‘He seemed to love difficulties so much that he not infrequently chose the most difficult manner of overcoming them. Whatever was fullest of engineering perils had the greatest charms for him. That which was easy was comparatively uninteresting.’ Despite his declared focus on