None of his debacles ever impeded his uncanny ability to get jobs and attract new investors. He caught and embodied the relentless engineering optimism of his time. ‘The most useful and valuable experience is that derived from failures and not from successes,’ he once wrote. ‘But what cannot be done?’ When testifying before a board of directors or a committee of Parliament, he was a formidable advocate: overflowing with esoteric knowledge, diplomatic yet seemingly candid, speaking tersely to the point, and charming and witty when that seemed appropriate. He could usually persuade even the most sceptical listeners. He disliked writing and thought he had no talent for it, but his memoranda piled up compelling arguments by steady accretion. brunel was also a facile, accurate draughtsman, decorating his workbooks with fine small drawings tossed off for the apparent fun of it, and if necessary he could go to his workshop and make a skilful model of a design in wood or iron. With his command of speaking, writing, drawing and modelling, he had the rare capacity to explain himself with clarity and eloquence in four modes and three dimensions – a key to his overwhelming powers of persuasion.
Today brunel remains the only British engineer of his era with an enduring popular reputation. In Great Britain he is virtually a folk hero. Some of his notable engineering works have survived as reminders of his wide-ranging inventiveness. The Great Western Railway still runs across many of his bridges and through the Box Tunnel. At one end of the line, his station at Bristol Temple Meads still stands, though now reduced to a humble car park. At the other end, his Paddington Station in London encloses tracks and platforms in a space 700 feet long and 240 feet wide, under a vaulting roof of wrought-iron arched ribs covered with glass and corrugated iron. The Royal Albert Bridge, his greatest feat of bridge building, crosses the River Tamar near Plymouth in two spans of 455 feet each, an artful blend of arch and suspension techniques. With its approaches added, the Royal Albert traverses a total of almost 2200 feet. The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, over the dramatically deep Avon gorge, was finished to his designs as a posthumous memorial. The Great Britain, his second ocean steamship, was improbably salvaged after a long, chequered career and was brought home to Bristol to be reconstructed and opened to the public.
Other brunel traces help keep his name alive. The reputations of historical figures often depend on the written footprints they happened to leave behind; brunel’s private papers and manuscripts, amounting to at least twenty-seven thick letterbooks and many other files, are housed at the University of Bristol and at the Public Record Office in Kew. Other brunel letters are scattered in a dozen archives across Great Britain. One of the fullest research troves available for any Victorian engineer, these materials allow historians an uncommonly rich record of his life. At Westminster Abbey, a brunel window in the south aisle memorializes him. A brunel statue stands on the Thames Embankment in London, looking upriver towards the Charing Cross site of his Hungerford pedestrian bridge, now long gone. At Paddington Station, another statue has him sitting down, looking thoughtful, holding his tall silk hat in one hand and a notebook in the other. In Bristol, a third statue presents him standing up, a jaunty hand in his waistband, gazing off towards the river and his preserved Great Britain steamship.
Brunel’s biography recapitulates the history of engineering in his time, from its French origins to its ultimate mid-Victorian feats in iron and steam. His father, Marc Isambard brunel, came from a family of tenant farmers in northern France, halfway between Paris and Rouen. Over his father’s opposition, Marc decided to be an engineer and spent six years in the French navy. Came the Revolution, and his Royalist sympathies exiled him to America, then to England, where he married an Englishwoman and settled into a picaresque engineering career. He always dressed and carried himself like a gentleman from the ancien régime, with its antiquated manners and costume. Once, in a British court proceeding, he was asked if he was a foreigner. ‘Yes, I am a Norman,’ he replied, ‘and Normandy is a country from whence your oldest nobility derive their titles.’
Marc brunel met Henry Maudslay in 1799, two years after Maudslay had opened his own machinist’s workshop. Their complementary skills meshed well: the French-trained engineer explaining his concepts, the skilled British mechanic bringing them down to ground and to practical execution. brunel and Maudslay worked on projects together for the next twenty years. At the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, under the supervision of the naval architect Sir Samuel Bentham they devised steam-powered machinery for making the wooden blocks (pulleys) used in great numbers by sailing ships, turning out a cheaper, more consistent product than by the old hand methods. From this first success, brunel went on to inventions for sawing and bending wood, making shoes and boots, and improving marine steam engines and steamboat paddle wheels. He never quite regained the early heights of his novel blockmaking machinery. Abstracted and absentminded, he would lose umbrellas and take the wrong coach, ending up somewhere out in the country. A financial innocent, at one point he spent three months in a debtors’ prison.
Marc’s greatest work was his son, Isambard, born at Portsmouth in 1806. The boy resembled his father in appearance – small, a large head, dark complexion and eyes – and in his apparently innate knack for drawing and machinery. Isambard grew up in Chelsea, swimming in the Thames and meeting a stream of famous visitors at home. He found his métier at the Maudslay workshop: ‘your firm,’ as he later wrote to the Maudslays, ‘with which all my early recollections of engineering are so closely connected and in whose manufactory I probably acquired all my early knowledge of mechanics.’ Sent off to school near Brighton, he wrote home that he had been making boats, thus injuring his hands, and asked for his father’s eighty-foot tape measure. He spent two years in Paris, studying maths and the French language, and apprenticing under a famous maker of chronometers and scientific instruments. Denied entrance to the elite Ecole Polytechnique because of his foreign birth, he returned to England in 1822 and went to work for his father.
Still a teenager, he had already accumulated a range of education and experience – from Marc, Henry Maudslay, and in France – that few British engineers of his generation could match. Bilingual, bicultural, he displayed a precocious sense of engineering theory and practice. His intellectual gifts were obvious. Marc fully recognized them and pushed his son onward. As Isambard’s career took flight, his immersion in real engineering projects eventually crowded out his more theoretical French background. ‘One sadly loses the habit of mathematical reasoning,’ he noted. He became very much an Englishman, speaking with no French accent, and ever wary of continental tendencies. Later he advised a young man to spurn any writings by French engineers. ‘Take them for abstract science,’ he suggested, ‘and study their statics dynamics geometry etc etc to your heart’s content – but never even read any of their works on mechanics any more than you would search their modern authors for religious principles. A few hours spent in a blacksmith’s and wheelwright’s shop will teach you more practical mechanics – read English books for practice. There is little enough to learn in them but you will not have to unlearn that little.’
In 1825 the brunels embarked on a daring, unprecedented project to build a 1200-foot carriage tunnel under the Thames. Nobody had ever run a tunnel beneath a navigable, tidal river. The watery riverbed overhead consisted of unpredictable mixtures of clay, sand, gravel and mud, and was constantly disrupted by tides and river traffic. For these daunting conditions, Marc invented a novel construction shield. It resembled a giant bookshelf, three men high and twelve men across. Each man stood in a separate compartment, digging with pick and shovel; as the ground was excavated, the shield was screwed forward; bricklayers came in behind and shored up the tunnel. The work inched along, beset by leaking water and lighting and ventilation problems. At times the men stood in black water up to their knees.
After a year of difficulties, Marc took sick and told Isambard, twenty years old, to take over. The response of the brawny workmen to their new boss – so young, small, and French-educated to boot – may be imagined. Given all the circumstances, he managed well enough. At one