Isambard sought refuge in an extraordinary private journal, the most candid and searching self-appraisals he ever committed to paper. He recorded the details of his daily life, the tunnel work, sleeping five hours a night, and stray thoughts about girls. At twenty-one, despite his adult responsibilities in the tunnel, he was between adolescence and grownup-ness. Still under construction, he took an unsparing look at himself. ‘My self-conceit and love of glory or rather approbation vie with each other which shall govern me,’ he wrote. ‘I often do the most silly, useless things to appear to advantage… My self-conceit renders me domineering, intolerant, nay, even quarrelsome with those who do not flatter.…I am always building castles in the air, what time I waste.’ Yet that self-conceit had quite adequate cause; he fully appreciated his own special talents and sought fame and reputation. ‘My ambition, or whatever it may be called (it is not the mere wish to be rich) is rather extensive.’ So probably he should never marry. ‘For one whose ambition is to distinguish himself in the eye of the public, such freedom is almost indispensable.’ Or maybe he should. ‘Yet, in sickness and disappointment, how delightful to have a companion whose sympathy one is sure of possessing.’ In this journal, he is less the engineering wunderkind, more any young man in baffled turmoil about his future.
In January 1828 water again broke into the tunnel, more seriously this time. Six men were killed. Isambard was knocked down, suffered internal injuries, and barely escaped alive. It took him over three months to heal. The Mechanics’ Magazine, no fan of the brunels, praised his coolness under pressure and brave concern for his men. But investors had lost confidence in the project, still only half completed. Work was stopped and the tunnel sealed. ‘Tunnel is now, I think, dead,’ Isambard later wrote in his diary. ‘This is the first time I have felt able to cry… However, nil desperandum [never despair] has always been my motto – we may succeed yet.’
At the time, he felt crushed by such a public defeat. The halting of the Thames Tunnel project did, however, free brunel from an endless, risky, dreadful burden – and from his father’s orbit – to pursue other work on his own. In Bristol, his designs for docks and the Clifton Suspension Bridge brought him to the attention of men involved in starting the Great Western Railway. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-six, he was entering the most successful decade of his career. (The Thames Tunnel project was later resumed, but without brunel fils. It opened in 1843 just for pedestrians, not carriages, and ultimately became part of the London Underground.)
In step with the general progression from civil to mechanical engineering, brunel’s attention moved from tunnels to railways. He took his first trip late in 1831, on the Liverpool and Manchester. The carriage shook too much for easy writing. ‘The time is not far off,’ he decided, ‘when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 miles an hour – let me try.’ He got his chance with the Great Western, the longest railway yet conceived in Great Britain. Appointed its engineer in the spring of 1833, he threw himself into this new work with all the energy of a good engineer at play. He spent long days on horseback surveying and plotting its route, placating resistant landowners along the way, and stayed up late writing letters and reports. Against the advice of most railway men, he convinced his board to accept a broad gauge of seven feet, more than two feet wider than the tracks of existing lines: a bold departure, ultimately proven wrongheaded, but early evidence of brunel’s forceful persuasive gifts.
For two years he was too busy even to scribble in his diary. The day after Christmas in 1835, he finally sat down and took stock. ‘The most eventful part of my life…emerging from obscurity,’ he wrote. ‘What a change – The Railway now is in progress. I am thus Engineer to the finest work in England…and it’s not this alone but everything I have been engaged in has been successful.’ (He was perhaps repressing any memories of the Thames Tunnel.) ‘And this at the age of 29 – Faith not so young as I always fancy tho’ really can hardly believe it when I think of it.…I don’t like it – it can’t last – bad weather must soon come.’ He moved into plusher quarters at 18 Duke Street in the Westminster area of London, with easy access to the corridors of influence at Parliament and Whitehall. It remained brunel’s home and office for the rest of his life. Resolving his earlier doubts about possible marital intrusions on those boundless ambitions, in July 1836 he took a trophy wife, a fabled beauty named Mary Horsley whom he had known and intermittently courted for five years.
Marriage and, later, fatherhood did not affect his usual work habits. During the first four months after his wedding, he made decisions about the brick-arched Maidenhead Bridge over the Thames, the Box Tunnel, the tile drains along the track, the heating and welding of iron bars, the sinking of bridge arches and the proper way of laying bricks, the ordering of four locomotives, the size of engine valves relative to piston area, the question of allowing Great Western work on Sundays, and the cheapest wood for posts. It was brunel’s line, all down the line. He installed his own methods for putting down the roadbed and securing the rails, served as architect for every station along the way, and even picked the names for the first locomotives. ‘It is an understood thing,’ he wrote to one of his men, ‘that all under me are subject to immediate dismissal at my pleasure.’
brunel’s control of every aspect of the Great Western made him the culprit when anything went wrong. As construction took longer and longer, and costs more than doubled, directors in London and Liverpool started having doubts about their young engineer. ‘The Box Tunnel is operating a good deal against the Great Western,’ noted George H. Gibbs, a London director. ‘Connecting it with the name of brunel, the difficulties of the Thames Tunnel are not unlikely to come into people’s mind.’ The first section of the line, from London to Maidenhead, was opened to passengers in June 1838. When trains did not run as fast or as smoothly as expected, brunel recommended reballasting the roadbed, replacing springs in the cars, and improving the locomotives. As the trading price of Great Western stock kept falling, shareholders in Liverpool moved to dismiss brunel. Even George Gibbs, who usually defended him, felt torn. ‘With all his talent,’ Gibbs wrote of brunel, ‘he has shown himself deficient…in arranging his work in his own mind so as to enable him to proceed with it rapidly, economically and surely. There have been too many mistakes, too much of doing and undoing.’
Under fire, for a brief time brunel felt shattered, even unable to work. His creation, so subject to costly revisions, was mockingly called the Great Experimental Railway. Gibbs had a blunt conversation with him; brunel promised to cooperate and retained the support of Gibbs and his faction. At a tense showdown during a meeting of the directors, brunel was again persuasive, defending himself with an even temper and compelling effect. The Liverpool contingent was outvoted, and brunel proceeded to finish the Great Western. Upon completion, it was acclaimed as the fastest, most strongly built railway in the world, and its engineer’s characteristic problems along the way were forgotten.
Brunel’s first steamship began with a famous jest in October 1835. At a Great Western directors meeting in London, someone objected to the unprecedented length of the line, planned to run all the way to Bristol through many expensive tunnels at the western end. Rising to the challenge and topping it, brunel replied with what he apparently meant as