With improvements in travel and the growth in prosperity, people found their way across the vast continent. They marked the empty plains with their communities, building the first towns, selling the virgin land, creating a country, only stopped by a poor or hostile environment, such as the desert regions of Arizona and Nevada. And even here in a region so bereft of life, in the early 1900s, Arthur Powell Davis of the US Bureau of Reclamation realised it would be possible to make the desert bloom. He dreamed of harnessing the Colorado River as it gouged its way for 1,400 miles through snowy heights and forbidding canyons and turning the wild spirit of the unruly river into an obedient force for good.
The scale of the enterprise was so vast that it took years to win financial backing and government support. Everything about it broke records. As tall as a sixty-storey building and with a larger volume than the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Hoover Dam, begun in 1931, was the biggest dam in the world. At the height of the Depression, poverty-stricken workers earning just a few dollars a day died from horrific explosions, carbon monoxide poisoning and heat exhaustion. It was chief engineer Frank Crowe, with his skilled management, who built it ahead of schedule and under budget, and who, in doing so, created one more industrial wonder for the modern world.
By the time President Roosevelt inaugurated the Hoover Dam in 1935, the last ‘wonder’ described in this book, the world was transformed in almost every way possible. People’s standard of living had increased greatly, average life expectancy had almost doubled in the West and infant mortality had virtually disappeared. Other systems of transport had been developed too, including the automobile which gave many people their own private transport. Higher education and specialist training opened up new opportunities for those whose forebears, a few generations before, had been labouring in fields unable to read or write. The £1 a week that Robert Stevenson had given his labourers to work a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, wet or dry, had by the time the Hoover Dam was lighting up the western deserts turned into a wage that a working man, increasingly backed by unions, could live on more comfortably.
The stories in this book capture the restlessness and ambition of an age and also represent a high watermark of industrial achievement. Each ‘wonder’ illustrates the swiftly moving frontiers of technology, and serves as a unique monument, a marker for what was known at the time. Taken together, the wonders illustrate progress by charting the frontiers of industrial knowledge and expertise. Timing is critical; it is no accident that these particular stories occurred when they did. It would not have been possible to create a Hoover Dam or a Panama Canal earlier in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the French tried and failed in Panama since the technology and infrastructure to create the canal were not in place. The changes are not linear; history is not about a smooth, even progression. There were enormous bursts of creative endeavour and change that reached out in unexpected directions until what was once barely possible became routine.
In one sense the stories present a romantic view of man – of an individual who struggles to realise his dream and make a mark on the world. As the nineteenth century progressed the men of genius took the stage in quick succession, each engrossed in his own creation to the exclusion of all else. Each in turn gave so much of himself, often denying relationships, sleep, basic human comforts and ultimately, in some cases, their health, to the demands of their creative work. Robert Stevenson struggled in dangerous seas to create his lighthouse, which is the oldest offshore lighthouse still standing anywhere in the world, a testimony to his battle with the sea. The Roeblings – father and son – were prepared to give their very lives to the Brooklyn Bridge, whose perfect symmetry and beauty have inspired poets and artists. And Brunel was in the very midst of the Industrial Revolution, seemingly directing it himself, throwing his small, energetic figure into the great mélange, absorbed in the delight of it all, unable to tear himself away from his Great Ship, no matter what was the price to be paid.
The legacy of their great ambition and talent remains to this day. With the exception of Brunel’s Great Ship, all the wonders have survived to the twenty-first century and are now celebrated as powerful symbols of the modern world. The wealth of inspiration and energy of the nineteenth century was the catalyst for the huge progress that marked the twentieth century as the coming industrial giants stood on the shoulders of an earlier generation.
‘I have never embarked on any one thing to which I have so entirely devoted myself, and to which I have devoted so much time, thought and labour, on the success of which I have staked so much reputation …’
Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the Great Eastern, 1854
IN 1857, ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL, Britain’s foremost engineer, paused one day for a photograph in Napier shipyard at Millwall in east London. Cigar in mouth, with mud caked on his shoes and trousers, this is no formal photograph. He has his hands in his pockets, his clothes are creased, his hair untidy. The face and, particularly, the eyes are absorbed in something that can only be imagined, something that occupies him completely. He looks like a man with a future.
Brunel was at the peak of his fame, his latest venture had become the talk of England. Behind him rose the massive dark shape of the hull of the Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world, the Leviathan of her day. Expectant sightseers from across Europe came to see her on the banks of the Thames, where she rose, wrote Charles Dickens, ‘above the house-tops, above the tree-tops, standing in impressive calmness like some huge cathedral’. Nothing like this had been seen before; when complete, she would be the largest moving man-made object ever built and, for many, a symbol of the greatness of the British Empire. Yet far from being the final triumph in Brunel’s brilliant career, the Great Eastern was to become the monstrous creation that would destroy him.
Brunel’s grand scheme had begun to take shape a few years earlier, shortly after the Great Exhibition of 1851. Britain had seen a spectacular boom in the railway industry, with over 6,000 miles of track laid since the 1830s. Brunel himself, caught up in the thick of railway mania, was increasingly disillusioned by it. ‘The whole world is railway mad,’ he protested to a friend. ‘I am really sick of hearing proposals made.’ Among his sketches for Paddington Station in London in 1852, his notebooks reveal drawings of his next bold venture: a great steamship, almost twice the length of any ship ever built.
He dreamed of a floating city, majestic by day and a brilliant mirage at night, reflecting a million lights in the dark water. It was to be a ship of such vast and unheard of proportions that she could carry 4,000 passengers in pampered luxury as she steamed through distant seas. In the evening there would be dancing under sparkling chandeliers, or a stroll on deck in especially manufactured ‘moonlight’ as she pursued her steady course to the Antipodes magically, without need of refuelling. But could Brunel ever realise his dream and build the ‘Crystal Palace of the Seas’? And who could afford to support him?
Most ships docking in the Thames in the mid-nineteenth century were made of wood and built to a traditional design around a skeleton of wooden ribs giving strength to the hull. They were wind powered and usually little more than 150 feet in length. Brunel’s ‘Great Ship’, as she came to be known, was to be 692 feet long, 120 feet wide and 58 feet deep. Enormous engines as high as a house, with the power of over 8,000 galloping horses, would drive her paddle wheels and screw. In addition, an impressive 6,500 yards of sail would be carried on six masts and five funnels that were spread along her deck. The revolutionary new design of her hull, strong and streamlined, would see her cut through the seas as smoothly as a knife cuts butter and she would have the practical ability to carry all her own fuel to the furthest reaches of the empire and back. Brunel felt certain there was a need for such a ship.
To most shipbuilders of the day, Brunel’s