Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859), was the leading British civil engineer, famed for his bridges and dockyards, and especially for the construction of the first major British Railway, the Great Western, and for inventing the modern iron ship; his Great Eastern was the largest ship for 50 years.
He was the only son of Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849), a royalist who fled the French Revolution and built a career as a mechanical engineer in London.[1] The father is best known for the Thames Tunnel, the first major underwater tunnel. The son at age 14 was sent to France for schooling, but failed the admission test for the Ecole Polytechnique, studied watchmaking in Paris; he returned to London to apprentice with his father. He was badly injured in an 1828 accident on the Thames Tunnel project. Recuperating in Bristol, he was the prize winner of a local contest, proposing a spectacular suspension bridge over the River Avon. Funds ran out, but the bridge was eventually completed as a memorial after his death. Isambard Brunel was a volcano of brilliant ideas at the cutting edge of civil engineering, but based on rigorous mathematical designs and models. Bristol businessmen financed his plans to upgrade the city’s docks. Their confidence in him led to his appointment in 1833 (at age 26) as engineer to the Great Western Railway (GWR), covering the 100 miles between Bristol and London. The first major railway in the world, and the largest engineering project Britain had as yet attempted, GWR consumed Brunel’s phenomenal energy for 15 years. The result was a high speed network in south-west England that became a model copied all over Europe and the world. In 1849 Brunel introduced the express train, which made the 194 mile run from London to Exeter (with three stops) at the astonishing speed of 43 mph.
Brunel set the standard for a very-well-built railway, using careful surveys to minimize grades and curves. That necessitated expensive construction techniques and new bridges and viaducts, and the famous two-mile-long “Box Tunnel.” His assistant Daniel Gooch designed the locomotives. One controversial feature was the wide gauge (7 feet, instead of the normal 4'8"), which added to passenger comfort but made construction much more expensive and caused difficulties when eventually it had to interconnect with other railways using standard gauge; after its death the gauge was changed to normal.
Brunel was had quick mind, an unusually rich imagination, and a driving forceful personality that brooked no opposition. He was active in many public affairs.
He died young, leaving an estate of under £90,000, having lost much of his fortune in the “Great Eastern” venture.
�==Bibliography==
- Beckett, Derrick. Brunel's Britain(1980), 256 pp, well-illustrated analysis of key projects
- Buchanan, R. Angus. The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. 2002. 294 pp.
- Buchanan, R. Angus. “‘Brunel, Isambard Kingdom (1806–1859)”,’‘Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,’‘ (online 2005)
- Fox, Stephen. Transatlantic: Samuel Cunard, Isambard Brunel, and the Great Atlantic Steamships. 2003. 512 pp.
- George Augustus Nokes. A History of the Great Western Railway 1895 - 373 pages online at books.google.com
- Rolt, L.T.C. . ‘’Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1958) , the standard biography, 345pp
- Vaughan, Adrian. Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight-Errant (2003)
Primary sources
- ‘’The Works of Isambard Kingdom Brunel,’‘ edited� by Sir Alfred Pugsley (1976) 215pp
See also
- ↑ Father and son were both called Isambard, an old family name.