Isambard Kingdom Brunel: The Little Giant Who Built the Modern World

He stood five feet four inches tall. He was almost never seen without a cigar and a stovepipe hat. He slept four hours a night, worked the other twenty, and in the space of a single human lifetime built things that engineers today look at with undisguised awe.

His name was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. And there is a strong argument that no individual in history did more to shape the physical world we live in than this small, tireless, visionary son of a French refugee who made Britain the engineering capital of the earth.

In 2002 the British public voted in a BBC poll to find the greatest Briton of all time. Brunel came second. He was beaten by Winston Churchill, who saved Britain from Nazi occupation.

That is the company Isambard Kingdom Brunel keeps.

The Son of a Refugee

Brunel was born on the 9th of April 1806 in Portsmouth, the son of Marc Brunel — a French engineer who had fled revolutionary France — and Sophia Kingdom, an Englishwoman whose surname became her son's extraordinary middle name. Marc Brunel was himself a remarkable engineer, responsible for the Thames Tunnel, the first tunnel ever built under a navigable river anywhere in the world.

Isambard grew up surrounded by engineering. He was educated in France, returned to England, and at the age of twenty was appointed resident engineer on his father's Thames Tunnel project. During its construction the tunnel flooded. Brunel was nearly killed. He spent months recovering.

He was back on site as soon as he could walk.

The Great Western Railway

In 1833, aged just 27, Brunel was appointed chief engineer of the Great Western Railway — the line that would connect London to Bristol. What he proceeded to build was not merely a railway. It was a statement of what engineering could be when imagination was allowed to run at full stretch.

Brunel designed the entire route himself — surveying the land on horseback, calculating gradients, positioning tunnels and bridges and cuttings with an obsessive attention to the passenger experience as well as the engineering reality. He specified a broad gauge track — seven feet and a quarter inch between the rails — wider than the standard gauge used elsewhere, because he believed it would allow faster, smoother, more stable travel. He was right. The broad gauge Great Western Railway was the fastest railway in the world.

The Box Tunnel near Bath — at nearly two miles the longest railway tunnel in the world when it was built — was considered by many of Brunel's contemporaries to be impossible. The engineering challenges were immense, the death toll among the navvies who built it was terrible, and the doubters were loud. Brunel built it anyway. It opened in 1841, precisely on schedule.

He also designed the stations. He designed the bridges. He designed the overall aesthetic of the railway as a unified experience rather than a collection of separate engineering problems. Paddington Station in London — still one of the great railway termini of the world, still serving millions of passengers every year — is Brunel's station. The roof that soars above the platforms, the wrought iron arches, the sense of arrival and departure made architectural — all Brunel.

The Ships

If the Great Western Railway had been the entirety of Brunel's achievement it would have secured his place in history. It was perhaps a third of it.

Brunel built ships. Not ordinary ships — ships that redefined what ships could be, ships that broke every record that existed and established new ones, ships that changed the nature of oceanic travel.

The SS Great Western, launched in 1837, was the largest steamship in the world and the first purpose-built transatlantic steamship. It proved that steam-powered ocean crossings were commercially viable — something many experts had insisted was impossible.

The SS Great Britain, launched in 1843, was the first ocean-going ship in history to combine a screw propeller with an iron hull. It is now preserved in Bristol's Great Western Dockyard, restored to her original condition, the direct ancestor of every large ship afloat in the world today. Every modern ocean-going vessel descends technically from what Brunel launched in Bristol in 1843.

Then there was the SS Great Eastern. Launched in 1858, she was by an enormous margin the largest ship ever built — nearly 700 feet long, capable of carrying 4,000 passengers, so far ahead of her time that the world's shipyards would not produce anything larger for another 40 years. She was a commercial failure — too large for the ports of her era, too expensive to operate efficiently — but she found her purpose. In 1866 the Great Eastern laid the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable, connecting Britain and America by wire for the first time in history.

Brunel's ship connected two continents. The modern communications world began on the deck of a vessel he designed.

The Cost

Brunel paid for his genius with his health. He worked at an inhuman pace — his notebooks show a man simultaneously managing dozens of projects, writing thousands of letters, solving problems that would have occupied lesser engineers for months in the space of days. He smoked constantly. He barely slept. He drove himself and everyone around him with an intensity that bordered on mania.

In 1859, aged 53, he suffered a stroke on the deck of the Great Eastern just before her maiden voyage. He was carried ashore. Ten days later, on the 15th of September 1859, he died.

He had been an engineer for 30 years. In those 30 years he had built a major railway with all its infrastructure, three revolutionary ships, numerous bridges, and a raft of other projects. He had done it through relentless application of an imagination that simply did not recognise the word impossible.

The Bridge

Go to Bristol. Cross the Avon Gorge on the Clifton Suspension Bridge — Brunel's bridge, designed when he was 24 years old, completed after his death in 1864 as a memorial to him. Stand in the middle of it. Look down at the gorge. Look at the chains stretching to the towers on either side.

He drew this. A young man in his twenties stood at the edge of this gorge and drew what would span it, and then he made it happen.

The bridge is still there. It is still in daily use. It is still one of the most beautiful bridges in the world.

Britain produced this man. This country, this culture, this tradition of practical genius and restless ambition and refusal to accept that something cannot be done — produced Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Be proud of that. It deserves your pride.