Brunel: pocket GIANTS: The Engineering Visionary

by Eugene Byrne

Overview

In a BBC poll in 2002, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was voted the second-greatest Briton of all time, only eclipsed by Churchill.

It's often claimed that that through his ships, bridges, tunnels and railways Brunel played a critical role in creating the modern world. In the soaring ambitions of the Victorian age, nobody thought bigger than Brunel.

Never tied to a dusty office, he crammed enough work, adventure and danger into a single year to last a lesser person a lifetime. He was also a brilliant showman, a flamboyant personality and charmer who time and again succeeded in convincing investors to finance schemes which seemed impossible.

Brunel made plenty of mistakes, some of them ruinously expensive. But he also designed and built several structures which are still with us to this day. For these we have to thank a man who was famously described as ‘in love with the impossible’.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780750955256
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	02/03/2014
Series:	Pocket GIANTS
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	189 KB

About the Author

EUGENE BYRNE is a freelance journalist, author and researcher. Born in Ireland, he grew up in Somerset and studied history at Lancaster before moving to Bristol in 1981, where he has lived ever since. As a journalist he has contributed hard news and history/heritage stories to innumerable publications, including most national newspapers as well as writing a number of science fiction novels and short stories. In recent years he has become more involved in work on the history of Bristol and south-west England, working with artist Simon Gurr to produce three history books in graphic form. He also provides historical consultancy for a range of clients.

Read an Excerpt

Brunel: Pocket Giants

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By Eugene Byrne

The History Press

Copyright © 2014 Eugene Byrne
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5525-6

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CHAPTER 1

Marc Isambard Brunel

'Come on, Citizen!'

On 17 January 1793, France's revolutionary regime condemned King Louis XVI to death.

That day, a young French naval officer was sitting with his dog in a cafe in Paris. On hearing the news, he spoke a little too loudly about his feelings and found himself in an angry exchange with some republicans. As he stood up to leave, he summoned his dog ironically: 'Come on, Citizen!'

People were being executed in ever greater numbers for alleged or actual crimes against the revolution. The toll extracted by the guillotine – the 'national razor' as they were starting to call it – would soon peak over a ten-month period known as 'The Terror'. Marc Brunel decided to flee the cafe, flee his lodgings in Paris and, eventually, flee the country.

Marc Isambard Brunel was born in Hacqueville in Normandy in 1769. His family were prosperous farmers, and he was proud of his roots. In a courtroom in England he was once asked if he was a foreigner. 'Yes,' he replied. 'I am a Norman, and it is from Normandy that your oldest nobility derive their titles.'

Isambard was a very uncommon name. It is thought to have derived from the German surname 'Eisenbarth', which may originally have meant 'iron beard' or 'shining iron', which seems appropriate. It may have arrived among the Brunel family of Normandy via some Flemish variation like 'Ysenbaert'.

Marc had an elder brother who would in due course inherit the family landholdings and, as was often the way with second sons of such families, Marc was therefore destined to enter the Church. But by the time he had completed his elementary education it was clear that his talents lay in other areas: his aptitude was for drawing and mechanics. The college principal decided that the boy had no religious calling and helped him transfer to study under François Carpentier, a retired sea captain, for training in hydrography and draughtsmanship. Carpentier was married to one of Marc's cousins and, although French, was also the American consul in Rouen.

At 17 Marc Brunel became a junior officer in the French navy. He served for six years, mostly in the West Indies, aboard the corvette Le Maréchal de Castries. By the time he returned, France was in revolutionary ferment. The old order – the Ancien Régime – had been overthrown, or so it seemed, and Marc, in that Parisian cafe, was on the wrong side of the new order. He made his way from Paris to his parents' home in Hacqueville. From there he went to Rouen and the house of his mentor, Monsieur Carpentier.

There he met Sophia Kingdom, an English girl about 17 years old. She was the youngest of sixteen children of William Kingdom, a contracting agent for the British army and the Royal Navy. He had died when she was 8 years old, but the family was reasonably well off, and in due course, despite the revolutionary turmoil, she was sent to France to complete her education and improve her French. She also taught English to the children of the local middle classes.

While M. Carpentier was obtaining a passport for Marc to leave for America, the youngsters fell in love. Before he sailed for New York in July 1793, Marc promised he would one day return to her and that they would be married.

Brunel soon found work in America. Working with two other Frenchmen, he carried out a land survey around Lake Ontario. He went on to survey the line of a canal that would eventually link Lake Champlain with the Hudson River. He also submitted a design for a new congress building in Washington; his scheme, modelled on Paris' Halle aux Grains, won, though it was never built as it was considered too expensive. A modified version was built as the Park Theatre in New York, but was destroyed by fire in 1821.

Marc gave up his earlier hopes of one day being able to re-join the French navy, and at the age of 27 was appointed chief engineer of New York. But for all America's vast potential, the place for an ambitious engineer was back across the Atlantic. Britain was the seat of the Industrial Revolution, the place where the most exciting new engineering and technology developments were taking place. It was also the home of the largest employer in Europe, an organisation of immense scale and complexity working at the cutting edge of technology: the Royal Navy.

Marc had an idea which he thought would be of use to the navy, and so he set sail for England with a letter of introduction to the First Lord of the Admiralty from a British diplomat in Washington. Equally prominent in his mind – perhaps more so – was the promise he had made to Sophia.

She, meanwhile, had endured adventures of her own. She had remained in Rouen when Marc left for America and had been arrested as an enemy alien when Britain declared war on France in October 1793. She had been taken to the port of Gravelines and incarcerated in a convent which was being used as a temporary prison. A guillotine was set up in the convent courtyard. Some of the families whose children she had taught English intervened to try to secure her release, but to no avail. For almost a year, Sophia lived in daily fear of being executed.

Political changes in Paris finally resulted in the Gravelines prisoners being freed. Sophia, however, was in poor health by this time and it was several months before she was well enough to return to England in 1795.

Marc's ship docked at Falmouth on 7 March 1799. He immediately made for London where Sophia was now living with her brother. Not long afterwards the pair announced their engagement, and they were married at the church of St Andrew in Holborn on 1 November 1799.

'The career of Brunel,' wrote Samuel Smiles, 'was of a more romantic character than falls to the ordinary lot of mechanical engineers.'

Smiles, chronicler of Britain's Industrial Revolution and dour advocate of hard work, common sense and thrift, did not altogether approve of romance, but he did not exaggerate. Marc and Sophia Brunel's courtship, separation and happy reunion was just the beginning of a long and loyal partnership. Marc's career and finances would go through a dramatic sequence of highs and lows, but the couple saw it through together. Indeed, Sophia's devotion to her husband would one day see her in prison for a second time.

The idea Marc brought to England was for a system that could revolutionise industrial production. The Royal Navy needed around 100,000 new pulley blocks every year for raising and lowering the masts and sails on its ships. A single big ship-of-the-line such as Nelson's Victory would need well over a thousand blocks on its own.

These blocks were produced by hand, a laborious and expensive process which required skilled workers and often resulted in many blocks being rejected. Marc's invention was intended to change all this via automation. He designed an integrated set of machines, each of which would carry out one small part of the production process.

He had first started thinking about using machines to make the blocks in America. Part of the inspiration came to him when sitting under a tree one day, idly carving letters into its bark and noticing the way in which he was turning his knife: 'And what do you think were the letters I was cutting?' he later wrote. 'Of course none other than S.K.'

On arrival in Britain he lost little time in using his letter of introduction to Earl Spencer, the head of the navy. After some initial setbacks he secured support for his idea from Sir Samuel Bentham, the Inspector General of Naval Works and a distinguished engineer in his own right. (He was also the philosopher Jeremy Bentham's younger brother.)

Marc engaged Henry Maudslay to make the machines. Maudslay was one of the giants of the Industrial Revolution, a tool- and die -maker who is considered by many to be the father of modern machine tool-making. With Bentham's backing, His Majesty's Government approved Marc's proposals in 1803 and within three years he and Maudslay had set up a complete production line at Portsmouth dockyard, where forty-three machines operated by fewer than a dozen unskilled workers did the jobs of sixty craftsmen. The cost saving was reckoned at £24,000 per annum, and for years afterwards distinguished visitors and royal guests came to look in wonder at the machines.

Marc and Sophia had by now moved to Portsmouth to be near the block mills. They already had two daughters, Sophia and Emma. Their only son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was born at their home in Britain Street, Portsea, on 9 April 1806.

CHAPTER 2

Marc Brunel's Greatest Achievement

'He is a good little boy but he doesn't care for books except mathematics.'

Brunel bequeathed a huge amount of paper to posterity – plans, drawings, letters, notebooks and sketchbooks. As well as these, many of his contemporaries left behind paper trails of their own, or biographies and autobiographies which mention their dealings with him. The only real pity is that Brunel's own attempts at keeping a diary as a young man were so fitful and were eventually abandoned. Much of this material is housed at the Brunel Institute, located next to SS Great Britain in Bristol. A fascinating find from recent years is a drawing of his rocking horse. It is almost professional in its quality, yet it was made by a 6-year-old.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, it is often said, was Marc Brunel's greatest achievement. But his skills were no mere genetic inheritance or the result of ideas casually picked up at the family dinner table. Marc set out in a systematic way to ensure that his only son would be trained, instructed and nurtured as an engineer from an early age.

There were no schools or colleges in Britain from which one could emerge as a qualified civil engineer, so Marc's programme was detailed and thoughtful. The twin starting points of his profession – 'the engineer's alphabet', he called them – were mathematics and drawing. From the age of about 4, Isambard was taught the basics by his father.

The details of Isambard's childhood are obscure. Our only sources are the biography his son wrote and a handful of surviving letters, but it is plain that he was born into a happy and loving family. There are a few glimpses of Isambard as a child. After the family moved to London in 1808, to an address in what is now Cheyne Row, we learn that Isambard learned to swim in the Thames, at the bottom of the garden. Since at this time the river was an open sewer for London's growing population, we might count this as the first of his numerous fortuitous escapes from death.

Around this time, Marc's business began to fluctuate wildly. He had moved his family to London because of his involvement in designing woodworking machines for the government and he also owned a sawmill in Battersea. With the Napoleonic Wars at their height, he had invested in machinery for making boots for the army. He employed disabled ex-soldiers and turned out better and cheaper boots than other contractors. When peace finally returned in 1814, however, he was left with large amounts of unwanted stock. He managed to recoup some of his losses when Napoleon escaped from exile and fighting recommenced, only to see business fall away again after the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. A few months earlier the sawmill had been destroyed by fire and it was then that Marc found he had been swindled by a business partner. Instead of having £10,000 in the bank, he had just £865.

This was the backdrop as 8-year-old Isambard was sent to Dr Morell's school in Hove. It was an interesting choice, especially if one wishes to class Marc as a social conservative due to his support for the French monarchy. Dr Morell's was probably the most progressive school in the country.

The curriculum included modern languages and geography, as well as the usual Greek and Latin. Bullying was not tolerated and there was no corporal punishment. Neither did the school operate the notorious system of 'fagging' whereby younger boys acted as servants to the older ones. The formal religious dogma of the Anglican Church was not taught either; Dr Morell was a Unitarian minister, and the religious element of the school's curriculum was slight by the standards of the day. Unitarianism was the nearest thing a Victorian could get to agnosticism while still remaining respectable.

Isambard was, if anything, too happy there; halfway through his time at Dr Morell's his father sent him to stay with a relative in France, apparently to straighten him out. 'I entrust my little boy to you as he needs a Mentor,' Marc wrote. 'I don't believe I could make a better choice than in imploring you to moderate the impetuosity of his youth. He is a good little boy but he doesn't care for books except mathematics for which he has a liking.'

Evidently this dose of French discipline worked. By the age of 13, Isambard was writing to his mother to the effect that he liked Horace a lot, but Virgil even more. He also reported that he had been making model boats and that he was amusing himself by making a plan of Hove:

I should be much obliged if you would ask Papa (I hope he is well and hearty) whether he would lend me his long measure. It is a long eighty -foot tape; he will know what I mean. I will take care of it, for I want to take a more exact plan, though this is pretty exact, I think. I have also been drawing a little. I intend to take a view of all (about five) the principal houses in that great town, Hove. I have already taken one or two.

Making drawings and plans of buildings was one of his great boyhood hobbies. According to another possibly apocryphal story, he noticed some new houses being built across the road from his school. He pondered the bad workmanship and, noting the way that the sky promised storms, told his classmates that the buildings would fall down before morning. They found this impossible to believe, so bets were laid, the buildings collapsed overnight and Isambard duly collected his winnings.

In 1820, Marc sent his son to Normandy to study at Caen College. If Britain had the greatest engineers and industrialists at this time, it was widely acknowledged that France had better theoreticians, and Marc believed that this was where his son would find the best education in advanced mathematics. He was also keen that Isambard should improve his French.

From Caen College the boy went on to the Lycée Henri-Quatre in Paris to prepare for the entrance exams for the École Polytechnique, which trained all of France's civil and military engineers. He was turned down, however, as he was not a French national. Instead, Marc secured for his son a period of apprenticeship with Abraham -Louis Bréguet, the world's leading maker of clocks, chronometers and precision instruments. Isambard lived with the Bréguet family in Paris, making plans and drawings of buildings in his spare time and sending them to his father. He would later say that the only qualification in which he took real pride was that he could call himself one of Bréguet's pupils.

While Isambard was with Bréguet, his father and mother were in prison. Marc's money problems had become insuperable. His bankers failed, he was out of credit and he was imprisoned for debt. Sophia insisted on joining him in the King's Bench Prison, Southwark, where they spent ten weeks. One visitor reported that Marc sat at a table working on plans and drawings, while Sophia sat in a corner of the room, mending his stockings.

Marc was angry that he had ended up disgraced through no real fault of his own. The country he had done so much to help in wartime was not showing enough gratitude, he felt, particularly over his losses manufacturing army boots. Letters to influential friends produced no results, so he raised the stakes dramatically. One of the distinguished visitors to the Portsmouth block mills, Tsar Alexander I, had tried to lure him to work in Russia. Marc now let it be known that he was in touch with the Russian government.

The Duke of Wellington, soon to be prime minister, was alarmed at the prospect of Britain losing Marc's talents to the Russians. Now that France had been defeated, Russia was seen as the greatest threat to British interests, both in the Mediterranean and on the north-west frontier of British India. Wellington probably did not know Marc personally, but he would certainly have been aware of his reputation and of how his troops at Waterloo wore Marc's factory's boots. At the Admiralty, Lord Spencer also lobbied for something to be done. The treasury reluctantly paid Marc a grant of £5,000 and the Brunels were freed.

There are interesting parallels between the lives of Brunel, arguably nineteenth-century Britain's greatest engineer, and Charles Dickens, arguably nineteenth-century Britain's greatest novelist. Both men were born in Portsea, within a few streets of each other, and both of their fathers were imprisoned for debt. Both grew up with a powerful work ethic and died relatively young. For Dickens the shame that the debtors' prison brought on the family remained raw and vivid all his life. He drew on the experience of his parents and younger siblings in the Marshalsea Prison for his novel Little Dorrit. The effect it had on Isambard is less clear. Living in France through this episode would have insulated him from the excruciating social embarrassment that his mother and sisters must have felt, but it remained seared into the family's collective memory. They referred to it as 'the misfortune', and it is tempting to see anxiety over money and status as one of the drivers of the adult Brunel's commitment to work.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Brunel: Pocket Giants by Eugene Byrne. Copyright © 2014 Eugene Byrne. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents

Title page,
Acknowledgements,
Map,
Introduction:,
The Second-Greatest Briton of all Time?,
1 Marc Isambard Brunel,
2 Marc Brunel's Greatest Achievement,
3 Isambard's Early Career,
4 The Great Western Railway,
5 Marriage and Family Life,
6 The First Two Ships,
7 Railway Triumphs, Railway Failures,
8 The Later Years,
9 Legacies,
Notes,
Timeline,
Further Reading,
Web Links,
Copyright,