A tribute to modern engineering’s Godfather
A young person thinking about a career in engineering, should look no further for inspiration than the greatest engineer of the Industrial Revolution, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
Born on April 9, 1806, 211 years ago, Brunel was the son of a French refugee father and an English mother.
It isn’t just the number of major building projects that makes Brunel stand out, it is the fact that so many were firsts. He assisted in building the first tunnel under a navigable river – the Thames between Rotherhithe and Wapping.
He designed and built the Clifton suspension bridge, the longest span in the world at the time, the Maidenhead Railway bridge over the Thames (the widest brick arched bridge in the world). He designed and built the Great Western, the longest ship in the world at the time. This was followed in 1843 by the Great Britain, the world’s first modern ship, it was iron-hulled, engine powered and propeller driven.
A glimpse of Brunel’s genius is captured in the design of the Great Britain. Its giant 5 metre diameter propeller and its specially shaped fins is only 5 per cent less efficient than its modern computer designed counterpart.
Firsts in engineering are meaningful because these construction feats need courage on the part of the engineers who put their reputations on the line when they design and build something never before attempted.
Brunel’s bridges were original, functional and in many cases, downright beautiful. For example, rather than design a standard suspension bridge across the Tamar river between Devon and Cornwall, Brunel decided to build a lenticular truss bridge.
A truss is a structure of connecting elements usually forming triangular units for strengthening. A lenticular truss is a lens-shaped truss.
The bridge, called the Royal Albert Bridge wasn’t only a mathematical and engineering triumph but in 1859 its beauty caused a sensation.
Perhaps Brunel’s greatest achievement was the Great Western Railway (GWR). The idea was to construct a 190km railway line from London in the east of England to Bristol in the west. The stagecoach took days to travel between the two cities. Brunel wanted to reduce the journey time to a few hours. To optimize speed and comfort the line had to contain as few bends as possible and be almost gradient free. This meant building bridges, cutting through small hills and constructing a major tunnel. Critics considered blasting and digging the 2.95km tunnel through Box Hill an impossible task but Brunel proved them wrong.
Another major engineering challenge on the GWR line was the Sonning Cutting, about 60km west of London. This is a 2km slice through Sonning Hill excavated using only spades and wheelbarrows.
To cap it all Brunel designed and constructed the magnificent railway stations of Paddington in London, and of Temple Meads in Bristol – both functioning to this day.
A feature of Brunel’s civil works is that they were built to last, he said he didn’t want to build structures to last only for a few decades but for a 1000 years. He was adored by the public and loathed by his financiers. There was more than a financial price to pay for some of Brunel’s monumental projects. In an era before health and safety, many workers lost their lives during construction.
A rather grim example is that of the construction of his third ship, the Great Eastern, the first ship to incorporate a double hull. It was a technical triumph but a commercial failure. During construction, boys were used to enter the narrow one metre gap between the two hulls to hammer the rivets into the steel plate. When the ship was eventually decommissioned and taken apart for scrap, it is rumoured that the skeletons of two boys were found between the double hull.
Brunel, a lifelong 40 a day cigar smoker, suffered a stroke in 1859 just before the Great Eastern made her first trip to New York. Ten days later, at the age of 53, he died.
Victorian health and safety aside, one can’t help feeling that in our cost-constrained bland public buildings we’ve lost the Brunelian attitude of having the courage to build firsts and to build for beauty.