Did mum-of-six design Brunel’s bridge?
IT IS known as one of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s crowning achievements – but the Clifton Suspension Bridge may actually be down to a little-known mother-of-six who gave away her designs.
The plans for its foundations were given to the engineer free of charge by Sarah Guppy, who said women must ‘not be boastful’.
She has been recognised in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography more than 150 years after the bridge in Bristol opened.
Mrs Guppy was born in Birmingham in 1770 and married Samuel Guppy, whose wealthy family ran a Bristol sugar company.
She raised six children, but was also heavily involved in Georgian engineering and inventing.
In 1811 she patented a method of piling foundations – driving steel and cement foundations deep into the ground – which was then used as the blueprint for the Clifton Suspension Bridge and Thomas Telford’s Menai Bridge at Anglesey, North Wales.
But she never took credit for her work and registered her designs in the name of ‘the Guppy family’.
Anna Silva, from Oxford University Press, said: ‘She was an early advo- cate of a suspension bridge in Clifton and was reported to have been “assiduously employed in forming the model of a bridge to be erected across the Avon” in 1811, when she sought subscriptions to erect such a bridge, in which she herself seems to have been an early investor.
‘Though the precise impact of her ideas on his design is unknown, her early advocacy of a suspension bridge in Clifton certainly pre-dates Brunel’s own involvement in such a scheme.’
She gave Brunel, who was a family friend, the plans to enter into a competition to design a bridge over the Avon at Bristol.
Mrs Guppy dreamt up dozens of inventions, including ways to protect ships from barnacles and a device to boil an egg from the steam of a kettle.
She also contributed to many engineering projects but, in letters advising Brunel as he designed the Great Western Railway network, she said she did not want credit because women must ‘not be boastful’.
After her husband died when she was 7, Mrs Guppy married a man 30 years her junior who quickly frittered away the family fortune.
She died in 1852, 12 years before the Clifton Suspension Bridge was completed.