Isambard Kingdom Brunel

25:13Joh:Brunel is very much a man of his time in this sense. He believes passionately in free enterprise and opposes any kind of state regulation. In March 1833, he is appointed engineer to the newly formed Great Western Railway. He leases a large terraced house in London, sets up an office, employs staff, and gets to work.

25:38The railway he now starts planning will be the longest Britain has yet seen. At 118 miles, it will stretch from Bristol in the southwest to London in the southeast, passing through Bath, Chippenham, and Reading along the way. After undertaking a rather shaky journey on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Brunel decides that his will be as level and straight as possible, designed for smooth running at high speeds. In his diary, he writes, the time is not far off when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 miles per hour. Let me try. He spends nine weeks surveying the landscape to perfect the route, riding on horseback through the countryside and sometimes working 20 hours a day.

26:30He even has a small traveling coach designed with a bed and desk inside to facilitate his intense schedule. In the end, the railway is so flat that it is referred to as Brunel's billiard table, thanks to the building of a fair few bridges and tunnels, which he also designs. He had in mind an entirely new conception of railways, a whole railway system. He called it the greatest work in England, but it meant that he was thinking about the whole gamut, so from the stations, the route, tunnels, the locomotives and rolling stock.

27:07Joh:Though he has a hand in the designs of many of the railway's constituent parts, most of his work is not entirely novel. But there is one area in which he is a true innovator. The track gauge was completely different. And when we say track gauge, we mean the distance between the rails. Most railways that had been built up to Brunel's time had been built to what we now call the standard gauge, which was a distance of about four foot eight and a half inches between the rails. Brunel thought bigger, and so his railway would be built to what became known as the broad gauge, and that was a distance of seven feet and a quarter of an inch between the rails.

27:44The idea of this was that carriages would have greater capacity, more passengers could be carried, trains could run at higher speeds.

27:55As he is planning his new railway system, there is an important development in his personal life. He gets to know Mary Horsley, a socialite from a creative family in London's fashionable borough of Kensington, just 19 years old to his 26. For several years he pays court to her, making numerous visits to her family home and taking part in their impromptu concerts and theatrical performances. But even the combination of the intense planning and design work going into the railway and his blossoming relationship with Mary isn't enough to satisfy Brunel's boundless energy. In 1835, with no seafaring engineering experience, he proposes a new maritime project.

28:42The Great Western steamship came about from a conversation that Brunel and the directors of the Great Western Railway had had in a hotel after a slightly boozy dinner while the GWR Act was being passed and a proposal was made and we don't know whether it was Brunel who said it why don't we link London and New York and of course some of the directors of the company thought Brunel was mad but of course he said well we can use a steamship to run from Bristol to New York and so from that the great western steamship company was invented Brunel becomes the company's consulting engineer a role he undertakes as work on the railway is still ongoing.

29:24Ships with steam engines have been crossing the Atlantic since 1819, although generally under a mixture of steam and sail power. In the 1830s, conventional wisdom has it that the weight of coal needed to carry a steamship across the ocean makes them too heavy, and thus requiring of more coal in a vicious cycle. Brunel's calculations, however, lead him to believe the conventional wisdom is not correct. Though a ship large enough to cross the Atlantic would need more coal, it's also true that its carrying capacity rises faster than the increase of drag caused by its larger size. And so the Great Western, a 236-foot-long wooden paddle steamer, is born.

30:13Never one to confine himself to a single big idea at a time, Brunel now also proposes to marry, and on the 5th of July, 1836, the couple are married in Kensington. It appears to be a genuine love match. His surviving letters show a heartfelt affection for his wife, despite her reputation as somewhat proud and haughty. After a two-week holiday in North Wales, they set up home in Westminster, overlooking the leafy St. James's Park. Parts of the four-story red-brick townhouse they move into are given over to Brunel's offices, and the upper floors are soon resounding with the cries and laughs of their three children, Isambard, Henry, and Florence.

30:59Brunel indulges his interest in art and interior design, often shopping with his brother-in-law for fine china and bronzes for the house. A whole room is given over to paintings depicting scenes from Shakespeare's plays. It is known, not very imaginatively, as the Shakespeare Room. But Brunel's work never stops, and on the 31st of March, 1838, the SS Great Western heads out of the Bristol shipyard towards Avonmouth, ahead of her first journey across the Atlantic. The Great Western was incredibly successful, making its maiden voyage in 1838, and was able to crisscross the Atlantic as a pathfinder for Brunel's idea of linking London, Bristol, and the New World, essentially.

31:47It is not Brunel's only triumph that year. In the early summer, the first section of the Great Western Railway, from London to Maidenhead is finally ready to open.

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34:02It is the 31st of May, 1838, in the small town of Salt Hill, 20 miles west of London. Seated at a long dining table inside an elaborate marquee, a middle-aged woman raises her glass as a toast is offered to Brunel's Great Western Railway. Today, she is one of a group of dignitaries to try the line out, a few days ahead of its public opening.

34:30Joh:Setting her wine on the table, she dabs her lips elegantly with the snowy white napkin. Waiters move around the table, clearing away the remnants of the celebratory lunch they have just enjoyed. Guests, now decidedly merry after the multiple toasts they have drunk, laugh and chatter around her. Further down the table, the engineer himself holds court, several of the men leaning in eagerly, hanging on every word. The woman catches the eye of her husband, who is among them, and they share a small smile. He is one of the directors of the Great Western Railway, and today is the culmination of years of his work.

35:16Joh:Tapping on his glass, the railway's Bristol chairman rises to his feet. It is time, he tells them, to re-board the train and make their way back to London. The woman rises and walks arm in arm out of the marquee with her husband across a stretch of lawn onto the railway tracks. Up ahead is Brunel, distinctive now in the trademark stovepipe hat that adds valuable inches to his diminutive stature. They come now to where the gleaming black and red locomotive is waiting, and the woman marvels once again at the shining gold wheel arches and the coppery sheen on the tall steam funnel. Her husband hands her into the low-ceiling wooden carriage, and she takes a seat opposite him, resting her elbow on the sill of the large, unglazed window opening.

36:10Joh:Once they are all aboard, the engine rumbles into life. A thrill runs through her of the sound of the train's whistle.

36:20Joh:This is only the second time that she has been on a train, the first being this morning. on the outbound journey from London. Every sensation is novel. The motion of the carriage, the sound of the wheels rattling over the tracks, the clouds of white steam that occasionally blow past. She stares dreamily out of the window as the train puffs its way merrily towards the capital. At this time of year, southern England is a riot of green. The rocking motion of the carriage is just lulling her to sleep when she hears shouts coming from the carriage in front. Her husband sticks his head out of the window to see what the fuss is about.

37:03Joh:He lets out a sharp exclamation and motions for her to see what is going on. She looks out, craning her head up. Thomas Guppy, one of the other directors, is standing on top of the carriage, weaving his way from the front of the train to the back. She breathes in sharply when he gets to a break between two carriages, but he easily leaps from one to the other, landing safely if slightly unsteadily. When it seems clear he won't fall off, the woman looks at her husband and they both chuckle. Clearly Guppy had a bit too much to drink at lunch, but it is a day for celebration after all.

37:53After the inaugural run for the company's directors and other esteemed guests, the 22-mile-long London to Maidenhead section of the Great Western Railway officially opens to the public. The western part of the line, from Bristol to Bath, finally opens in 1840, but it still awaits connection all the way to London, and this is the trickiest part of the entire project. For a 13-mile stretch, to keep the journey as flat as Brunel desires, most of the track must be raised on embankments or sunk into cuttings. A tunnel is also needed just outside of Bath. Known as the Box Tunnel, it is nearly two miles long.

38:37It requires miners to use gunpowder, followed by picks, excavating much of it by hand from solid rock. The conditions are treacherous, and by the time it is completed in March 1841, 100 men have lost their lives to its construction.

38:57The Great Western Railway finally runs all the way from Bristol to London, but with costs having soared, opinion begins to sour on its engineer. I think Brunel always divided opinion during his own lifetime and subsequently. There were those who thought he was a daring innovator, a man who dared to go where nobody else had gone before. And then there was also a group of people who were directly involved in the projects and sometimes lost money due to some of the failed experiments that he'd proposed. And there were many critics during that period, particularly in Bristol and other places where they felt that it was easy for him to experiment with other people's money.

39:43Despite the criticism, he does not lack work. During what is called the railway mania of the 1840s, Brunel builds train lines in South Wales, Devon, Cornwall and the Midlands. He also starts to draw up plans for an iron-hulled ship as a successor to the more conventional SS Great Western. It was 323 feet long. It was made of iron plates that had been manufactured in iron bridge. and it was designed to cross the Atlantic and to provide a luxury experience for its passengers. In addition, the steamship had some innovatory features. So the first of which, as well as being of iron, the other one was, of course, that it had a screw propeller.

40:26The screw propeller was not a new idea. Brunel had seen it demonstrated elsewhere, but he realized that it could be a much better source of propulsion than the paddle steamers. The paddle wheels were not always very efficient. Named the SS Great Britain, when the ship launches in 1843, it is the largest ship afloat. Iron hulled, steam powered, and screw propelled. This moment in the mid-1840s is perhaps the peak of Brunel's career. He is working across multiple groundbreaking projects and has an office staffed with engineering assistance. Although he is not the easiest man to work for. Isenbarg managed everything on all his projects.

41:14He wouldn't be called a delegator, as we might call it today. He was very reluctant to spread any responsibility to his assistants. And as a result, they tended to wait for him to make decisions. This, of course, added to his workload. He would not trust his subordinates in the same way that people might do now. He also struggles to work in partnership with other experts. and is demanding of contractors, slow to pay and quick to quibble over invoices. But there is no doubting his work ethic. Brunel was certainly a driven man. He always wanted every project he worked on to be the best and quite often argued with shareholders that it wasn't necessarily going to be the cheapest.

41:58And this meant that he went the extra distance to make sure that anything he did was the best, the best railway, the best steamship. But you have to put it in the context that Brunel and its generation were pathfinders. They were doing things that had never been done before. And those kind of people, we need those kind of people. They may not be popular with the shareholders or accountants, but that's how progress is made. And I guess that's one of the reasons why we still remember Brunel today. Although his work frequently takes him away from home, he remains a loving and dedicated father when he is present.

42:36Servants testify to his running upstairs to the nursery from his offices at the end of the day, and he entertains his children with conjuring tricks. Despite his success, however, he is not immune to failure. In 1846, after only being in service for a year, the SS Great Britain runs aground in Ireland. The steamship company goes bust, and later that year, when a parliamentary commission rules on the railway gauge controversy, Brunel does not come out on top. The upshot of the conclusions were that no more broad gauge lines should be built and that any railways after that should be built to the standard gauge.

43:18But there was a proviso that any railway schemes that were already in motion, that were already in parliament, could be built to the broad gauge. He also struggles to build a cheaper rail system for the cash-strapped South Devon Railway. He proposed a revolutionary new form of propulsion, which was called the Atmospheric System. And this was a system using pumping stations, steam pumping stations, pumping using a pneumatic system through cast iron pipes that ran in between the rails. And in theory, it was a good idea. He'd seen it demonstrated in London and in Ireland on relatively short lines.

43:56But the idea of using this revolutionary technology over a considerable distance, next to the sea and over the hilly territory of Devon, proved is undoing. And they were never able to make the system work properly. And in 1848, the South Devon were forced to abandon the atmospheric scheme. And it cost the shareholders of the South Devon Railway about£400 ,000, which was a lot of money. And Bruno's reputation was quite badly damaged at that time.

44:28Despite these setbacks, his career continues to go strong. The Great Western Railway has turned a profit the first year it was in operation, and continues to do so. More and more miles of track are being laid, expanding the network. He is wealthy and generally respected. And in 1847, he buys a country estate near Torquay in Devon, with plans to build a grand holiday home there. The only sadness is the death of his inspirational father, Mark, in 1849, and the loss of his engineering wisdom The house in Torquay never gets built Because as the 1850s dawn, most of Brunel's time and money becomes absorbed by another project A third steamship larger than anything ever attempted before In the late 1840s and early 1850s, Isambard had the idea of designing a much bigger ship, a ship that was capable of sailing from the UK to India and Australia with one load of coal not having to stop.

45:32The difficulty Brunel had was that initially none of the shipping, big shipping lines that he approached were interested in taking the ship. And so a new company was set up to to finance and build the ship. And so in some ways, it was a ship without an end purpose, apart from Brunel's desire to make it work. By the end of 1853, Brunel has completed his design for a ship that can carry 4 ,000 passengers. The Great Eastern, as it is called, is six times the size of the Great Britain. He collaborates with the eminent shipbuilder, John Scott Russell, to construct it, and work begins on the banks of the Thames.

46:12The partnership, however, is fraught. As always, Brunel does not work well with other people. Money is also a continual problem, especially since the engineer keeps changing the plans, and Scott Russell's business goes bankrupt in the process.

46:42Joh:Andrews will be reading another beloved classic, Emma. Step into the village of Highbury, home to the handsome and clever Emma Woodhouse. Witness the delicate art of matchmaking, where appearances can deceive, and true affections are not always easily guessed. On Short History Off, we're herring around the world with the groundbreaking journalist Nellie Bly, and grappling with the surreal with Salvador Dali. On Real Survival Stories, we're in the shark-filled waters off the coast of Florida and trundling down the Birdsville track deep in the Australian bush. And in Sherlock Holmes' short stories, Holmes investigates the disappearance of a missing star rugby player in The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter.

47:23Joh:Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.

47:30In 1855, Brunel takes time off managing this gargantuan project to answer a call for help from his brother-in-law, a permanent secretary in the war office. By now, the Crimean War is well underway, and conditions for British soldiers are abominable, as Florence Nightingale discovers in her time there. In particular, there is a dire need for a hospital. Brunel is asked to create a prefabricated building that can be shipped out to the front and swiftly erected. Within months, the entire hospital has been built at Renkiyoy in modern-day Turkey. It is well ventilated, with adequate drainage, and in its period of usage sees 1 ,000 patients treated, with a minuscule fatality rate of 4%.

48:18It is the first large-scale prefabricated hospital in the world. Back in Britain, by the autumn of 1857, the Great Eastern is ready to launch. but the process is not straightforward. The ship wasn't launched down a slipway as you might imagine as modern ships are. It was built on an iron and wood platform on the side of the River Thames at Millwall and then had to be hauled across this platform into the river sideways. This caused Brunel and the steamship company a lot of problems and they used a combination of chains and pneumatic rams. And the chains that were used were the backdrop to the most famous picture of Brunel taken by Robert Howlow.

49:03The SS Great Eastern is finally afloat by January 1858. But that summer, Brunel, a lifelong and enthusiastic smoker, is diagnosed with kidney disease. He's too ill to attend the grand opening of the Royal Albert Bridge, built to carry trains across the river Tamar from Devon to Cornwall. Instead, he visits a few weeks after the ceremonial opening in a special railway wagon outfitted with a sofa. In September 1859, he is visiting the completed Great Eastern when he collapses on deck. It is the last time he will see the ship. A few days later, it sets off on its maiden voyage in his absence.

49:49In early September 1859, after being ill for some time, Brunel suffers a stroke. Just a few days later, there is an explosion in the Great Eastern's engine room as she makes her way down the Thames. Though it is a blast that would have destroyed a smaller ship, the vessel survives, but six of her crew are not so lucky. Then, on the 15th, Isambard Kingdom Brunel himself dies at home, surrounded by family. He is only 53 years old. He is publicly mourned. Daniel Gooch, the locomotive engineer, writes in his obituary, By his death, the greatest of England's engineers was lost. The man of the greatest originality of thought and power of execution, bold in his plan, but right.

50:42A group of his colleagues joined together and finished the Clifton Suspension Bridge in his memory. Work had gone on sporadically in the 1830s and 40s, but a lack of funds meant that by Brunel's death, little more than the stone towers on either side of the gorge had been built. The design slightly altered, the bridge is now swiftly finished and opens in 1864.

51:09Brunel's legacy also lives on in the SS Great Eastern, often seen as his last great folly. Its initial voyages were not very successful. They were unable to get the numbers of people to travel on it. And it only became really successful a few years later when it was converted to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. And this proved to be very successful at because, of course, it was able to carry all that cable. And in a way, it fueled another revolution, which was another communication revolution. Even after his death, Brunel's creations continue to drive technological progress. Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the very definition of a polymath.

51:55In his relatively short life, he worked across an array of engineering specialisms, from bridges and trains to ships and tunnels. And he worked on every detail of his projects, from the route a train line should take to the inner workings of a steamship engine. He was a member of the last generation of engineers who could work in this way, before the maturing Industrial Revolution encouraged ever greater specialization.

52:22Joh:His tireless energy pushed forward industrialization in Britain, laying the groundwork for the explosion of scientific and technological innovations that would mark the second half of the 19th century. And his projects are still in use today. If you've ever marveled at the Royal Albert Bridge in Plymouth, traveled through the West Country of England on the Great Western Railway, or walked through London's Paddington Station, you've done so, thanks to Brunel. In many ways, he was a man who built much of modern Britain. Brunel's enduring legacy is his ability to think out of the box in a 21st century phrase.

53:01The historian Kenneth Clark said that Brunel was a man who was in love with the impossible. And I like to think that he made the impossible possible. You can't get away from the fact that he was one of the most influential engineers of his generation and of the 19th century. He did things that nobody had ever done before and we are left with an amazing legacy. He was not an innovator, he was a doctor. He was very clever at picking up on new kinds of technology and running with them and doing something very different. And as a result, we're left with an amazing legacy of high-speed railways, the foundations of a maritime dynasty of ships and liners.

53:42his imprint is all over the UK and certainly on other parts of the world. And I'm sure that he would have been proud of that kind of legacy today.

54:00Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of Nina Simone.

54:08She was such a paragon of that sense of independence, that sense of absolute commitment, that sense of not being limited by expectation or by genre or by race or anything. You know, an artist is there to create and to speak truth. And that means absolutely. That doesn't mean any other version of that. That closed a lot of doors. that capped a lot of ceilings, that ultimately led to an incredibly difficult life. But she's there as an example of what that commitment and that dedication mean.

54:44Joh:That's next time.

54:51Joh:You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History Of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiser.com forward slash subscriptions to unlock more episodes today. Get your tickets now for the Dog Stars. It's no surprise how fast civilization can disappear. Out there. Just kill or be killed. Jacob Alordi. There are people out there. They need our help. Josh Brolin. Shoot first and inquire afterwards. Margaret Qualley. Okay, tough guy. And Guy Pearce. Arm up. The Dog Stars, directed by Ridley Scott.

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