As a Brunel cultist of distant French descent I feel that I must take issue with one element of the otherwise uncontroversial historical article by Peter Davis, at the Libertarian Alliance. In a most welcome piece celebratory of everything British (with certain noteworthy exceptions, apparently both called Gordon), he says:
Then we had Great minds like Brunel (OK he was partly French) who, within a couple of days in the 1830s, revolutionised the nation, and I’m sure that if he were alive today, would design and build a bridge spanning the atlantic that could easily last several billion years in a couple weeks.
Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, the first famous engineer of that name, was indeed French; he married Miss Sophia Kingdom, who was English, and their son, the even more famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was born British (in Portsmouth on the 9th April 1806), though much of his education was obtained in France.
References (birthplace):
Beckett, D.: Brunel’s Britain, David & Charles, ISBN 0715323601
Wikipedia entry: ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel’
Also (education, etc.):
Tames, R.: Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Shire Lifelines, ISBN 0852631405
Rolt, L.T.C.: Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Penguin, ISBN 0140117520
In respect of the great man’s infallibility, it must be pointed out that not every industrial historian accepts the conclusions of Rolt (op.cit.) in respect of the matter of Mr. John Scott Russell and the Great Eastern, and that there are now two increasingly clearly opposed bodies of opinion on the subject, the ‘Roltists’ and the ‘Emmersonians’ (after Russell’s biographer, who took a quite different view).
It is also clear that despite IKB’s enthusiasm for the atmospheric-railway project his faith in materials science was in this case misplaced; despite experimenting with some exotic and scarcely obtainable substances he could not contrive a reliable seal for the slot in the top of the vacuum pipe through which the piston inside acted upon the piston car outside, and the project was eventually abandoned, doomed never to be revived by the development of electric traction (however, the story goes that a most impressive statistic was obtained when a fellow perhaps unfamiliar with the principle of operation of the system sat on a piston car and knocked out its coupling pin without first checking that the vacuum was off; it wasn’t, and he and his piston car, detached from the heavy train and enjoying the full benefit of the vacuum, were eventually fired from the end of the track like the projectile from a gigantic airgun, to set a land-speed record that was not exceeded for a great many years)
There is also a story about someone rushing into Brunel’s elegant office to tell him that a minor railway bridge which he had designed had just collapsed, shortly after its completion. Brunel, his cool that of the proverbial cucumber, apparently said something along the lines of “My word, I’m glad you told me that; I was about to do another half-dozen exactly like it.”
As to an Atlantic bridge, was this not the purpose of the Great Western steamship proposed to the Board of the Great Western Railway Company by Brunel himself? It took him more than a fortnight, though.
