In Our Time - Brunel

Episode Date: November 13, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the Victorian engineer responsible for bridges, tunnels and railways still in use today more than 150 years after they were built. Brunel represented the cutting edge of technological innovation in Victorian Britain, and his life gives us a window onto the social changes that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Yet his work was not always successful, and his innovative approach to engineering projects was often greeted with suspicion from investors. Guests:Julia Elton, former President of the Newcomen Society for the History of Engineering and TechnologyBen Marsden, Senior Lecturer in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of AberdeenCrosbie Smith, Professor of the History of Science at the University of KentProducer: Luke Mulhall.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1860, the proceedings of the institution of civil engineers printed an obituary of Hisumbared Kingdom Brunel. Quote, the characteristic feature of his works, it said, was their size. But, quote, his besetting fault was a seeking for novelty. where the adoption of a well-known model would have sufficed.

Today Brunel is remembered as one of the tiring figures of the early Victorian age of steam, an age when engineers strove to establish themselves as respectable members of the professional class. Brunel designed and built ships, bridges, tunnels and railways, many of which are still in use today, more than 150 years after they were opened. He is commemorated in numerous museums and statues, as the name of a university, and his reputation has never been higher. but the patchy opinion of some of his contemporaries suggest a more complicated story.

With me to discuss Isambard Kingdom Brunel are Crosby Smith, Professor of the History of Science at the University of Kent, Julia Elton, historian of engineering and former president of the Newcomen Society for the History of Engineering and Technology, and Ben Marsen, senior lecturer in the School of Divinity,

History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Crosby Smith, Isambard was the son of an engineer Mark Brunel. Tell us something about him. Yes, the Brunelles were originally a farming family from near Ruan in Normandy. And Mark was originally intended for the priesthood. But at an early age, he showed an aptitude for mechanical and mathematical studies. And went to Ruan where he studied hydrography,

that is the charting and surveying of coastlines and seas. In 1786, he joined the French Navy. where he served mainly in the West Indies for about six years. And he returned to France in 1792 just at the time the revolutionary terror was at its height, at its peak. And for someone with royalist sympathies, this was not good. He meanwhile met Sophia Kingdom, who was over from England, despite the revolution,

to improve her French and her wider education. And due to the, mainly to the revolution, Brunel managed to get a passage to New York. So essentially he became what we might call an asylum seeker. So when in New York, then it came back to Britain. But in this time he was developing as an inventor. He was. In North America especially, he set about surveying canal routes,

involved himself in construction projects. And while there, he was introduced to Britain's first Lord of the Admiralty, the second Earl Spencer around 1798, who became his key patron. And that really opened the way for him to return to Britain in 1799, where within a very short time he married Sophia. his most memorable achievement in Britain during this period was in the mass production of rigging blocks for the Royal Navy, something that was previously done by craftsmen

and now it was done by machinery. So in the period of the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, Mark Brunel obviously was recognised as a very central figure in Portsmouth Dockyard, and it was there in April 1806 that Isambard Kingdom was born. He was born in force. How did, briefly, how did he educate his son? Well, most of Isambard's early education was mathematics, arithmetic, geometry, drawing, taught largely by his father.

And then he moved to private schools in Chelsea and Hove, where he widened his education, as it were, the making of the gentleman in terms of some Latin, some Greek. and modern languages. But it was essentially Mark who encouraged his son to draw and came up with this phrase about the engineer's alphabet of measuring and observing any building of interest

with neat precision was Mark's phrase. And then he went to France and studied mathematics because he thought that mathematical education was in advance of, in France it was in advance of what it was in England, but came back to this grantee, Julia Eldon. And his career really began in the 1820s with his father.

Yes, he came back from France in 1822, after his father had been released from debtor's prison. Why was he in debtors' prison? Mark Brunel was horrified when he saw the state of the feet of the people returning from the war in France. And he, in fact, patented a way of mass-producing Wellington boots for which he wasn't paid by the government. And there were various other things.

I think he was not a very good business. man, though he was a very brilliant inventor. So he was, like many people of his time, thrown into debt as prison. I think it was quite a common fate for lots of perfectly good middle class people. Was there such a thing as the state of engineering at that time in this country? Oh yes. And what was the state? What state was it in? Well, there'd been a lot of work on building canals. In fact, there had been a canal mania. There was a lot of work on building roads. Telford, who is the sort of great dominating figure of the early 19th century, was responsible for building the Hollyhead Road, which was the Irish Mail Road,

and he also opened up the Highlands building great roads there, huge road building programme. And then, of course, as James McAdam, who was the son of the famous McCadden, said in the 1820s, and then came the disaster of the railways. and the roads then managed, was sort of obliterated in the public by the fact that this brand new infrastructure system came along. How were these projects road and then rail?

How are they funded? It was all privately funded. It was all share capital. And it was quite complicated and expensive to get your private bill into Parliament. You had a promotional committee and you rushed around and you interviewed all the local landowners and all the people who might be expected to feel that they might benefit financially

from your proposed railway. You had to hire an aid of parliamentary agent, bankers, solicitors. You in fact had to employ a surveyor and an engineer and open a subscription list for shares because you had to have quite a lot of the capital before you actually took your scheme to Parliament. Did this compare badly with, say, France and Belgium? Because they were organised from the centre, weren't they?

They were organised from the centre. I think it depends if you're thinking heroism or if you're thinking state control. The fact is Britain did it privately, and so it was a complete free-for-all, which, in a sense, with Dr. Beeching's rationalisation of the system in the 1860s, a lot of... of that needed to be done because if you were a landowner and you had the money and you could

get yourself together, you could get a railway anywhere you wanted. So not planning it centrally was later on a big disadvantage. But as I say, people nowadays prefer the heroic approach rather than the state-controlled approach. Ben Marsden, can we talk about the status of engineers in British side in the early 90th century? And how this affected the way they went about their work? Yeah, I think people sometimes are confused when they hear the term civil engineer and they associate it with craft-based activity. And they assume that it's more like a low-status, artisanal activity.

But one of the things that really characterises civil engineers in this period that we're talking about is the desire to enhance their status and to distinguish themselves from these lower status, relatively unskilled activities. Why do they want to do that? because of the British class system at the time. I suppose that if you wanted to say who were the individuals that had high status at this time, well there'd be perhaps lawyers,

other kinds of professionals, physicians, rather than surgeons, cultural figures of various kinds, obviously at the aristocracy and that kind of thing. So there's a lot of competition, if you like, from within the engineering community, to try to build an image of themselves, build their status in various different ways.

So the idea of the civil engineer is a relatively, recent invention at this stage, you've had military engineers, obviously those working to produce bridges, roads, etc., in a military context. But then you have the civil engineers who are defined deliberately in opposition to those, especially through figures like John Smeaton. And Smeaton wanted to engage in public works, but also to some extent, sanitise how engineering worked. So he tried to do experiments, he tried to work with models, etc. and make engineering look scientific, because a good way of enhancing status was to associate himself with science. Another important issue was the question of whether engineers should be, in some sense, learn it because the

classic professions of doctors, lawyers and the clergy all to some extent had some form of training, so that meant going through the academy and perhaps having a kind of literary dimension to their practice. So there was a question of whether civil engineers were going to do this. And this was a real tension, I think, for engineers right the way through this period. They wanted to appear learned. So, for example, some young engineers in 1818 set up the institution of civil engineers, which was in a way a repository for libraries, models, etc. And it was supposed to instantiate that connection with scientific activity,

which had been important for Smeaton and these new young engineers. But part of that was a reaction to an idea. of engineering status, which was more to do with family, to do with patronage, more kind of, if we could say, Anshone regime. How did this social position of engineers reflect the way that Brunel, to come now to Brunel, conducted his affairs? We know that he started with his father, but we can come back to him a second. Generally speaking, how did this affect the way he conducted his business?

So I think it's possible to see Brunel in his early life, if you think he's born in 1806, so back in England in the 1820s, as almost experienced. experimenting with these different forms of status. So family, he's the son of an eminent and well-connected engineer. Science. In his early days, in 1830, 1831, he actually writes a treatise, a scientific treatise. Institutions, he's a very keen member of the institution of civil engineers. He's a member of the Royal Society of London, which is the premier scientific society of its time.

He joins the Atheneum Club as well. through these clubs, institutions, he has access to their literary dimension, if you like, the books, the pamphlets, the newspapers, etc., which are really integral part of engineering practice at that time. So to some extent, it's not just through producing works that he's attempting to enhance his own status as an engineer. To some extent, he's almost under the shadow of his father who has the higher profile. There's a lovely example of this where he writes in about 1830 to a man called Thomas Coates associated with a society for the diffusion of useful knowledge and says, from now on I shall be signing myself I, K. Brunel, because my father signs himself, I, Brunel, although we tend to call him Mark.

He actually called himself Isimbard Brunel. So he's trying to, as it were, escape from the shadow, if you like, of his father as the truly eminent engineer. So all of these things, the science. the family, the institutional activity, a ways in which he's exploring the possibility of enhancing his own status. In other hand, working with his father,

Crosbishop, was quite a useful way to start a career. And the first big project he worked on in the mid-1820s was the Thames Tunnel, which, I think it's supposed to be the first attempt to go under a river, and they discovered that it was extraordinary tricky

because of the ground they found under the water. But he worked on that with his father. Can you give us some idea of how that proceeded? He did indeed and it exemplifies very well what Ben has been saying about engineers more broadly. Isambard basically cut his teeth on the Thames Tunnel project. He started as assistant to his father. He took over as resident engineer in the mid-1820s. Mark Brunel became somewhat unwell so Isambard took on an increasingly important role.

What was the big problem? threefold, poor ventilation as the tunnel lengthened under the Thames, the geological structure of the riverbed, which turned out to be a kind of gravel and sand rather than clay, which made the tunneling exceptionally dangerous. And the other problems were financial, because it wasn't obvious that this project was going to go anywhere, especially after the rate of tunneling

was shown to be really quite slow, something like two to three feet per week or per month even in some cases. And Mark had to build a special thing, machine, you'll tell me what it is, to protect the worker so that there wasn't flooding all the time in these exceptionally, as you say, dangerous conditions, in which Brunel made his first entrance onto the public stage by back to your word you, by heroically rescuing a lot of

of workbers who were trapped in this flood and that got him national prominence as this dashing young, brave person. Mark's device was known as the Great Shield which was supposed to be based on the shipwarn, the Taredo Navalis in terms of its capacity

to burrow into stout timbers and prevent any roof falls behind it. The shield was a cast iron rectangle in the form that was used on the tunnel and it was divided into 36 cells each with a miner with a workman

digging away at the face of the clay or the gravel and the whole structure would then be jacked forward at a rate of so many feet per per month or per week. You want to come in? Just a comment on that which is that another interesting thing about this was the fact that it was like a a couturist attraction

and it just really dramatises the fact that engineers, whilst at one level desperate to get on and finish their projects, also needed to keep publics on side, and they also needed to find ways of making money at times when these projects were paused. So the Terms Tunnel, you could buy panoramas, you could buy mugs, you could buy a newspaper kind of thing. There were brass band concerts, etc.

It's a tremendous place to have some fun, and has been described as one of the main tourist attractions of London of that period. Can we, he moved to Brisbane, and so must we. And he worked on the... He was one of the people who put in for his next project in 1829 for what would they help to be

the Clifton suspension bridge. What happened there, Julia Elton? Well, the money had been given by an 18th century Bristol merchant on the theory that one of these days the interest would make it big enough to build the bridge. And in 1829-ish,

it was deemed that the time was now right to do it. And there was indeed a competition in 1829 and various people put in, including I.K. Bruner, who was in fact convalesting in Bristol from an accident he'd had on the tunnel. And because he was bright and sparky, he also was tremendously excited by the dramatic landscape qualities of the Clifton Gorge. And he put in several designs with very long spans. And the big problem is that Thomas Telford, who is by this time the grand old man of engineering, in fact, was buried in Westminster Abbey, he was so grand eventually, he comes in and he says, no, no, no, I have built the great men I suspension bridge.

It's got a span of 570 odd feet, and this is the longest span that is achievable. And so all the competition designs for spans that were well over his specified span length, They all had to be thrown out, and they then asked Telford to design his own bridge, which was idiotic with enormous towers rising 200 feet from the floor valley. And so they then managed to sideline Telford. I'm never quite certain how. And they had a second competition. But they had to compromise with Telford, who was, as I say, the grand old man,

and Brunel was the young whippersnapper. And so it was decided that they had to reduce the span. and they built that enormous abutment on the leeward side to reduce the span. That's where all the money went. So that Brunel's design, which actually would have been wonderful, at least from the point of view of the architecture of the peers, in fact, they managed to get as far as building the two masonry peers, and then the money ran out.

There's a well-documented example of Brunel's showmanship at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Bristol in 1836 when they assembled dignitaries meet for the, as it were, the consecration of the bridge, even though it's not complete. And Brunel attempts to install a thousand-foot iron bar from one side of the gorge to the other. but it unfortunately well unfortunately the cable snaps and it plunges to the River Avon beneath

but Brunel manages to have it all back in place for the ceremony the next morning and of course the whole thing is staged rather like a religious ceremony so I think this is just one example of Brunel's ability to play to the investing public to those who mattered

Van Marsen, his next big commission in 1833 was the great Western Railway so he's still aiming towards Bristol from London Can you tell us about that how that was commissioned? That's right, so he has great connections with Bristol already by this stage or the Bristol area through the Clinton Suspension Bridge Project

and I think part of this is a recognition that by 1830 you have the Liverpool and Manchester Railway which is connecting the Liverpool Port with the Manchester markets but also areas of production manufacture. Bristol is perhaps in danger of being sidelined as a port if it doesn't create good connections with the hinterland and then back obviously to London. So there's enthusiasm for creating a as it were parallel radio in this railway, I should say, in this first part of the passenger railway age. So Brunel is then made engineer, first surveyor in a

1833, March 1833, and then later engineer for this railway. And his idea, curiously, is not simply to follow what's been already proposed by George and Robert Stevenson in the Liverpool and Manchester and other railways in the north of England. Instead, what he does is he says, I'm going to start again from scratch, think in terms of first principles, which essentially a scientific principle as far as he's concerned, and reinvent a new railway system. And as part of that, he creates his own what's called the broad gauge, which is the distance between the tracks.

He creates his own locomotives, which are very, very large. He has this idea that he's going to produce a railway, which is part of a complete package, rapid travel, eventually from London to Bristol, an incredibly good gradient. So instead of having slopes and reducing speed very, very quick, and luxury. So his intended passengers are very much the upclass individuals who he thinks we'll want to move quickly from London to Bristol, essentially to read to work, almost like the HS2 that's being proposed at the moment.

And they start and end in two great projects of industrial palaces, Paddington and Temple Meese. So he's got that going as well. What crippled it? What was the thing that made it very difficult to do? It was the gauges, was it? There were many controversial things about it. Well, we can't have time for many. Can you give us two or three of the key ones? Okay, so using a broad gauge instead of the existing standard gauge,

seven feet and seven instead of four, four, eight and a half inches was problematic. Crosby, can you take this up now? Yes, I think there were many critics of the Great Western Railway, as well as many supporters. I mean, the investors in Bristol were generally very loyal to Brunel, but one of them noted that in private that there have been too many mistakes, too much of doing and too much of undoing. And I think that was one of Brunel's characteristic flaws in the eyes of particularly investors,

not being very careful with their capital. Brunel, because he chose to do things experimentally or was deemed to be experimental, that didn't guarantee success according to Trident tested methods and that was one of the criticisms that would be later labelled against his design of steamships. Now how did it specifically run into trouble

and what was the nature of that trouble? Well, the Great Western Railway I think overall was profitable. So I think the investors got, as it were, a fair share of the success of the railway in their eyes. The problem really, as usually conceived by historians, is matching other or not being a uniform gauge with any kind of attempt to provide a national rail network. And one of the arguments, a kind of quasi-social political argument, was that it was essentially an elite railway, as Ben mentioned. It was very much, one critic called it the gentleman's wide gauge.

It didn't, as it were, catered for the travelling masses, for example, in the same way that the northern, northwestern railways catered. I want to come back for a moment, Ben. I think we have to recognise as well that Brunel at this stage was really relatively untried as a railway engineer and there are heavy criticisms from a group of shareholders, directors from the north of England who are saying, who is this man?

You know, why are we trying these innovations? So there, Brunell is, for example, compared to Don Quixote as a kind of crazy engineering knight-errant tilting at windmills with wild projects, etc. It's only really because of support from the scientific community and on a very narrow vote that he's allowed to continue to actually construct the railway in the late 1830s. Well, I think one of the problems was that actually he was really not a very good mechanical engineer

and he wanted, of course, to do everything himself, unlike Robert Stevenson, who was actually a very good delegator. He wanted to do everything himself and so the line was opened and actually the locomotives he designed were a terrible mess and there were howls of complaints. They didn't work. The line was very uncomfortable. And he did offer to resign,

and there was a moment when that was clearly a possibility. And actually the Great Western Board called in Sir John Hawkshaw and Nicholas Wood. And they, who were heavyweights, said that actually Brunel was absolutely the person to finish the line, but that actually the locomotive design should be taken out of his hand. and they therefore employed Daniel Gouch, who was trained in the Stevenson School of Locomotive Engineering.

I will say for Brunel, he was a big enough figure. He liked everybody to answer to him, but in this instance, Gooch answered to the board, and Brunel was big enough to take that on, and the Great Western Locomotive story turned into a huge success because of Gouche. And Brunel's push West continues when he goes into... ships and we have the first great Western, which is to go from Bristol to America and he plunges into

shipbuilding. How does he do that, Julia Elton? Again, we must sort of say, take it for granted everything he does is the biggest that's been done at the time or the biggest that's ever been done. This is the biggest ship, steam ship and away he goes. Yes, I think you could say that. That's not necessarily good engineering of course, but in the ships. That's what was going on. I mean, the ships, I think, were a very remarkable part of his career, I think more remarkable in some ways than the railways

because other people were just as brilliant if not more. So the ships, I think, are very unusual. There was an anomaly in those days about getting ships across 3,000 miles of water. They, in fact, felt that if you made a ship that was big enough, the resistance to the wood go up in the same proportion and that therefore you would have to have such impossible amounts of fuel to get it across that it was impossible and actually of course that isn't so because resistance doesn't of course go up in the same proportion as the size of the hull this is a very unscientificate way of putting it but he managed that was an anomaly and he saw he saw how silly it was and of course the ship was in competition with serious and arrived in new york

and she still had, I think, 200 tonnes of fuel left and Sirius was down to its last 12 tonnes. Crosby, I'm sure, knows far more about this than I do. Crosby. Well, the late 1830s was a period of great competition to try to be the first across the Atlantic with a regular steamship service. And there had been an American domiciled in London,

Junius Smith, who attempted to float an enormous company with some eight steamships and capital of over a million pounds in the 1830s, which prompted, that really prompted Brunel, his competitive instincts, to do the same to extend, as it were, the Great Western Railway westwards across the Atlantic. So he wasn't the first to conceive the idea of a transatlantic steamship service of this kind. but the Great Western was very nearly the first steamship. A wooden paddle steamer, pretty much the largest steamer afloat at that time. And in many ways, the most successful of his three famous steamships, where he, as it were, in the eyes of some critics, where he went wrong was to build a Great Britain,

which was 3,000 tonnes instead of 1,400 tonnes or thereby. It took five years to get to the floating, outstage in Bristol and in another year to complete, by which time he had really exhausted the patience of his investors. And the Great Britain only made a small number of transatlantic crossings before grounding on the coast of County Down and bankrupting the Great Western Steamship Company. So if he'd built, you could say with the benefit of hindsight, if he'd built more Great Westerns, he might have become, instead of the Cunard line of the Atlantic, it would have the Great Western Steamship Company of the Atlantic.

Julia. On the other hand, I'm in the SS Great Britain is really the first modern ship. It's completely an iron. It's screw-propelled, not paddle-wheeled like the SS Great Western. And I think to some extent, it wasn't entirely his fault.

That running a ground in Dundrum Bay, it was always said was actually the drunken captain. I mean, I don't see how Brunel could be held responsible for the fact that it ran a ground, and it took months to get her off and he designed the cradle that did in fact get her off but it did spell the end

for the great way for the company Well the contemporary criticisms ranged from building an iron ship which deranged the magnetic compasses which was one of the arguments for the grinding that the screw propeller was a much too experimental arrangement for example the tips of the propeller

kept falling off and several of the transatlantic voyages were conducted under sail alone at the end because the propeller was simply thumping away there and not actually doing anything. So it is particularly ironic that after salvage of the vessel, she became an auxiliary steamer running to Australia with emigrants. And then at the end of her career, her sailing career, she was a pure sailing ship. So the passengers often noted in their letters to the captain afterwards that the ship's sailed extremely well.

But what do you make of his venture into these iron ships? What do you make of it, Ben? I think this is another one of those things where if you go back to his really early life and you see this incredible set of aspirations that he has, which he talks about privately, he wants to make a name for himself. It's very, very clear, even from his,

almost as soon as he's into his teams, that he's trying to do that. One way of doing that is the railways, but it's like that's not enough. So with the exploration into the Great Western, he sees that as this huge systematic extension of the Great Western Railway across the Atlantic, kind of thing. There's a double thing in this, though,

because he has to make it very appealing to get the money, and he has to go out and himself appeal for this private money. So if he's a figure in the city, or a figure in the industrial or cultural landscape, they're saying, oh, we like that, chap. We've met him. He's very clever indeed, so we'll give him some of our money. That was partly...

had to do that. I think he's a charming individual in some ways she was drumming up investors, wasn't it? Not with contractors and not with assistance but I think he has cultural charms he has cultural attributes and skills he can talk, he can, you know he's he's a gentleman

I suppose, he has gentility and that's something that allows him to well the public etc but I think there's possibly something else going on which is that in an environment where yes there's certainly a huge amount of innovation. There's also a lot of caution. So there's probably space in that kind of environment for one individual to play up his personal innovative brand, if you like. And I think that's

possibly that's something that Brenno is deliberately going for. I'm not just, as Crosby says, going to repeat the Great Western, I'm going to do something wildly different. Crosby then, now Julius is going to come in. Well, I think increasingly in his career, as the ships get bigger and will see this with the Great Eastern. He's playing not just to, as it were, tried and tested investors like

the merchants of Bristol, but it's an age of speculation. And the Great Eastern steamship company, the third project in maritime history for Brunel, the ship is

initially costed at around a quarter of a million pounds. The aim was to build two of these ships, to run without refueling either to Australia or to India or both. And there was talk that the dividends for the investors would be some 40%. So he was offering them a good deal. It was a real carrot, a real carrot, such as we would rarely see today. But he was constantly trying new things, Julia Elton.

What about this atmospheric railway that he had a hand in? Well, you could argue that actually one should draw a veil over the. atmospheric railway because, I mean, it was an absolute disastrous failure. It was a system in which you used a tube and you exhausted the tube in front of the carriages which sat on a sort of piston and so they just shot forward by atmospheric pressure and you exhausted the tube by a series of stationary steam engines at every anyway at a few mile intervals. It had been tried quite successfully

on the Dalke Expense extension to the Dublin and Kingstown Railway, but that line was only a mile and three quarters or two. And it had also been tried on the London and Croydon Railway as an auxiliary to the locomotive running, and that was, oh, three miles, whatever is London to Croydon, not all that much. Brunel was proposing to use

a single line of tube over a main line from Exeter to Plymouth 52 miles so you know you went from a small relatively experimental thing to this enormous idea

and in fact he completely overreached himself and it was a disaster it all had to be taken up he refused any fees for it well that's bold I mean he was a perfectly moral man Brunel kept two dogs as Ben Martin, the public and the private.

Can you briefly tell us what we get out of them? Yeah, so these diaries are incredible documents. Although we don't tend to think of engineers of being literary figures or sort of authors or writers, it was actually very common for engineers to keep diaries at this period. Mark Brunel had suggested that keeping a diary for an engineer was a professional duty. So he encouraged his son, Isnabar King and Renel, to do the same.

So there are two diaries, the private diary, the personal diary. The private diary is like a record of, day-to-day events associated with the engineer's work with his employer. Maybe the source of a report later to directors, etc. The personal diaries are the really revelatory ones because these are the ones that show us really what Brunel was feeling.

So can you give us a few instances from that? Well, when he talks about his castles in the air, his Chateau de Spagna, as he calls them. He relates an anecdote at some point where he was riding along a track on his little pony, as he called it, and he felt himself pulling himself up to look taller so that he could make a better impression on those who are walking beside him. It's in those diaries that he talks about his aspirations,

his desire to be the first engineer of his own time and also the exemplar for all future engineers. What, helpfully, can we tell about Brunel's character from what's known about the rest of his life when he wasn't building bridges and tunnels and ships and railways, Juryo? Well,

actually that's mostly what he did. You must have had some time off. He had very little time off. I mean, in the early days he married, his wife was a member of the Horsley family, and they were very cultivated. John Horsley was a composer. They knew Mendelssohn.

He moved in that milieu, but actually, if you look at his workload, in the summer of 1843, He was almost not at home at all. He was working 18-hour days. And actually, it was felt that his wife was a sort of trophy wife. He was practically never at home. And they were all like that.

I mean, the eyes of the public were on them. The society was looking to these great engineers to provide this new infrastructure. And actually, none of them had very much time to do anything. apart from work. And you might qualify that a little. I think the interesting thing is, in a way, being at home was being at work, because the office was actually in the same premises on Duke Street in London,

near to the House of Parliament, where most engineers actually lived at that stage. There's a lovely example of Brunel's interest in art, literature, etc, and some of his kind of ability to entertain guests and that kind of thing. So in 1847 he decided that he was going to become a patron of art And he set up a series of commissions To ask modern British artists to illustrate the works of Shakespeare The artist's got to choose the works But they had to be currently performed

And they had to be popular But after that it was up to them So Edwin Lanzir was one of them His brother-in-law John Horsley Who Julius just mentioned was another John Horsley illustrated a scene from Romeo and Juliet, Lancia, I think it was a midsummer night's dream. So imagine the dining room, actually rather close to Brunel's office,

decorated with these wonderful images from Shakespeare. And Brunel was hoping that from this he would create a commission that would be something that he could give after his death to the nation. In fact, he was slightly disappointed with the results, and also actually the family, after he died, was so short of cash that they seems have decided to sell most of these. assets. Yes, because I will say for Brunel, he certainly put his money where

his mouth was, so that he in fact invested in the atmospheric railway, but he also invested disastrously in the Great Eastern Rail, in the Great Eastern steamship. And when he died, they were desperately short of cash. But actually, I mean, I think I would equally say, I mean, Robert Stevenson was also

commissioning pictures and buying works of art, as indeed for some of the great contractors, because basically, they'd made it. And that's what you did. I mean, it's like nowadays. I mean, they start from fairly, in Stevenson's case, a fairly modest backgrounds, and they really make it, and this is one of the great symbols you become a patron of art. Crossby, how would you characterize Brunel's reputation in his lifetime? I think the examples of Paddington Station, the Great Western Railway as a

whole, the bridges with which he was associated, particularly the Salt Ash Bridge over the Tamar, Maidenhead Bridge, those were regarded with great admiration by wide sections

of the public. But we always come back to the question of confidence in terms of the travelling public, doubtless, had great confidence in, if, I mean provided they could afford it to travel on the Great Western Railway.

But, for example, the figures of passenger numbers on his transatlantic steamships tell an interesting story in that following any mishap, however, minor on the Great Britain and also on the Great Eastern, the passenger numbers tend to plummet. So you get an idea that in terms of the travelling public, Brunelles' artifacts were treated with some caution. And there were comparatively few monuments and memorials to Brunel after his death in the 19th century. But in the 20th century, I guess post-1960s, there is a great revival in things Victorian. And it coincides, for example, with the salvage and restoration of the Great Britain in Bristol,

along with Bristol, as it were, rediscovering its heroic past in its, it's, it's great engineer. And I think there is that attempt in a post-industrial age, in an age of heritage, to look to heroes to a genius, a genius of invention and of engineering. I'm afraid that's all we have time for. So thanks very much as Julie Elton, Crosby Smith and Ben Marsen.

And next week we'll be talking about ESOP. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Yes. He did have this celebrity status So this is the famous example One of the ones that Crosby didn't talk about where

He's doing a conjuring trick And he chokes on a coin And it's a national news Which is Mr Brunel going to die And he develops this National news There's somebody rushed down the street to the Atheneum Where he knew everybody saying

It's out, it's out, it's out And everybody knew because of course He's supposed to have developed this apparatus Which allowed him to be spun round So that I think would be dislodged And then submitted a description of the apparatus an authorised account of the time. So in that sense, he did have some kind of celebrity status.

Yes. But if you look at what people were saying just at the point when he died, then, you know, monuments to his vanity. I mean, this is how many of these events are... You seem to resist that. You seem to resist him, Julia, having any sort of recognition,

high recognition that's... The reason why I resisted is that the Brunel industry and the Brunel worship has completely distorted an overall picture. And actually, if you're ever going to do another engineer, you really should do Robert Stevenson, who is a very interesting foil to Brunel

and was just as celebrated in his own time, if not more so. The problem with Robert Stevenson is that he had no family, his young wife died. There are no papers, there are no diaries, there are no drawings, there is no descending family to go on worshipping their ancestor,

to which the Brunelles have certainly done. That's the same with James Watt. And it's the same with James Watt. Reconstructed the image of James Watt, Senior, who's a better known figure. And of course the other thing are those photographs. In a world in which we worship celebrity, those photographs are so sexy.

I mean, they are. Those of him swaggering in front of the Great Eastern. And actually, I think, and the thing that makes, that I think is really interesting, is in an age in which we are so responsible, of us, we actually worship an engineer who is far more

prone to take risks even than his contemporaries. That, I think, is really interesting. So what I'm I go on being concerned to do is in fact, pull together he, in the context of his contemporaries, and what did everybody else do?

He was, in his own time, not considered to be the greatest Robert Stevenson was. He wasn't the one that got the night to and that's the point, isn't it? I don't believe. Sorry. Thank you very much. No, thank you. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programs to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4.