Short History Of... - Isambard Kingdom Brunel

Episode Date: August 23, 2026

Isambard Kingdom Brunel is remembered as one of the greatest engineers of the nineteenth century. Working on a dizzying array of infrastructure projects, he pushed the boundaries of what was considered technologically possible, and drove forward Britain's industrial revolution.   What inspired Brunel to become such a multi-talented engineer? What was the secret of his incredible work ethic? And does he deserve his reputation as one of the most significant figures in Britain's industrial history? This is a Short History Of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Tim Bryan, historian and author of Iron, Stone and Steam: Brunel's Railway Empire. Written by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Matt Peaty | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw | Fact check: Sean Coleman Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is the 19th of July, 1843, in Bristol, southwest England. In the offices of the Great Western Steamship Company, a whitewashed building near the city's docks, Brownlow Cecil, second Marquis of Exeter, stifles a yawn as hazy sunlight filters through the windows. Agreeably full of food and champagne, after an excellent lunch, he half listens to the mayor's wife. standing next to him. The room is filled with important men in dark suits. Most of them standing clustered around the guest of honor, an unassuming figure with wavy brown hair and neat sideburns. The only clue as to his status is the bejewed order of the Garter badge affixed to his jacket. Because he is, in fact, Prince Albert, the Queen's consort, and is currently deep in conversation

with perhaps the second most important person here today, the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the creator of the technological marvel they're all here to see. Now, one of the company's directors, informs the room that everything is ready. Brunel and the prince lead Brownlow and the others outside into a perfect summer's afternoon. What Brownlow notices most keenly, however,

is not the light, but the noise. A crowd of thousands. lines the docks. The water is carpeted with rowing boats carrying yet more spectators. When the prince is spotted, an almighty cheer goes up, startling a flock of seagulls who take to the air in a flurry of white feathers. The party make their way to a newly constructed wooden gallery set at the edge of the docks. As Brunel ushers everyone in, Brownlow steps to the railing at the front of the gallery and looks up and up and up. up. A gargantuan iron steamship builds the entire field of his view. Its smart black paint gleams in the sunlight.

If he cranes his neck, he can just about see the numerous, colorful flags that festoon its rigging, fluttering gently in the breeze. It is truly the greatest chip he has ever seen. Shaking his head in wonder, Brownlow takes a seat as a volley of cannon fire rings out. As the shots die away, a band begins to play Rule Britannia. Accompanied by the ringing brass, the enormous ship begins to move, towed by a smaller vessel. With Brunel standing close by, Prince Albert offers a ceremonial bottle of champagne to the woman sat next to him, the mother of a local politician. Flushing slightly, she accepts the bottle from the prince and steps towards the front of the gallery. Holding it by the neck, she flings it towards the slowly moving ship, only for it to fall short.

There is a dull splash as it hits the water. She turns round, mortified, but the prince gallantly waves away her apology, then snatches up a second bottle from the table at his elbow, and hurls it himself with all his might. This time, the bottle explodes in a shower of sparkling glass on the harbour. One of the company's directors pronounces the vessel's name, the Great Britain, and the crowd erupts in applause. A smile playing at his lips, Brunel gives a nod of approval. His latest achievement, the largest ship in the world, has been christened. While the launch of SS Great Britain marked an important milestone in the career of Isambard Kingdom Brunel,

it was not his first high-profile project. As the Prince and his party made their way to Bristol from London on that summer's day, they did so thanks to another of the engineer's achievements, the newly opened Great Western Railway. And on a tour of the city, they visited the half-completed Clifton suspension bridge, again designed by Brunel. Today, he is remembered as one of the greatest engineers of the 19th century.

Working on a dizzying array of infrastructure projects, he pushed the boundaries of what was considered technologically possible and drove forward Britain's industrial revolution. So what inspired Brunel to become such a multi-talented engineer? What was the secret of his incredible work ethic? And does he deserve his reputation as one of the most significant figures in Britain's industrial history? I'm John Hopkins.

From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Isambard, Kingdom Brunel. Isambard Kingdom Brunel's engineering talent does not arrive from nowhere. It quite literally runs in his veins. Tim Bryan is a historian and the author of Iron, Stone and Steam, Brunel's Railway Empire. Isambardt. Kinginburnell's father was called Mark Isanvar Brunel, and he was an interesting character. He was an emigre from the French Revolution, an engineer.

year. In 1793, four years after the start of the revolution, and the same year that King Louis the 16th is sent to the guillotine, Mark Brunel meets a young Englishwoman in the French town of Rune. Sophia Kingdom is the youngest daughter of a naval contractor from Portsmouth. She has been sent to France to improve her language skills, at perhaps the worst possible moment. Shortly after they become acquainted, Mark finds that his royalist sympathies mean he is no longer well. in the land of his birth. While he obtains a passport and flees to America, Sophia is not so lucky. After Britain declares war on France, she is imprisoned.

She eventually makes it back to her homeland in 1795, after months spent living in the shadow of the guillotine. Mark finds success in America, becoming the chief engineer of the city of New York as it expands in the wake of independence. He befriends important men, including founding father Alexander Hamilton. But he never forgets Sophia. In 1799, he travels to England and finds work with the Navy, and in November, the couple finally wed. Mark Brunel's work with the Navy soon takes the couple to Portsmouth, on England's south coast.

There he sets up what is considered to be the world's first factory production line, manufacturing rigging blocks. Made of wood, they are used in the raising and lowering of ships' sails, and Mark's mass production methods. production methods speed the process up immensely. They're big business. A 74-gun ship requires 922 of them, and the Royal Navy gets through around 100,000 a year. Sophia and Mark settle into a modest terrorist house by the dockyard. Soon they're joined by two daughters,

and in 1806, their first son, Isambard Kingdom, Brunel. When he is a year old, the family moved back to London. Mark spends much of his children's early years working on various business ventures, including a boot-making machine with which he supplies Wellington's troops at Waterloo. But he is always a better engineer than an entrepreneur, and he struggles to turn any of his ventures into long-term success. Isambard is close to his father, from whom he learns arithmetic and draftsmanship. In 1813, however, it's time to start school.

With a father like his, there is only one career path in contention. He was sent to France by his father and had training in various schools and institutions and then spent some time working with a clockmaker and watchmaker called Brege in Paris. And you get the impression that Isambard was always going to be an engineer. That career path had been laid out for him by his father. While Isambard is in France, life takes a turn for his parents. In 1821, Mark's chronic inability to manage his finances finally catches up with him. He was a talented engineer, but not a great businessman,

and a number of the projects that he worked on had failed, and he in fact spent some time in debtors' jail, which really influenced the young Isambard in the future. Unwilling to lose such a talented engineer, the government grants Mark £5,000. Along with Sophia, who voluntarily entered the jail alongside him,

he now returns to freedom and gets back to work. When a teenage Isambard returns from France in 1822, he joins his father's office, ready to put his education to use. Though they will not always work together, Mark and Isambard will continue to consult on each other's projects

in the years to come. In 1823, Mark Brunel begins work on a momentous infrastructure project. The Thames Tunnel Project was an important project for London, because in the 18th and 19th century, London had become increasingly congested. There were few bridges across the River Thames, and to get from one side of the city to the other was becoming increasingly difficult. And so Marcus and Barb Brunel put together their plan to build a ton of between Wapping and Rotherhive in East London,

and this was initially to be a pedestrian tunnel rather than a road tunnel or a rail tunnel. But it was a complicated and dangerous project that took some years to complete. It is a groundbreaking piece of engineering, the first tunnel of its kind to be driven beneath a major body of water. A shaft, 70 foot deep and lined with brick, will be sunk into the south bank of the Thames at Rotherhive.

Miners will then use Mark's patented metal tunneling shield to dig through the riverbed a foot at a time, as workers behind them line the passage with brick. By the time they reach the north bank, a shaft will have been sunk at whopping, lining up with the tunnel. All in all, it will be about 1,250 feet long, nearly 400 metres. Now 19 years old, Isambard is a salaried member of his father's staff on the project, and a key figure as the tunnel begins to take shape. Brunel was already showing engineering promise, even when he started to work for his father,

but I think it was inevitable that he would work with Mark on the designing construction of the tunnel itself. Mark relied on Brunel, particularly as construction took place, largely because conditions in the tunnel were very poor. The tunnel burrowed under the River Thames. At that time, the Thames was an open sewer. it was not at all healthy, and water started to come into the works. And the workmen and the staff supervising them soon became ill

because of the germs that were engendered by the water. And so as a result, Isamard was asked essentially to manage the works underground. But the Brunelles have underestimated the difficulty of the task. As they get to the middle of the river, the ground inside the tunnel becomes increasingly wet. One day, in April 1827, two years into the project, water comes flooding through the ceiling, bringing not only sewage, but also gravel, coal, shards of China and even bones. Centuries of London's rubbish.

Isambard hires a diving bell and has himself lowered down to inspect the riverbed, finding it very thin above the middle of the tunnel. After a second, larger flood in May, tons of clarens of clare. are dumped onto the riverbed to shore it up. Water is pumped out of the tunnel. Mud dug out and work resumes. But the river cannot be held back forever. Get your tickets now for the dog stars.

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It is the 12th of January 1828. 75 feet below the surface of the Tens, the great river that snakes through London, a group of men labour inside a brick-lined tunnel. Only the uncertain light of sputtering gas lamps keeps the darkness at bay. 21-year-old Isambard Kingdom Brunel mops the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief.

Even on a cold winter's day, the humidity under the river is unbearable. Stuffing the fabric back into the pocket of his muddy work trousers, he surveys the end of the tunnel ahead of him in the gloom. A group of miners on a multi-story metal apparatus hack their way through the earth under the river, endeavoring to extend it by another foot. Just behind them, on a raised wooden platform,

another group keep pace, extending the tunnel lining as they go. mud and clay are gradually replaced with bright red bricks to keep the river out. At least that is the idea. Water is still dripping through gaps in the brickwork and seeping up through the floor. Isambar takes another few steps, his feet splashing in the inches of water at the base of the tunnel. Shaking the wet from his trouser hem, he sighs deeply, but it soon turns into a racking cough. The air in the tunnel is vile, a mixture of sewage fumes from the riverbed they are digging through and smoke from the lamps. When he can breathe evenly again, Brunel becomes aware that the

dripping sound is intensifying. He glances up above where the men are digging. Is that a trick of the light? Or is the earth over their heads crumbling? All at once, an almighty torrent of water pours in through the tunnel roof. Isambard watches in disbelief as two workers are swept off the bricklaying platform and then, as the lamps are doused, the whole place is plunged into darkness. A crash sounds overhead

and a large chunk of brickwork knocks into the engineer's shoulder. He falls, thumping heavily down onto the ground. And after a moment's stunned in activity, he realizes the tunnel is beginning to fill with water. There is a sharp pain in his left leg. and feeling with his hands, he discovers the bottom half of the limb is buried under a small heap of bricks. Gritting his teeth, he reaches down and removes them one by one,

and with the water continuing to rise, he finally frees himself and clambers unsteadily to his feet. Limping, he calls back down the tunnel to the work as he had seen washed away. But there is no answer. At that moment, there is a terrible sound. an unearthly roar of a great wave of water rushing through the tunnel towards him. The last thing Brunel is aware of is the air being knocked from his lungs before the foul-smelling river water closes over his head. When the river bursts into the Thames Tunnel in January 1828,

Brunel avoids drowning only thanks to another engineer who pulls him from the water. But six other workers are not so fortunate. Suffering an injury to his leg, as well as serious internal damage, he goes to Brighton to convales and is laid up for several months. Work on the tunnel grinds to a halt, and Mark Brunel will not be able to complete it until 1842, almost 20 years after work began. By then, his son has moved on to other projects and to another city. Brunel moved to Bristol, really looking for work. And so he started to get involved with the merchant class in Bristol, the business people who wanted to do various projects.

And that's how he got asked to work on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. In 1829, Bristol's Society of Merchant Venturers forms a committee to plan a bridge across Clifton Gorge over the River Avon, which runs through the city. In order to find a designer, a competition is launched, judged by Thomas Telford, whose Menai Bridge in Wales is at this point the longest suspension bridge in the world. Though he is just 23, with no previous experience in the field, Brunel throws his hat into the ring.

In the first round, his designs were rejected, largely because of the scale of the bridge that he had in mind. The bridge commissioners had used Thomas Telford, who was then probably one of the most famous engineers of his time, to look at the designs, and Telford felt that Brunel's designs were too big, too ambitious, and potentially not safe. And so they were rejected, as were all the other designs.

And so another competition was held, and Brunel submitted his designs yet again, with the assistance of his father, who had already designed some suspension bridges elsewhere. And even in this second competition, Brunel was not successful. but he went back to the bridge trustees and argued his case and persuaded them that his designs were the best.

The bridge he plans has a span of 630 feet. He does not radically reinvent the concept of the suspension bridge but iterates on other people's work. The suspension chains, for example, will have links twice as long as those of the Menai Bridge. This will become a hallmark of Brunel's approach throughout his career. The foundation stone is laid in August 1831, but work soon stalls. The suspension bridge project had quite a checkered history because the company was always short of money.

Like many engineering projects of that period, the companies had to try and raise the capital to complete it. And although they got the go ahead, in 1831, work stopped when there were serious riots in the city of Bristol. And from then on, the bridge company really struggled to raise. enough capital to complete the project. Aged 25, Brunel has so far worked on the unfinished Thames Tunnel and now the unfinished Clifton Bridge. For most engineers this could spell the end of their career, but he is not most engineers. Though the bridge project has completely stalled, it brings Brunel to the attention of the businessman of Bristol at just the moment when they are embarking on a number of ambitious projects.

By the beginning of the 19th century, Bristol had lost its preeminent place as a port in Britain to places like Liverpool, largely because in the 17th and 18th century it had made most of its money through tobacco and sugar, and of course the profits of slavery through that as well. By the beginning of the 1800s, maritime port authorities and the local authorities and business community realized that they needed to do something to improve the city's fortunes. They decide that Bristol needs a railway line, connecting the city to London. It's already been a few years since Britain's first public railway opened in the northeast of England. Now some of Bristol's businessmen want in on the act too. In the 19th century, the idea of major capital projects like railways being done by government was really unheard of. And in most cases, it was expected that to build a railway or a steamship, companies were set up. And then they raised the capital to do that.

And in the case of railways, they also had to go for a whole parliamentary process to get an act of parliament passed that showed where the railway would go, how much it would cost, and who would be involved. 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. The 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. He even has a small traveling coach design. 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. 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 Broadgauge,

and that was a distance of seven feet and a quarter of an inch between the rails. The idea of this was that carriages would have greater capacity, more passengers could be carried, trains could run at higher speeds. As he is planning his new railway system, there is an important development in his personal life. He gets to know Mary Horace. A socialite from a creative family in London's fashionable borough of Kensington, a 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. The 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. Ships 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. Never 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' 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. Brunel 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 main voyage in 1838, I was able to crisscross the Atlantic as a pathfinder for Brunel's idea of linking London, Bristol and the New World, essentially. It 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. This August on the Noiser Podcast Network, Jane Austen Stories returns.

This time Dame Julie 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 of, 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 Bulls. And in Sherlock Holmes short stories, Holmes investigates the disappearance of a missing star rugby player in the adventure of the missing three-quarter.

Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus. It 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. It 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. Setting her wine on the table, she dabbs her lips elegantly with the snowy white napkin.

Waiters move around the table, clearing away the remnants of the celebratory lunch they've 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. 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 work. way back to London. The woman rises and walks arm in arm out of the marquis with her husband across a stretch of lawn to 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-ceilinged wooden carriage, and she takes a seat opposite in, resting her elbow on the sill of the large unglazed window opening.

Once they are all aboard, the engine rumbles into life. A thrill runs through her of the sound of the train's whistle. This is only the second time that she has been on a train. The first being this morning, on the outbound journey from London. 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. 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 Guppie had a bit too much to drink at lunch, but it is a day for celebration, after all. After 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 and 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 the 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. Despite 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. The screw propeller was not a new idea. Brunel had seen it demonstrated elsewhere, but he realized that it could, could be a much better source of propulsion than the adult 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 ground-breaking projects and has an office staffed with engineering assistance, although he is not the easiest man to work for. Isambard managed everything on all his projects. He wouldn't be called a delegator, as we might call it today. He was very reluctant to spread any responsibility to his assistance.

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 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. Brinnell 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.

And 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. servants 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. But 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 revolution.

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. But the idea of using this revolutionary technology over a considerable distance next to the sea and over the hilly territory of Devon,

Devon proved his 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. Despite 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 might, 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. The difficulty Bruno 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 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 constructed and work begins on the banks of the Thames.

The 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. Real Canadian Superstore has everything you need this back-to-school season. Save on lunchbox savers like Ziggy's sliced delimed meat products for always 375. And get life brand pure vita shampoo or condition. for $8 each.

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While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. In 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. front and swiftly erected. Within months, the entire hospital has been built at Renkjoy 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%. It 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 picket. of Brunel taken by Robert Howlow. The 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 Tema 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. In 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. A group of his colleagues joined together and finished the Clifton suspension bridge in his memory. A 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. Brunel'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 case. 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. In 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. 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. the second half of the 19th century. And his projects are still in use today. If you've ever marvelled 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.

The historian Kenneth Clark said that Bruno 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 an adopter. 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. His 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. Next time on Short History, I will bring you a short history of Nina Simone. She 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. That's next time. You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now,

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