He’s likely the most famous engineer in
history.
In 2002, a BBC poll named Isambard Kingdom
Brunel the second greatest Briton of all time,
second only to Winston Churchill.
A key player in the Industrial Revolution,
Brunel helped turn Britain into a global powerhouse.
Under his guidance, railway tracks were laid
across England and Wales at a phenomenal rate;
gravity defying bridges were built; and the
first modern ships were engineered.
With his trademark top hat and cigar, Brunel
became an icon of Britain’s early Victorian
age - a self-made man propelling his nation
forward through sheer talent and entrepreneurial
spirit alone.
Yet the life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel is
more than just the tale of a plucky Brit leading
the steam age.
The child of a French refugee father, Brunel’s
life was only made possible by the explosive
events reshaping the continent.
His early years were marked by war, and his
father’s chronic struggle with debt.
And yet his talent for engineering still allowed
him to ride the wave of the industrial revolution
to heights that have never been matched.
The Elon Musk of his day, this is the story
of both Brunel the man, and the technological
explosion that made his name.
Like Father, Like Son
If your mental image of Isambard Kingdom Brunel
is of the quintessential British Victorian,
it might come a shock to realize he was actually
half-French.
Brunel’s father, Marc Brunel, came from
a religious farming family in Normandy.
In fact, they were so religious that Marc
was originally meant to become a priest - although
his talent for numbers convinced his family
to instead let him train in engineering.
Still, the French Brunels were mostly about
God, family and loyalty to their king.
And that was a problem, because Marc came
of age just as France was deciding that kings
looked better without their heads.
On July 14, 1789, a Parisian mob stormed the
Bastille prison, firing the opening shot on
the French Revolution.
When revolution broke out, Marc was serving
abroad in the French Army.
So he missed most of the early highlights,
including the Women’s March on Versailles,
and the king’s attempted Flight to Varennes.
But Marc did manage to be back in Paris just
in time for summer of 1792.
AKA, just in time for the merde to really
hit the fan.
On August 10, 1792, a working class insurrection
engulfed Paris.
We don’t have time to go into the details
here, but the upshot is that it changed the
course of the revolution.
Suddenly, cautious, non-murderous revolution
was out, and guillotines and regicide were
very much in.
Amazingly, all this carnage merely provided
a backdrop to Marc’s time in Paris.
1792 was the summer he fell in love.
Sophia Kingdom was from a British Navy family,
the youngest of sixteen children.
With remarkable bad timing, her parents had
sent her to Paris that year to practice her
French.
Instead, she wound up first falling in love…
and then nearly losing that love to the Reign
of Terror.
In 1793, Marc’s royalist sympathies forced
him to flee the country just ahead of Robespierre’s
goon squad.
He bade Sophia goodbye and hightailed it for
New York, just one of many refugees fleeing
madam guillotine.
Yep, refugee.
So, in response to the question “what refugees
have ever contributed to society”, the answer
is “oh, just the friggin’ Industrial Revolution.”
While lying low in America, Marc made some
contacts in the British Navy.
In 1799, he traveled to Britain, married Sophia
Kingdom, and started working on the Portsmouth
docks.
There, he developed a method for mass producing
rigging blocks, something which gave the Royal
Navy a much-needed edge over Napoleon’s
fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar.
In recognition of his help, the Royal Navy
paid Marc a handsome sum.
Handsome enough for him and Sophia to at last
settle down and raise a family.
On April 9, 1806, their son was born.
They named him “Isambard,” after an alias
Marc sometimes used.
But it wouldn’t be just his name that Isambard
Kingdom Brunel inherited from his father,
or his diminutive stature.
It would also be a Mensa-level grasp of mathematics.
It was Marc who instilled in Brunel a love
for the language of engineering.
An appreciation of what it took to construct
something from scratch.
Neither father or son could have known it
in those early years, but this love affair
with engineering was destined to change the
world.
Birth of an Engineer
In 1815, Napoleon’s empire collapsed, ending
26 years of French upheaval.
As the monarchy was restored and the threat
of revolution faded, Marc made two important
decisions.
The first was that he would send his son to
France to study math, where the schools were
superior.
The second was that he was gonna do something
to help the troops.
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, tens
of thousands of veterans were returning to
Britain.
But rather than recognize their valor, the
government was all like, “hey, thanks a
bunch, now here’s a big fat pile of nothing.”
Marc was so shocked by the sight of destitute,
shoeless British veterans, that he decided
to build a machine for mass-producing boots
for them.
Unfortunately he super-overspent and the government
responded by throwing him in debtor’s prison.
For young Isambard Kingdom Brunel, this was
a formative experience.
His father was as good an engineer as he would
become, and yet here Marc was, languishing
in prison because he didn’t understand business.
It was a mistake Brunel swore he’d never
make.
Yet even a spell in debtor’s prison wasn’t
enough to keep Marc out the engineering game.
In 1825, Marc asked his son - now back in
Britain and better trained than ever - to
join him on a great construction project,
possibly the greatest London had ever seen.
They were going to tunnel underneath the Thames.
At this point in history, London was one of
the busiest ports in the world.
Yet getting goods from its docks to the south
of England was an unbelievable cluster headache.
First, merchandise had to be loaded onto mule-drawn
carts.
Then it had to be taken across London Bridge
at a snail’s pace.
The idea of tunneling under the Thames to
forge an alternative route was not new.
But it was thought to be impossible.
Now Marc and Brunel were going to make the
impossible happen.
Construction on the Thames Tunnel began in
1825.
Immediately, it turned into a nightmare.
There were leakages, ventilation problems,
floods, not to mention it was all so slow-going
that it constantly teetered on the verge of
financial disaster.
At one point, money got so low that Marc opened
it up to tourists, hiring brass bands to play
as people wandered the unfinished tunnel.
But while the tunnel was a major migraine
for father and son, it would also be their
making.
On Marc’s side, the difficulties led him
to invent the world’s first tunneling shield,
a concept still in use today.
On Brunel’s side, the route to greatness
was a little more twisty.
In 1828 part of the tunnel ceiling collapsed
and the Thames came flooding in.
Now, the Thames may be small by global river
standards, but it’s still not something
you want to come crashing down on your head.
Six workers were killed in the ensuring flood.
It would’ve been even more, had Brunel not
gone charging in to help the miners, saving
lives in the process.
But while Brunel being a hero was great and
all, the important part is that his heroism
left him injured.
So badly injured that he needed over a year
to convalesce.
As Marc tried fruitlessly to gather more money
to drain the tunnel and continue digging,
Brunel lay up at home, bored out his skull.
It was in this restive state that something
caught the young man’s eye.
The city of Bristol was holding a design competition
for a bridge crossing the Avon Gorge, right
next to the affluent suburb of Cliffton.
So, Brunel decided to enter.
You won’t be surprised
to hear he won.
The Age of Steam
Today, the 
Clifton Suspension Bridge is one of the icons
of Victorian engineering, a vast span that’s
emblematic of Bristol.
If you want to know how it looked during Brunel’s
lifetime, though, just concentrate very hard
and picture absolutely nothing.
That’s because, like the Thames Tunnel,
the Clifton Suspension Bridge was yet another
Brunel project that ran completely over-budget
and wound up getting abandoned.
But while the Thames Tunnel would become an
albatross around Marc’s neck that dragged
him down until its eventual completion in
1841, the Clifton Bridge had the opposite
effect on Brunel.
Building it resulted in him being introduced
to the great and good of Bristol.
And the great and good of Bristol just happened
to be looking for someone to build their first
railway.
Here’s something you need to know about
1830s Britain.
The country is in the process of going utterly
railway mad.
In the early part of the 19th Century, there
had been a boom in canal and road building,
as the cities started to connect up.
But no sooner had most of Britain bet big
on canals than everything changed.
In 1829, Robert Stephenson successfully tested
his “Rocket”, effectively the first steam
train.
That same year, the Rocket had begun running
the line between Liverpool and Manchester.
Before long, the entire north was moving to
the shrill whistle of steam.
Down south in Bristol, a fear began to grow
that a lack of railway would soon demote them
from “major port” to “assholes from
hicksville.”
And that was how, in 1833, Isambard Kingdom
Brunel found himself contracted by the Great
Western Railway company to build the first
line connecting Bristol to London.
It was an incredible project for a young man
of 27.
With the Clifton Bridge running out of funds
and the Thames Tunnel still stalled, Brunel
knew this was his chance to make his mark.
So he decided he wasn’t just going to be
build a normal rail line.
He was gonna go back and redesign everything
from first principles.
That meant creating a new, broad gauge from
his trains to run on, allowing for big, luxurious
carriages.
That meant designing those same luxury carriages
himself.
Designing the locomotive that would pull them.
It meant also designing iconic stations like
London Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads.
It was a huge undertaking, one that would
guarantee Brunel finally stepped out from
Marc’s shadow.
It was also very nearly his final job.
Brunel may have been an unmatched genius at
designing stuff like Paddington Station and
the Great Western line itself, but he was
an absolute schmuck at designing locomotives.
In the late 1830s, tests using Brunel’s
engines were so disastrous that he came this
close to getting his ass fired.
In the end, though, everyone figured that
firing Brunel would be throwing the baby out
with the mediocre locomotive, so they just
made him promise to never, ever try engine
design again.
And that was fine by Brunel.
He already had his sights set on something
much grander than mere steam trains.
He was gonna get into shipbuilding.
The Race for the Atlantic
Although Brunel married Mary Elizabeth Horsley
in July, 1836, she spent most of their marriage
dismissed as a mere trophy wife.
There may have been a fragment of truth to
this.
Not matter what he might say to the contrary,
Brunel’s first love wasn’t Mary, or even
their children.
It was working on grand projects.
In the early days of the Great Western Railway,
Brunel announced to the directors that he
had a plan for an extension to the line.
We love to imagine a board of stuffy old dudes
with monocles asking incredulously if Brunel
meant to build a line all the way into Wales?
When Brunel told them he actually wanted to
open a connection to America, we can only
hope a dozen monocles simultaneously popped
out and dropped into a dozen cups of tea.
Brunel’s vision was to build the first steamship
capable of crossing the Atlantic - a feat
at that time thought impossible.
Some bozos had done the calculations and concluded
that any steamship trying to cross would require
so much fuel that it would become too heavy
to sail.
But Brunel was certain they were wrong.
Now, he was gonna put his money where his
mouth was.
In 1834, Brunel set about designing and building
his steamer.
Named the SS Great Western, the ship was a
wooden-hulled paddle steamer, not unlike something
you might see making its way down the Mississippi.
Incredibly, Brunel did this with zero experience
at shipbuilding.
But rather than become a planet-sized catastrophe,
it became a game-changing success.
In 1838, the finished Western made her maiden
voyage to New York.
Just as Brunel had predicted, she didn’t
run out of fuel, arriving in the Big Apple
with over 200 tons to spare.
It could’ve been the start of a lucrative
new venture for the Great Western company.
Had they focused on building more Westerns,
they could’ve cornered the transatlantic
passenger market.
But Brunel hadn’t built the Western as a
means.
He’d built it as proof of concept.
The real achievement would be what came next.
Just one year after the Western’s maiden
voyage, Brunel got to work on the SS Great
Britain.
We’ve heard it said that this was the first
modern ship.
Everything about it was a testament to the
Industrial Revolution, from its iron hull,
to its pioneering screw-propelled engine.
It was also big.
So big that, when Brunel launched the Britain
in July, 1843, it was too big to get out the
Bristol Docks.
It was only thanks to a record breaking high
tide in December, 1844, that this monster
ship was ever able to make it to the ocean.
Unfortunately, she wouldn’t spend very long
at sea.
On September 22, 1846, the captain of the
Britain ran her aground on the coast of Ireland
- possibly while drunk.
When Brunel visited the site of the disaster,
he angrily exclaimed:
“(she’s) lying like a useless saucepan
kicking about on a most exposed shore ...with
no more effort or skill applied to protect
the property than the said saucepan would
have received on the beach at Brighton’.
The accident and subsequent salvage operation
bankrupted the Great Western Steamship company.
While their railway arm would survive, the
dream of cornering the transatlantic market
was over.
A rival company swooped in and bought up the
salvaged SS Great Britain, taking it out of
Brunel’s hands forever.
It was the sort of titanic failure that would’ve
acted as a warning to any other inventor.
A warning not to keep overreaching with mad
projects, like Don Quixote tilting at some
steam-powered windmill.
But did Brunel take that warning?
Ha.
What do you think?
Westward Expansion
It’s a testament to Brunel’s mad genius
that pretty much everything that happened
to him gave him some idea for an invention.
For example, in 1843 he tried to do a magic
trick for his children, only to wind up accidentally
swallowing a coin and getting it stuck in
his windpipe.
So Brunel designed a machine that would spin
him around so fast that it would shake the
coin loose.
When that failed, it was Marc who saved the
day by suggesting strapping Brunel to a board,
holding him upside down and shaking him.
And so the coin finally came free.
But even this high-speed spinning machine
would have nothing on the madness of Brunel’s
next project.
In 1844, the Great Western Railway finally
reached the city of Exeter.
By now, Brunel-built track was crawling all
over the West Country, into Wales, and up
from Bristol into the Midlands.
But reaching Exeter posed a problem.
Beyond lay the wild expanse of Dartmoor, a
place so hilly that getting normal trains
to go over it would be a challenge.
But Brunel being Brunel, he decided to try
anyway.
In 1843, Brunel had visited Dalkey in Ireland,
where he’d seen an atmospheric railway.
And, no, that’s not a railway with a really
great atmosphere, but a railway that uses
a vacuum-sealed tube to propel its carriages
up an impressively steep gradient.
It was this that Brunel decided to build across
Dartmoor.
To be clear, this was an insane undertaking.
The Dalkey atmospheric railway worked, but
it ran a mere 3km.
By contrast, Brunel was hoping to build one
that extended over 80km.
The technology was simply untested on such
a scale - sort of like if the government announced
out of the blue tomorrow that they were gonna
build a hyperloop connecting New York and
Washington, DC.
Nevertheless, Brunel insisted on it, pushing
ahead at full steam - or should that be full
vacuum? - despite Great Western’s protests.
Amazingly, Brunel’s gamble worked.
Well, it did at first.
By early 1848, the first atmospheric railway
operating on a regular timetable opened between
Exeter and Newton Abbot.
On good days, its trains were capable of hitting
110 kph.
For a moment, it looked like Brunel had really
pulled it off.
But, no.
Impressive as they were, all of Brunel’s
great projects were doomed to end in failure.
Almost as soon as the line had opened, the
salty Devon sea air was eating away at the
leather lining of the vacuum tubes, causing
them to decay.
When the company tried re-sealing them with
grease, hungry rats chewed through them further.
By 1849, the atmospheric railway was in such
a bad shape that Brunel himself recommended
scrapping it altogether and starting again
with regular track.
It was a colossal waste of money, one that
Brunel was wholly responsible for.
Yet it was in the aftermath of this disaster
that we see some of Brunel’s greatness.
Always a moral man, Brunel personally paid
for the atmospheric railway’s failures out
of his own pocket, rather than making Great
Western pick up the tab.
Once that was done, he didn’t give up on
his Devon line, but kept right on working
at it, eventually extending track all the
way into Cornwall via the breathtaking Royal
Albert Bridge.
Big ideas and zany schemes aside, Brunel was
a tireless engineer of the ordinary; one who
linked up so much of west and middle Britain
in his lifetime that it helped make the nation
an industrial powerhouse.
While the railroads of America would be built
by robber barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt
who cheated and swindled, Brunel laid Britain’s
tracks while never losing sight of his moral
compass.
We know which of those guys we personally
prefer.
The Last Dream
As more and more of Britain vanished beneath
his railtrack, Brunel began to turn his mind
back to his greatest failure.
The SS Great Britain had been ambitious, but
not overly so.
What if the reason it was seen as such a failure
wasn’t because Brunel had aimed too high,
but too low?
What if, next time, he built something even
bigger?
The result of that crazed thought was the
SS Great Eastern, the single biggest shipbuilding
project ever undertaken.
Brunel’s plan was to build a ship that could
make it all the way from Britain to India
without having to stop and refuel.
Maybe even further.
But Brunel realized that he alone couldn’t
build such a leviathan.
So he called in expert shipbuilder John Scott
Russell to help him.
In no time at all, the two ambitious men would
grow to despise one another.
Work began on the Eastern in 1854 at London’s
Isle of Dogs.
Everything about the project was so vast that
it challenged everything Brunel knew about
engineering.
For example, Brunel figured out that a headlong
launch into the Thames would be impossible
for a ship this size, so they’d have to
launch her sideways.
Unfortunately, when the time came in 1857,
the Eastern was so heavy that she distorted
the slipway, resulting in the massive ship
becoming stuck halfway.
Just to get the damn thing into the river,
Brunel was forced to invent a “battery of
hydraulic presses” that would nudge the
Eastern out its rut.
This was even harder than it sounds.
By 1857, Brunel was suffering from kidney
disease, a condition which left him in chronic
pain.
Yet finish his hydraulic presses he did.
Before long, the SS Great Eastern was finally
afloat.
The biggest ship in human history - a record
she would hold for four decades - began her
maiden voyage in early September, 1859.
Brunel himself was on the deck to witness
what should have been his greatest triumph.
But, as we’ve seen time and again in this
video, Brunel’s grandest projects were always
destined to end in some kind of disaster.
Still, no-one could’ve predicted just how
great a disaster would accompany the Eastern’s
launch.
Stood on the deck of his monster ship that
blustery day, Isambard Kingdom Brunel suffered
a massive stroke - some say a seizure - and
collapsed.
Although he clung to life for another few
days, his body was really just delaying the
inevitable.
Brunel died on September 15, 1859.
He was 53 years old.
In the wake of Brunel’s death, his patrons
in Bristol went on a fundraising drive, determined
to build a suitable monument in his honor.
That monument became the Clifton Suspension
Bridge, finally finished to Brunel’s original
designs in 1864.
It would become the engineer’s lasting legacy
in the city.
But what about in the rest of the world?
At the moment Brunel died, he was considered
a great engineer, but also one plagued by
hubris, who wasted his talents on unworkable
projects like the atmospheric railway.
The Victorians actually considered his father,
Marc, to have been the better engineer, despite
his own flaws.
Against the guy who’d invented the tunnel
shield, Brunel was a mere dreamer.
But time moves on, and fashions change.
As the dour Victorian era gave way to the
20th Century, people began to realize just
how inspiring a dreamer can be.
Before long, Brunel’s maddest projects came
to be recognized not as failures, but as heroic
attempts to shape the future.
Today, Isambard Kingdom Brunel is no longer
seen as one Victorian engineer among many.
He’s the Victorian engineer, the man who
was to the steam age what Da Vinci was to
the Renaissance.
While the truth is a little more complicated,
there’s no doubt that Brunel deserves this
reassessment.
Here was the child of a refugee father, from
a family saddled with debt, who nonetheless
managed to transform the face of Britain,
making it into a modern industrial power.
He may not have been the father of the Industrial
Revolution, or even its main contributor.
But Isambard Kingdom Brunel showed humanity
what it was capable of.
For that reason alone, he deserves his place
as one of the greatest Britons
in history.
