Brunel

By Annabel Gillings

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the outstanding entrepreneurial Victorian engineer. He helped construct the Thames Tunnel, build the Great Western Railway and its terminus, Paddington Station, but his boldest endeavours were three gigantic ships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: May 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781910376829

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Birth and Revolution

On 9 April 1806, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born. The name Kingdom was that of his mother’s English family, while Isambard and Brunel were products of his father’s French lineage. Despite his grand name, he arrived into a quite ordinary terraced house in Portsea, a suburb of Portsmouth.

Isambard was the third child of Sophia and Marc Brunel, but the first boy and consequently, in the 19th-century, the first who could follow Marc into his beloved profession: engineering.

Years later, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s unusual name would become almost synonymous with engineering: he was perhaps the most eminent Victorian engineer. He built huge swathes of railway across Britain; he designed daring and elegant bridges on a vast scale; he created hospitals for soldiers of the Crimean war (yet he also advanced the design of guns); he revolutionised ship design and he built the most enormous and advanced vessels the world had ever seen. Thousands emigrated to Australia and America on ships built by Brunel. His work altered the lives of almost every person in Britain, and millions abroad. It is still integral to our transport system and can be seen in Paddington station; the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol; the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash and by anyone who uses a train in the west of Britain today.

Brunel’s achievements were enormous; a product of his prodigious energy and vision. Yet this incredible ambition would come to threaten not only Brunel’s work, but also ultimately to endanger his own life.

That ambition began with Brunel’s father, Marc; in spite of his gentle manner he would exert the greatest influence on Brunel’s life. The events and work of Marc’s life were a powerful force in shaping those of Isambard.

Marc Brunel was a famous engineer in his own right, but it was a position for which he had to work hard. He was born in the small village of Hacqueville, Normandy, in 1769. As the youngest son, his father expected him to train for the priesthood. But Marc hated Latin and Greek, and much preferred drawing, maths and carpentry. His creativity was obvious, but his father could see no future in it. So despite his protestations, Marc was sent to train at the Seminary of St Nicaise in Rouen.

Fortunately for Marc, the Principal of St Nicaise recognised his talents and persuaded Marc’s father of them. When he was 13, Marc was removed from the seminary and went to live with the Carpentier family, friends of the Brunels. Francois Carpentier was the American Consul at Rouen and a retired sea captain, he drew upon his naval connections, getting tutelage for Marc from his friend Prof Dulague, with the aim of Marc joining the navy as an officer cadet. For Marc, this opened up fantastic opportunities, since Dulague was also Professor of Hydrography at the Royal College of Rouen. Impressed by Marc, in 1786 he used his contacts with the Minister of Marine to secure for Marc the position of junior officer to a new frigate.¹ And so Marc began a six-year tour of duty, sailing to the West Indies, and America.

During this time Marc not only learned to speak English but gained invaluable experience in technical drawing and mathematics – he became fluent in the theories fundamental to engineering. These latter theories were not yet taught in England, and in due course, they were something that Marc would impress upon Isambard. But in 1789, during Marc’s spell with the French navy, his travels were dramatically interrupted by the uprisings of the French Revolution. Marc was forced to return to Paris when his frigate was sold off in 1792. A staunch royalist, he made an ill-advisedly public speech criticising Robespierre, and the angry crowd tried to seize him. He was forced to return to Rouen, where he took refuge with the Carpentier family.

French involvement in the Seven Years’ War and American Revolution combined with poor crops after 1787’s bleak winter rendered France almost bankrupt. Still, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived extravagantly and taxed the common man to the hilt, taking 70 per cent of his earnings. Peasant uprisings all over France culminated in Parisian workers storming the Bastille – Paris’ prison and symbol of the monarchy’s power – on 14 July 1789. By August, the National Assembly of Estates General consisting of clergy, nobles and the bourgeoisie, had drawn up a ‘Rights of Man’ declaration demanding liberty and equality. But the King refused to acknowledge it.

Here, in the dark context of the Revolution, Marc met with a wonderful coincidence. Also staying with the Carpentiers at that time was Sophia Kingdom, the youngest of 16 children, now orphaned. Her father, William Kingdom, had been a naval contractor but died when Sophia was young; at which point her eldest brother became her guardian. With impeccably bad timing this brother sent Sophia to Rouen to learn French with the Carpentiers just as the French Revolution was getting started.

Sophia and Marc met in these tense circumstances, and quickly fell in love. After just a few months, Marc proposed and Sophia accepted. But once again, the Revolution intervened in Marc’s life. Rouen – once a royalist enclave – was taken by the Jacobins and Marc and Sophia were forced to live in hiding.

The violence in the streets was accelerating; following the beheading of King Louis XVI. When Marc sarcastically addressed his dog as ‘Citoyen’ (citizen) in the street² in front of a patriot, the danger of his position became clear to him. He had to leave France or face imprisonment or even death.

Francois Carpentier was able to get a passport for Marc from the American Consulate allowing Marc to escape to New York on board the American ship Liberty, on 7 July 1793. But even on board, Marc was not yet safe. In August, after weeks at sea, a French frigate approached and searched the Liberty for runaways. As they approached, Marc found that he had lost his all-important passport. It took two hours for the French soldiers to find him, but in that time he had forged a new one. His skills in draughtsmanship paid off, and the soldiers fell for the forgery. He had escaped, but he had also left his precious Sophia behind in France.

Marc landed in New York on 6 September. He found work as an architect and engineer, and over the six years he stayed in America his reputation grew. He submitted the winning design for a new Congress Building at Washington (although it was not built in the end); he surveyed lakes and canals; and he became Chief Engineer of New York, designing a cannon foundry and advising on the defences of Long Island and Staten Island. He even took American citizenship. His dreams of returning to the French navy were forgotten in favour of his new career as an engineer.

In 1791, the civil unrest in France had escalated; Louis XVI fled, but was captured and returned to Paris. A new constitution was duly declared; by September 1792 the royal family were imprisoned and the French Republic was declared. On 21 January 1793 the King was executed for treason to his people. So ensued the Reign of Terror where the Jacobins established a dictatorship, led by Maximilien Robespierre. Some 40,000 people were eventually beheaded. A government of five directors – The Directory – was established to rule France, overthrown by army general Napoleon Bonaparte in a coup d’etat in 1799. In 1804 Napoleon enthroned himself as Emperor of France.

But in France, things weren’t going so well for Sophia. A decree was made in October 1793 that all English residents should be arrested and imprisoned. Besides her conspicuous Englishness, it was known that Sophia was engaged to an escaped royalist. She was taken away and locked up in a commandeered Convent, where she and other prisoners slept on cramped beds of wooden boards, and were fed on bread mixed with straw.³

Sophia’s imprisonment lasted until Robespierre fell in August 1794. At last she was able to return to England.

Marc and Sophia kept up a correspondence, and in 1798, chance offered them another opportunity to meet. It began when Marc was dining with Alexander Hamilton, a former aide to George Washington. A Frenchman, M. Delagibarre, who had just arrived from England, was another guest at the dinner. While discussing the royal Navy’s role in opposing Napoleon, Deligabarre outlined their problematic shortage of pulleys, 1400 of which were needed for one 74 gun ship.⁴ At present, Delagibarre explained, the English method of making pulleys was a slow and expensive one, with most of the work done by hand. Marc saw a great business opportunity in improving the process. So, on 20 January 1799 Marc left New York for England with the intent of overhauling the pulley-making business.

Marc reached Falmouth in March and wasted no time in finding Sophia. He went straight to London, where she was living with her brother. After six years of separation, on 16 March they were finally together again, physically changed but still determined to be together. On 1 November of the same year they were married at the church of St Andrews in Holborn. In 1800 they had their first child, Sophia, and in 1805 another girl, Emma, before Isambard was born in 1806.

Marc and Sophia had a wonderfully happy marriage, but for them and their children, it was not always a stable household. Money was always a problem. Although Marc was astonishingly inventive – perhaps more so than his son would be- his business ventures were not always successful because he paid far more attention to ideas than to profits or accounting. In due course, this would have a great impact on Isambard; the desire for financial security would become one of the driving forces in his ambition.

Marc’s first enterprise in England, the pulley-making business, got underway when he met Henry Maudsley, a man who would become the ‘greatest mechanic of his age’.⁵ At that point, Henry had a tiny shop in Wells St, off Oxford Street in London. But in time, it would spawn the screw-cutting lathe, the planing machine and the micrometer, and grow into perhaps the most famous engineering firm of the 19th century – one with which Isambard Brunel would also come to do a great deal of work.

Marc’s idea was to automate the process of making pulleys as much as possible, and he got Maudsley to make models of his designs for pulley-making machines. Next, Marc had to get the Navy to commission the full-scale version. Things didn’t look hopeful: Sir Samuel Bentham, Inspector-General of the Naval Works, was already planning a pulley-making plant for Portsmouth Dockyard. But, on seeing Marc’s designs he recognised their brilliance, and dropped his own.

Marc’s designs represented probably the first example of fully mechanized production in the world; the work previously done by 60 men could now be done by just six. A total of 43 different parts worked together to turn out the pulleys. The machines became famous and once complete, people came to marvel at them even from outside the Navy. Among them was Tsar Alexander I, who was so impressed that he asked Marc to come and work for him in St Petersburg, offering him a diamond ring as an inducement.⁶ This offer would later prove very significant in the Brunels’ fortunes.

Back in Portsmouth, Marc and Bentham agreed that Maudsley would build the machines and Marc would oversee their installation at Portsmouth. And so in 1802, Marc and Sophia moved to the small house in Portsea close to the dockyard, where their son Isambard was later born.

The pulley-making machines began a pattern that would repeat in Marc Brunel’s life: that of a great idea and much hard work, for a small reward. A dispute arose over who actually invented the machinery – Marc who designed it; Bentham who had commissioned it; or Maudsley who built it. In the end, Marc got £17,000 from the Admiralty, a much smaller sum than he had hoped