Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (review)

Samuel Smiles, the pioneering Victorian author of engineers' lives, wrote of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59): "His ruling idea was magnitude; he had an ambition to make everything bigger than he had found it. [...] He was the very Napoleon of engineers, thinking more of glory than of profit, and of victory than of dividends" (qtd. 211). The two most celebrated projects with which Brunel was associated—the Thames Tunnel and the Great Eastern steamship—were by any measure gargantuan as well as disastrous, and for both reasons have endured as fitting symbols of the age of heroic engineering. In between these fiascos, Brunel constructed the more functional and profitable Great Western Railway. Well connected, brilliant, and resourceful but also opinionated, autocratic, and impractical, Brunel has come to epitomize for many a brief period when England led the world in technological innovation and its railroads were the envy of its competitors. He emerges in Angus Buchanan's new biography as a representative figure of those strange early Victorian decades when steam, iron, and coal propelled society into places and at speeds never before imagined, and with little or no regard for what lay in or behind its startling new path.

Son of the French-born engineer Marc Isambard Brunel, Isambard Kingdom was born near Portsmouth. Educated in France, the younger Brunel served an apprenticeship by fire when at the age of only twenty he took over the day-to-day supervision of the excavation of his ailing father's Thames Tunnel beneath the river between Wapping and Rotherhithe. Conditions were dangerous, and Brunel barely escaped from an inundation that killed six workers, shattered his leg, and left him with internal injuries from which he never fully recovered. His perceived heroism led him to be closely identified with the Tunnel works, which were a popular tourist attraction followed closely all over England and abroad. By the time his father completed the Tunnel in 1843, Brunel was hard at work in Bristol, where he designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge (completed as a memorial after his death), quarreled with local authorities over improvements to Bristol Docks, and built the first two of his three great ocean-going steamers, the wooden-hulled Great Western, and the iron-hulled and screw-propeller-driven Great Britain. He also engineered several important wrought-iron bridges, notably the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash.

Brunel's most enduring project, and perhaps the only one on which he eventually turned a profit, was the Great Western Railway, launched in 1835 in the midst of railway mania to join Bristol and London. The major engineering feat was the 1-_-mile- long Box Tunnel, completed in June 1841 at the cost of some hundred lives. In 1851, inspired by the iron-and-glass design of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace (Brunel had served on the Great Exhibition's Building Committee), Brunel designed a new terminus, Paddington Station, which, he informed a desired collaborator, "entre nous will be one of the largest of its class" (qtd. 74). Although, as Buchanan concedes, Brunel was not a steam locomotive engineer, he was astute enough to secure for his railway the assistance of Daniel Gooch, who was. The Great Western Railway and its affiliate lines soon blanketed the southwest.

When railway mania faded in 1847, Brunel focused his prodigious energy onto global transport. The protracted and fraught construction of the steamer Great Eastern became, like the Thames Tunnel, a long-running public spectacle, a "microcosm," as The Times put it, which promised to "justify our claims to the moral supremacy of the world," but succeeded only in a fatal "catastrophe" and in casting "a great gloom" over the enterprise of such heroic engineering (qtd. 132). The Great Eastern was so large and unwieldy it had to be launched sideways into the Thames; it crushed a worker...