Isambard Kingdom Brunel

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Brunel at the anchor chain of the Great Eastern steamship . Robert Howlett's photography shows Brunel's self-confident charisma.
Signature of Brunel

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (born April 9, 1806 in Portsmouth , † September 15, 1859 in London ) was a British engineer and a technical pioneer of the Industrial Revolution . He became famous for building the Great Western Railway (GWR) and a number of well-known steamers and bridges. In 2002, Brunel was ranked second in a public poll by the BBC to identify the 100 greatest Britons .

Family and ancestors

Brunel was born to Sir Marc Isambard Brunel and Sophia Kingdom Brunel on Britain Street in the Portsmouth borough of Portsea. His father was from France and had been a royalist naval officer there. Before the French Revolution he fled to the USA and in 1799 to Great Britain , where he worked in the Portsmouth Block Mills . Brunel himself also spent a few years in France. The whole family moved to London in 1808 because of their father's work. Brunel had two sisters, Sophia and Emma, ​​and had a happy youth, although the family had occasional financial difficulties.

education

Brunel's father taught him drawing from the age of four. He had learned Euclidean geometry by the age of eight and was fluent in French . His interest in buildings increased and he was already able to discover and correct errors in the structures and designs. He was then sent to boarding school with Dr. Sent to Morrell in Hove . Right from the start, his father wanted him to have a high quality education, such as that which he himself had enjoyed in France. At the age of 14 Brunel went to the College of Caen in Normandy and finally to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris , famous for its math teachers. When Brunel was 15 years old, his father was jailed for three months on charges of £ 5,000. After Brunel had finished school at Henri-Quatre , his father wanted to send him to the prestigious École polytechnique (technical college), but as a British he was not allowed. That's why Brunel trained with the famous watchmaker Abraham Louis Breguet in Paris, who praised the young Brunel very much. In 1822 Brunel returned to Great Britain after four years.

Construction projects

Thames tunnel

Thames tunnel

At the age of 20, his father appointed him chief engineer in the construction of the London Thames tunnel, as two of the most important engineers had died in an accident in the tunnel. The tunnel was one of his father's greatest projects. The tunnel was the first in the shield tunneling built tunnel and the first major tunnel ever under a river. Driving the tube from side to side took nearly two decades (1825–1843). During this period there were two serious incidents in which water entered the tunnel and young Brunel almost died; a total of six workers were killed in the course of the project. Isambard Brunel recovered from this accident for six months in Clifton near Bristol , but suffered the damage until the end of his life. Work on the tunnel was initially stopped as no more investors could be found, but was completed seven years later, in 1843. The tunnel was the first to ever pass under a navigable river; Originally intended for pedestrians, the tunnel now serves the London Overground . It was around this time that Brunel began to keep a diary that shows his energy and enthusiasm.

Railway construction and railway stations

Construction of the Royal Albert Bridge

In 1831 he became chief engineer of the Bristol docks and subsequently designed and built the docks in Plymouth , Cardiff , Brentford and Milford Haven . As early as 1833 he switched to railway construction for the Great Western Railway Company , where he introduced a 2,140 mm wide gauge instead of the standard gauge . In the years after Brunel, the routes were changed to standard gauge despite the advantages of his design. In addition to more than 1,500 km of railway lines built under his direction in the west, the Midlands , South Wales and Ireland , he was praised above all for the engineering structures on his lines: with their numerous viaducts , train stations and tunneling , they were considered one of the wonders of Victorian England . He also built Temple Meads in Bristol and Paddington in London.

Brunel used a Britschka as a mobile office to monitor the construction of the Great Western Railway, taking with him a drawing board, route maps, his tools, as well as 50 of his favorite cigars and a folding bed. He was also known for smoking up to 40 cigars a day and getting by on 4 hours of sleep.

shipbuilding

Great Eastern , July 1866

Even before the Great Western Railway opened , Brunel used his reputation to convince the shareholders of the railway company to build the Great Western , at that time by far the largest steamship in the world. The maiden voyage took place in 1837. The Great Britain followed in 1843 , the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamer , whose hull was no longer made of wood , but of iron . Other special features of the ship, which is now in the dry dock in Bristol specially designed by Brunel , are a double bottom and watertight bulkheads .

Building on these two successes, Brunel turned to his third ship, the Great Eastern , in 1852 , which was a giant of the seas with 18,916 gross register tons - a record that the Celtic was only able to set in 1901. Even during construction, costs got out of hand and there were a number of technical problems. The size also became a problem, with around 4,000 passenger seats it was far too large for the time. So it was soon used as a cable lay across the Atlantic.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

Bridge building

Brunel was also involved in the construction of several large bridges, including the Royal Albert Bridge in Saltash, Cornwall and the Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol , which was not completed until five years after his death.

Death and afterlife

Statue of Brunel on the grounds of the Brunel University named after him . To compensate for his small stature (1.60 meters), he almost always wore a high cylinder .

Shortly before the maiden voyage of his largest ship, the Great Eastern , he suffered a stroke from which he did not recover. Ten days later he died at the age of only 53 and was - like his father - buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London .

Many of his original notes and drawings are now part of the University of Bristol's Brunel Collection .

Several institutions bear his name in his honor. The Brunel University in Uxbridge (district in Greater London) is named after him and since 1985 the Brunel Award has been awarded by an international jury of designers and architects for railway design (buildings and vehicles ). After him was Brunel GmbH named, a service provider in the field of engineering, its German headquarters, founded in 1995 in Bremen located. In Swindon , which owes its importance to the Great Western Railway , a large shopping center in the city center, the Brunel Center , is named after Brunel.

There is a statue of Brunel in Swindon, as well as in Paddington Station in London . Two other statues are based on the photo of Brunel with the anchor chain and can be seen on the grounds of the university named after Brunel in Uxbridge and not far from Temple Meads train station in Bristol , in front of the headquarters of the law firm Osborne Clarke , whose client was Brunel. A three-dimensional wall collage made of aluminum panels has been exhibited in the station since 2006, showing graphics based on Brunel's sketchbooks.

Brunel is still the subject of popular culture to this day. When the BBC asked who the 100 Greatest Britons were in 2002, respondents voted him second behind Winston Churchill . Jeremy Clarkson released a documentary on Brunel in this context before the vote. In the historical novel noise of John Griesemer Brunel plays a significant role, and at the 2012 London Olympics embodied Kenneth Branagh Brunel at the opening ceremony. The legend continues to this day that Brunel constructed the Box Tunnel on the Great Western Main Line in such a way that the sun always shines through the entire tunnel on Brunel's birthday.

On March 23, 2018, the Being Brunel Museum , which includes the restored ship SS Great Britain , opened in Bristol Harbor .

literature

  • Isambard Brunel: The Life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Civil Engineer. Longmans Green, London 1870 (digitized) .
  • Robert Angus Buchanan: Brunel. The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Hambledon and London, London et al. 2002, ISBN 1-85285-331-X .
  • LTC Rolt : Brunel. A Pocket Biography. Sutton, Stroud 2006, ISBN 0-7509-4294-0 .
  • Adrian Vaughan: Brunel. An Engineering Biography. Ian Allan, Hersham 2006, ISBN 0-711-03078-2 .
  • Andrew Kelly (Ed.): Brunel, in Love with the Impossible. A Celebration of the Life, Work, and Legacy of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Bristol Cultural Development Partnership, Bristol 2006, ISBN 0-95507-421-5 .
  • Miron Mislin : For Isambard Kingdom Brunel's 200th birthday. In: Steel construction . Vol. 75, 2006, No. 12, pp. 1021-1024, doi : 10.1002 / stab.200690171 .
  • Eugene Byrne: Brunel (= Pocket Giants. ). The History Press, Stroud 2014, ISBN 978-0-7524-9766-2 .
  • Alfred Pugsley (Ed.): The works of Isambard Kingdom Brunel , Cambridge UP 1980

Web links

Commons : Isambard Kingdom Brunel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ To the photo Andy Grundberg: The Machine and the Garden. Photography, Technology, and the End of Innocent Space. In: ders .: Crisis of the Real. Writings on Photography, 1974–1989. Aperture, New York 1990, pp. 50-65, here p. 51: “the famous Robert Howlett portrait of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who is shown standing with obvious pride and self-satisfaction… [the picture shows] the creation of a new Eden, one in which the ideal of the garden is supplanted by the ideal of the machine ".
  2. ↑ Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) , short biography on BBC History (English).
  3. ↑ Childhood and Family Background on Brunel200.com (English).
  4. ↑ Buchanan (2006), p. 18 (English).
  5. ↑ Isambard Kingdom Brunel at Brunel University , last updated on October 4, 2010 (English); Marc Isambard Brunel: Plan for the management of an underground vault, which is to form a double street under the bed of the Thames. Rau, Dresden [1827] (digitized version) .
  6. ↑ The Thames Tunnel at Brunel200.com .
  7. ↑ a b Bernd Nebel: Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the private website Bridges: Architecture, Technology, History , last updated on August 27, 2011.
  8. ↑ Isambard Kingdom Brunel on the SS Great Britain website .
  9. ↑ Olinka Koster: Close but no cigar ... how Brunel became a non-smoker. In: Daily Mail, July 19, 2006.
  10. ↑ SS Great Britain on Brunel200.com (English).
  11. ↑ SS Great Eastern on Brunel200.com (English).
  12. ^ Brunel Collection. In: Bristol.ac.uk , last updated on January 16, 2012 (English).
  13. ^ Temple Meads Brunel Artwork Unveiled. In: BBC.co.uk of September 14, 2006.
  14. ^ Churchill voted greatest Briton. In: BBC.com , November 24, 2002.
  15. ^ John Griesemer: Intoxication. Munich, Piper 2005, ISBN 3-49224-226-X .
  16. ↑ London 2012: Faster, Higher, Stranger - Quirky Offcuts of the Olympics. In: The Observer , July 28, 2012.
  17. ↑ Annabel Gillings: Brunel. Haus Publishing, London 2006, p. 72. See, however, Steven Morris: Light at the end of the tunnel: sun shines for Brunel's birthday. In: The Guardian , April 10, 2017.
  18. ^ Marc Brown: Being Brunel museum opens on Bristol harborside. In: The Guardian , March 23, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Brunel, Isambard Kingdom
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British engineer
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1806
PLACE OF BIRTH Portsmouth
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 1859
Place of death London