The Full Story
Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge at twenty-four. His Great Western Railway ran from Paddington to Bristol on tracks wider than the rest of Britain's, because he had decided the wider gauge gave a smoother ride. When the two crews boring Box Tunnel from opposite ends of two miles of rock finally met in the middle, they were one and a quarter inches out of alignment.
Then he built ships nobody thought possible. The SS Great Western was the first purpose-built steamship to cross the Atlantic. The SS Great Britain was the first large vessel driven by a screw propeller, a design every modern ship still uses. The Great Eastern was 692 feet long, launched in 1858, the biggest ship on earth for forty years. Nobody else could build it. It went on to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable, connecting Europe and North America for good.
He worked twenty-hour days. Smoked forty cigars a day. He died at fifty-three, months after the Great Eastern's launch. In 2002 the BBC asked the nation to vote for the greatest Briton of all time. Only Winston Churchill beat him.
Why This Matters
Brunel is the person most responsible for what the Victorian world physically looked like. Railways, stations, bridges, tunnels, ships, telegraph lines, an extraordinary proportion of the architecture of nineteenth-century modernity is his. He was not always right. The broad gauge failed. The Great Eastern almost bankrupted three companies. What he proved was that things previously thought impossible were just things nobody had yet tried.