Isambard Kingdom Brunel

4 Key excerpts on "Isambard Kingdom Brunel"

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  Ten Engineers Who Made Britain Great

  The Men Behind the Industrial Revolution

  • Anthony Burton(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • The History Press

    (Publisher)

  9

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel

  Image: Isambard Kingdom Brunel. (Science & Society)

  B runel is the one engineer that almost everyone in Britain has heard of, and probably regarded as the greatest, even though he was guilty of far more serious errors of judgement than others whose achievements have been described here. His father, Marc Brunel, was French and served for a time in the navy, but was forced to go into hiding during the French Revolution as he had openly expressed royalist sympathies. During that time he met a young English woman, Sophie Kingdom, who had been sent to France to learn the language. She had also been caught up in the revolution and was sheltering in the same house. They fell in love, but Brunel was forced to flee to America, leaving her behind. From America, where among other activities he had surveyed canals, he came to England and at once went to look for Sophie. They were married in 1799.

  Marc had a remarkably successful career, devising one of the first factories to use mass production techniques. It was the block mill at Portsmouth, where a whole range of machines designed by him and made by Henry Maudsley were used to manufacture the blocks that were a vital part of a ship’s rigging. He also developed new, improved machinery for sawing timber. The Brunels had two daughters, then, on 9 April 1806, they had a son, Isambard Kingdom. To his father’s delight, the young Isambard showed an early interest in all things mechanical. Marc taught him drawing, a skill that he felt was essential in any engineering career, and after day school the boy was sent to Dr Morrell’s Academy at Hove as a boarder. In a letter home to his mother, he mentioned that although he enjoyed reading Horace he preferred Virgil, and told her he had been drawing in the town and making maps. He was clearly a bright scholar.

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  Engineering

  A Beginner's Guide

  • Natasha McCarthy(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  The founding of the ICE not only established momentum for similar institutions to mobilise across the world but it set in place an explosion of engineering societies representing ever new and more specialised areas of engineering. The first branching occurred when the Institution of Mechanical Engineers was set up in 1846. Part of the reason for taking their own path was the feeling that mechanical engineers were quite different to civil engineers. While the consulting civil engineer might spend time drawing plans and visiting sites to ascertain that all is going to plan, the mechanical engineer is more likely to be getting dirty hands in the cabin of a locomotive. Hence the mechanical engineers created their own society serving their needs more precisely. This was a move that has often been repeated – and following the initial distinction between civil and military engineering, there have come many distinctions that can be made at more or less detailed levels.

  Throughout the world, engineering has followed this model, with specialised engineering societies being established to represent the interests of their members and to set standards of practice and ethics. The emergence of engineering as a profession and its organisation into professional bodies puts engineering on a par with other professions such as medicine and law. It reflects the fact that engineering requires specialist knowledge and skill for the engineer to work successfully, and that engineering has a central role in society, serving and bearing responsibility to the wider public.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel is one of the most famous names in engineering. Brunel was born on 9 April 1806, the son of Marc Brunel and Sophia Kingdom. Marc was an engineer who had made important developments in the process of mass manufacturing and recruited his son on one of his greatest works, the tunnel under the River Thames in London. I. K. Brunel was a precocious recruit and his successes saw him join the scientific elite in Britain’s Royal Society at the age of 24.

  Brunel’s greatest successes lie in his railways and bridges. Brunel had a hand in the construction of more than 1200 lines of railway in Britain. The line that is most closely associated with him is the Great Western Railway (GWR) from London to Bristol. Paddington Station was designed in outline by him, with the detailed design and construction handled by the same company that built the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in 1851. Brunel’s railway lines were always created with an eye on aesthetics, and the bridges and tunnels of Brunel’s railways were carefully planned by Brunel himself. Two bridges that stand out as his legacies are the Royal Albert Bridge in Saltash, Cornwall and the Clifton Suspension Bridge across the Avon Gorge in Bristol. The first stone of this bridge was laid in 1831, however work was halted, and only taken up again after his death as a memorial to him (though the final bridge was of a slightly altered design). Brunel developed mathematical analyses for application in the design of his bridges and had, unlike his compatriots of the time, a grounding in engineering science from his education at schools intended to prepare students for France’s Ecole Polytechnique.

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  OCEAN RAILWAY EPUB ED EB

  • Stephen Fox(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Harper Perennial

    (Publisher)

  But what cannot be done?’ When testifying before a board of directors or a committee of Parliament, he was a formidable advocate: overflowing with esoteric knowledge, diplomatic yet seemingly candid, speaking tersely to the point, and charming and witty when that seemed appropriate. He could usually persuade even the most sceptical listeners. He disliked writing and thought he had no talent for it, but his memoranda piled up compelling arguments by steady accretion. brunel was also a facile, accurate draughtsman, decorating his workbooks with fine small drawings tossed off for the apparent fun of it, and if necessary he could go to his workshop and make a skilful model of a design in wood or iron. With his command of speaking, writing, drawing and modelling, he had the rare capacity to explain himself with clarity and eloquence in four modes and three dimensions – a key to his overwhelming powers of persuasion.

  Today brunel remains the only British engineer of his era with an enduring popular reputation. In Great Britain he is virtually a folk hero . Some of his notable engineering works have survived as reminders of his wide-ranging inventiveness. The Great Western Railway still runs across many of his bridges and through the Box Tunnel. At one end of the line, his station at Bristol Temple Meads still stands, though now reduced to a humble car park. At the other end, his Paddington Station in London encloses tracks and platforms in a space 700 feet long and 240 feet wide, under a vaulting roof of wrought-iron arched ribs covered with glass and corrugated iron. The Royal Albert Bridge, his greatest feat of bridge building, crosses the River Tamar near Plymouth in two spans of 455 feet each, an artful blend of arch and suspension techniques. With its approaches added, the Royal Albert traverses a total of almost 2200 feet. The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, over the dramatically deep Avon gorge, was finished to his designs as a posthumous memorial. The Great Britain, his second ocean steamship, was improbably salvaged after a long, chequered career and was brought home to Bristol to be reconstructed and opened to the public.

  Other brunel traces help keep his name alive. The reputations of historical figures often depend on the written footprints they happened to leave behind; brunel’s private papers and manuscripts, amounting to at least twenty-seven thick letterbooks and many other files, are housed at the University of Bristol and at the Public Record Office in Kew. Other brunel letters are scattered in a dozen archives across Great Britain. One of the fullest research troves available for any Victorian engineer, these materials allow historians an uncommonly rich record of his life. At Westminster Abbey, a brunel window in the south aisle memorializes him. A brunel statue stands on the Thames Embankment in London, looking upriver towards the Charing Cross site of his Hungerford pedestrian bridge, now long gone. At Paddington Station, another statue has him sitting down, looking thoughtful, holding his tall silk hat in one hand and a notebook in the other. In Bristol, a third statue presents him standing up, a jaunty hand in his waistband, gazing off towards the river and his preserved Great Britain

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  Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800-1914

  • Ben Marsden, Hazel Hutchinson, Ralph O'Connor, Ben Marsden, Hazel Hutchinson, Ralph O'Connor(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of Pittsburgh Press

    (Publisher)

  4 RE-READING Isambard Kingdom Brunel: ENGINEERING LITERATURE IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY Ben Marsden

  Accounts of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel have long emphasized his originality although not always in glowing terms. His ‘besetting fault’, stated The Times in 1859, was a ‘seeking for novelty, where the adoption of a well-known model would have sufficed’.1 Certainly Brunel had a flair for bold experiment and the many hagiographic treatments of him, marking him out as a ‘visionary’, have minimized his debts to his predecessors.2 Of course, Brunel did learn from others but, with engineers more often represented as men of works than of words, the fact that his knowledge and practice were bound up with literacy is rarely admitted. Even for the best known engineers, reading and writing await sustained historical attention. So too does the exploration of an early nineteenth-century ‘engineering literature’: those writings produced, consumed and variously appropriated in connection with engineering practice. It has been difficult to document literary practices for members of a notoriously ‘papyrophobic’ profession.3 In this chapter, however, I ask what Isambard Kingdom Brunel read and wrote, how he read and wrote, why he wrote as he did, what he wrote about the literary productions of others – and why he sometimes avoided, and advised others against using, print.4 Answers to those questions reveal a literary landscape of early nineteenth-century engineering. Literary engineering was not quite an oxymoron. In subtle ways, literary accomplishment, production and posture were bound up with the re-orientation of the profession of engineering.

  One might initially expect the literature of engineering to mirror the ‘literature of science’ and for the authorial and reading practices of engineers to echo those of men and women of science, with genres like the scientific paper or treatise prominent. From the 1830s, as Brunel’s career took off, the relationship between the academy and engineering in Britain was under scrutiny and there were concerted attempts to place textbooks centre-stage in a newly learned profession.5 Nineteenth-century British engineers, however, have been contrasted with their academy-trained French and German counterparts, as empiricists averse to theoretical science-writing;6 and Brunel’s own innovations were frequently subjected to unfavourable scientific critique. Yet those critiques, rather than showing his distance from scientific culture, indicate an unusual closeness to scientific practitioners, institutions and literature. Brunel was, apparently, a repository of wisdom on ‘the scientific departments of civil engineering’.7 Yet he published no formal paper in a scientific or technical journal.8

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