Travel is people. You may go abroad to see the famous sites, but what you remember best are the people you meet. Among them, like unex-pected treasure, are a few memorable contacts that will make your travels unique, special, and delightful. "People" is devoted to some of those you may come in contact with during your Home At First travels.
 

This article first appeared in April, 2004, and was updated in October, 2010.

          The little giant of British engineering, I.K. Brunel, was a major contributor to the development of modern transportation via his designs for railways, bridges, stations, tunnels, and steamships.
        Isambard Kingdom (I.K.) Brunel (born April 9, 1806) ranks with Richard Trevithick, and George & Robert Stephenson among the men who thrust Britain into the steam age. And like the father-and-son Stephensons, Brunel was a member of an engineering dynasty.
        I.K.’s father Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849) was born in France and fled to America during the French Revolution where he earned a reputation as an architect and engineer in New York before moving to England in 1799. In 1818, he invented a tunnel-boring shield, which he used to dig the first Thames Tunnel near Greenwich between 1825 and 1843.

ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL
(1806-1859)

CUTTING HIS TEETH ON THE WORLD'S FIRST UNDERWATER TUNNEL
          Son Isambard joined his father in 1823 and oversaw the completion of the first Thames Tunnel — the first underwater tunnel in the world. Although designed for horses and wagons, when it opened in 1843 it was for pedestrians only until it became a railway tunnel in 1869. It remains in service today, carrying the London Underground’s East London Line underneath the Thames between Wapping and Rotherhithe, a little more than a mile east of Home At First’s London apartments at St. Katharine’s Dock. The Brunels built the tunnel so well that major refurbishments to the tunnel were first made only during the 1990s, 150 years after its completion.

ENGINEERING A TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM FROM LONDON TO NEW YORK
        Brunel's next major project was the Clifton Suspension Bridge across a deep river gorge at Bristol, England, which — owing to competition with another great British engineer, Thomas Telford, as well as financing difficulties — took more than 30 years to build.
        Looking to build a high-speed, state-of-the-art railway from London to the Severn River docks at Bristol, I.K. surveyed and built (1833-1841) the Great Western

CLIFTON SUSPENSION BRIDGE

Railway (GWR). The line was part of a planned fast transport link between London and New York, and Brunel also built the ships for the sea crossing from Bristol. History’s first transatlantic steamship service was on Brunel’s Great Western (1838). It was succeeded by a faster, bigger ship, The Great Britain (1845, now preserved at Bristol), the first propeller-driven iron steamship. Brunel’s final shipbuilding effort resulted in The Great Eastern, capable of carrying 4,000 passengers or up to 10,000 troops—the largest ship on earth for 40

years. The Great Eastern never succeeded as a

passenger liner envisioned for the emigrant trade to Australia. Instead, it was converted to lay the first transatlantic communications cables. Both the Clifton Suspension Bridge and The Great Britain may be visited as an easy day trip to Bristol from Home At First's Cotswolds cottages in and near Tetbury.

THE GWR — A LASTING MONUMENT TO BRUNEL
        Despite his great contributions to tunnel, dock, and steamship technology, Brunel’s most visible contribution remains the Great Western Railway. His French architectural training resulted in railway design that was structurally strong with an appearance as grand as its scale. In this way Brunel reshaped both the art and technology of architecture. Notable in much of Brunel’s work is his use of structural and ornamental iron, the principal construction metal of the first half of the 19th century. His huge iron ships and monumental iron bridges represented great leaps forward in modern engineering. His last bridge was his greatest: the Royal Albert Saltash bridge flying 80 feet over the Tamar River on the dramatic western railway approach to Plymouth, Devonshire (not far from Home At First’s Devon lodgings). The Saltash Bridge — still in use, and still

S.S. GREAT BRITAIN AT BRISTOL

audaciously beautiful — is a fitting final testimony to the little
giant of British engineering, for it opened in the year Brunel died, 1859.

Brunel's Royal Albert Bridge,
across the Tamar River at Saltash

        Workmen are now carefully dismantling the bridge, which is hoped to be relocated to a site close to where it has been for well over 160 years. The current site is just beyond the north corner of Paddington Station, not far from the Hammersmith & City Line Paddington Underground station. It is now hoped that the bridge will be restored to its original form and become a footbridge and monument to the great engineer of the GWR. Once re-opened, Brunel’s lost iron bridge will be the perfect commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Britain's engineering giant.

Travel back in time.