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APRIL, 2004




        Two of Britain’s shining stars of the 19th century are back in the news about 200 years after one was born and 200 years after the other changed the world.
        After
Richard Trevithick’s practical railway locomotive first ran 200 years ago in Pen-y-darren, South Wales, horsepower would never be the same. After 200 years, this "Father of the Railways" is finally getting the recognition he deserves.
        Also back in the news is the little giant of British engineering, I.K. Brunel, himself a major contributor to the development of modern transportation via his designs for railways, bridges, stations, tunnels, and steamships. A public works project near Paddington Station in western central London has uncovered a long-forgotten Brunel bridge, and the move toward preservation has begun.

ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL (1806-1859)

        Like Richard Trevithick, Isambard Kingdom (I.K.) Brunel (born April 9, 1806) ranks with 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
ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL
 

   

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

Brunel's Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon Gorge at Bristol, England.
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 audaciously beautiful—is a fitting final testimony to the little giant of British

Brunel's SS Great Britain under restoration in Bristol Docks.
S.S. GREAT BRITAIN
AT BRISTOL

engineering, for it opened in the year Brunel died, 1859.

 
 
A LOST TREASURE REDISCOVERED IN TIME FOR THE LITTLE GIANT'S 200TH BIRTHDAY
        But it was another Brunel bridge that was in the news shortly before the great man's bicentennial birthday. While re-working a complex road grid around London’s Paddington Station, workers discovered an original Brunel double-arch iron bridge completely encased inside a modern brick bridge crossing the Grand Union Canal. Fortunately, an engineering historian realized the importance of the old structure, which becomes the eighth surviving Brunel bridge in Britain. The rediscovery of the bridge came just prior to demolition of the Bishop’s Road brick bridge as part of a major London road improvement project. London’s city council acted quickly to stop the demolition from going forward, stipulating the careful removal and salvage of Brunel’s hidden iron bridge.

Brunel's last achievement, the Royal Albert Bridge, still carries mainline trains across the Tamar River at Saltash, carrying passengers to such Cornwall destinations as St. Ives and Penzance. Brunel University painting.
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.

 

FOR NEWS ABOUT TREVITHICK, GO TO PAGE 1

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