The Man who created the world as we see it today

A couple of years back, the BBC ran a show called “The Greatest Britons of them all”. Or something to that effect.

I did manage to see most of the episodes in that series, and it was very interesting, real good programming.

The important thing was the selection of candidates, who were on “show” literally.
Winston Churchill
Lady Di
Isaac Newton
John Lennon
Charles Darwin
William Shakespeare
Oliver Cromwell
Queen Elizabeth I
Horatio Nelson
Isambard Kingdom Brunel

My personal favorite was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, probably the least “known” off the lot. He was the finest, visionary engineer of the Industrial Revolution.

If the Industrial Revolution could be compartmentalized into two distinct constituents. The social-economic factors/fallouts, and its associated politics. AND the real engineering itself. The Manufacturing, building, planning, visioning, Brunel was God. He was the nuts and bolts man who dreamt and created with the drawing board as his canvas.

He engineered the underwater tunnel across the Thames; he built over 1000 miles of Railways, and three steam ships each of which when built, were at their time the largest sea vessels in the world! And a lesser known fact is that, he was the Consultant Engineer during the building of the Railways in India and Australia.

And if that is not enough, he was the creator of the broad gauge railway as is used all over the world now and also created a fairly environmental friendly “atmospheric rail system”, which propelled trains using compressed air pipes instead of conventional rail tracks with fossil fuel guzzling engines charging up and down. But unfortunately this met with limited success.

The reason I admire the man most is for his bridges. He built over a 100 of them in his life time, from small corner stone ones measuring a few meters, to arch wonders half a mile long. The man was commissioned to extend the railways, and as he went about his task of building tracks and making stations, he encountered the pesky problem of rivers, rivulets and man made obstacles. And the “bridge building” he had to undertake, is the forerunner to the nearly all the bridge designs that we know and use today.

When he already was acclaimed as a pioneer in railway engineering, he set his eyes on steam ship building. The biggest problem at that time was building steam ships which could actually store enough coal to propel the engines, during a Trans Atlantic journey. Brunel designed a steamship “The Great Western”, which he argued could carry enough coal to fuel the engines for a Trans Atlantic journey. Though the Great Western wasn’t the first steam ship to actually make the Trans Atlantic journey, the Sirius first made the trip from London to New York. The Great Western docked at New York only two days later, but had taken 15 days as opposed to the Sirius ‘s 19, and the Great Western reached with over 200 tonnes of coal to spare, while the Sirius towards the end of its journey, had to actually burn its cargo to feed its engines, as it had run out of coal!

His last project was the steamship “The Great Eastern”, it was the most ambitious maritime project of the century. The ship was 700 feet long and weighed close to 20,000 tonnes! For the next fifty years no ship was conceived/designed on even paper to match “The Great Eastern”. Entire docks and ship building yards had to be extended to accommodate a ship construction of this magnitude.

After many financial problems, the ship did set sail, but on its second day an engine room mishap claimed five lives. An accident caused entirely out of human error as opposed to a design/manufacture flaw. Nonetheless the accident was tragic, Brunel died a week later.