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Being Brunel, a museum celebrating the great man’s life and work, was recently opened within the SS Great Britain visitor attraction in Bristol.
One of the items on display is a letter that Brunel received from a 10-year-old boy in 1858 when news was spreading of the difficulties that the engineer faced in launching the SS Great Eastern. The boy wrote “I often think of engineering,” and suggested that Brunel should dig a trench around the ship, flood it, and float the vessel out onto the Thames.
So Brunel was enthusing the young about engineering even then. And there’s much in Being Brunel that will excite today’s youngsters. They can have fun dressing up in 19th-century clothes, and will be amused by the giant model of Brunel’s head, with trademark cigar and stovepipe hat.
Brunel was a celebrity in his own day. Souvenirs of his projects went on sale, from mugs bearing pictures of the Thames Tunnel to stereoscopic images of his ships. The directors of the Great Western Railway and many subscribers raised a sum worth more than £1m today to present him with an impressive silver-gilt dinner service. And after his death medals were made to commemorate him.
Brunel’s fame must have had much to do with the breadth of his achievements: he built locomotives, railways, bridges, tunnels and ships, and so transformed the lives of many people. And yet as a young man he confided to his locked diary that he suffered from self-doubt. But later, after he had moved into a house in London’s fashionable Duke Street, he acknowledged that “I am now somebody”.
He indulged his love of the theatre by commissioning for his home paintings of scenes from Shakespeare plays – one of the pictures was by Landseer.
The museum displays many of Brunel’s possessions. These include his cigar case, with space for 48 cigars, one day’s supply, and his ivory folding ruler and silver propelling pencil. There’s also a set of 124 wooden curves that he used for making scale drawings of railway routes – a task now made easy by CAD.
No aspect of a project was too small for Brunel to concern himself with. He surveyed the route of the GWR on horseback and designed every detail of trains and stations, even making sketches of ornate lampposts. He sketched plants for a planned garden, even noting their expected heights. It’s easy to see why the museum curator describes him as “part workaholic genius, part control freak, part man on the street”.
A little-known project of Brunel’s assisted Florence Nightingale’s efforts to save lives during the Crimean War. In six days he designed a 1,000-bed flat-pack hospital with excellent ventilation and hygiene facilities. The building was shipped to Turkey in pieces, and the whole project took just two months.
Another scheme, the atmospheric railway in South Devon, shows that Brunel could be too ambitious and ahead of his times. A piston was moved by vacuum through a pipe, drawing a carriage along a track above. The line failed to work properly as the pumping stations were underpowered, so closure came swiftly. The experiment can be seen as Brunel’s greatest failure, although it foreshadowed today’s plans for Hyperloop.
After Brunel’s death in 1859 obituaries said that his greatest achievements were his three ships. One of these, the SS Great Britain, lies alongside the Being Brunel museum, in the dry dock where it was built. It was the largest and most advanced ship in the world when it was launched in 1843, and was hailed as “the greatest experiment since the Creation”.
Brunel had decided to give it an iron hull, which allowed the vessel to be much larger than if it had been made of wood, and to fit a screw propeller, then an experimental technology. He also invented a balanced rudder design, which reduced the effort needed to steer the ship. Together these innovations transformed shipbuilding and sea travel.
In its long working life the Great Britain travelled more than one million miles. It has been painstakingly restored since its return to Bristol, and a tour of the ship is a memorable experience.
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