BRUNEL: THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

摘要

Isambard Kingdom Brunel looks out calmly from the photograph by Robert Howlett in East London 1857. This is the iconic engineer, chosen to open the London Olympics 2012 because he represents the Industrial Revolution. The huge chains are for launching the Great Eastern, his monster ship, built on the Isle of Dogs. His boots are muddy, his air is pre-occupied, his gaze does not really acknowledge the camera. Pressing matters demand his attention. He is at the height of his powers, he surveys a world that he has built and that he controls. But he also represents over-reaching ambition: the launch fails, he collapses and is taken to his London home and sickbed. The Victorian's favourite word for machines and engineering was 'promethean', and the adjective suggests gigantic, world changing, world shocking design. Brunel was the quintessential promethean engineer who changed the world we live in. His first project, the Thames Tunnel, is the birthplace of urban transport and has changed the shape of the cities we live in. His last project, the Great Eastern, changed trade and the shape of the world. When the ship arrived in America, people lined Manhattan fifty deep. Today over 90% of our goods still travel by sea. Everything Brunel did, by land or by sea, he did with the flare and showmanship we see in that last famous image. In everything he did, he worked beyond parameters of established practice. In this paper, I examine Brunel as engineer, but also as showman and world changer. He is a polymath, difficult to define: a civil engineer, marine engineer, mechanical engineer, chemical engineer. I will look closely at his first and last projects, because they are the key to understanding everything he did. In both projects we see his resilience and determination, but also his self assurance. His three great ships were each of them the biggest in the world, and each represents three very distinct developments in thinking about marine construction. I also introduce his father, Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, who invented automated production. The father of mass production was not Henry Ford, it was a Frenchman fleeing to America to escape the 'Terror'. Sir Marc pioneered up state New York for the first canal in America from the River Hudson to Lake Champlain. He became an American citizen and later, as Chief Engineer of the Port of New York, he designed the defences on Staten Island. Sir Marc is less well known than his son, but is considered by many to be the greater genius. If we are looking for the father of the modern world, it is probably Sir Marc Brunel, pioneer of mass production.