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Exercises
Isambard Kingdom
Brunel
by Miles Kington
I can honestly say that all the good fortune I have ever had has
been due not to luckiness but to unluckiness.
Looking
back through my career, I can see that everything fortunate that has happened
to me has come about through a misfortune in some other undertaking.
This might be a
quality, as my father shared it in great degree. He
was a Frenchman by birth and was destined for the priesthood. But
he showed much talent for drawing and making things, and little for worshipping
God. So even the priest urged my father's parents to divert him from the Church.
Accordingly he became a great maker and designer of things. He
would no doubt have prospered well in France were it not for a little event
called the Revolution, which caused him to flee France to the USA with a price
on his head.
After many adventures there (including being made Chief Engineer of New York
City and taking American citizenship) he came to England. He married an English
girl and found himself with a great reputation, being employed to design and
build the first tunnel under the Thames. It was, I believe, the first tunnel
under a great river anywhere. My father had to invent the process as he proceeded.
His process was a good one. Unfortunately (how often that word has occurred
in my life!), the survey done by geologists for us showed that the bed of the
Thames lay on firm clay which would permit us to dig the tunnel with safety.
They were wrong.
The river was set on gravel
which let the water through. This we did not find out until we were halfway
across the river and the water broke in.
I myself was in the tunnel at the time. I can still remember the crunching
of the timbers and the
of the gas lights as the water sped towards us and we ran for our lives. The
Thames in those days was little more than an open sewer and the water in which
I found myself was, let us say, far from healthy. Little wonder that when I
escaped from the watery grave under the Thames I succumbed to some bad fever
and was dispatched to recuperate, not at Brighton as I had hoped (this was judged
too exciting a place for a young man) but at Bristol.
So there I was, a young, ambitious engineer with no work and not much health,
in a place I had never seen before.
But
I was resolved to make the best of a bad job.
I recovered my strength by
about the rocks of the Clifton Gorge and making sketches
of the environs.
This was to prove a golden experience
when it was known that the merchants of Bristol wished to
have a bridge built across the Clifton Gorge and invited designs
for it. I submitted a design.
It was rejected by the aged Thomas Telford, acting for the judges. Luckily,
all the designs were rejected and the judges asked for fresh ideas, including
some from Telford himself. Thus challenged, the old man came up with what I
can only call a
design involving gigantic columns reaching up from the floor of the gorge itself.
This was duly rejected and my new design was accepted. Overjoyed, I set to
work immediately.
All would have been well had not
the money run out. Some worthy citizen had set aside a large sum half a
century previously in order to accrue interest and build up enough funds to
build the bridge. Unfortunately (that word again!) either he had not set enough
aside or the interest had been insufficient and the proceeding came to a halt.
Other plans I had afoot at the time (new designs for Bristol docks, a canal
scheme in Lincolnshire, etc.) were all suspended for one reason or another.
So all I had behind me was incompleteness and disappointment.
You might have noticed that everything I had done until now (or not done) fell
into different areas of engineering. I had tried tunnels, bridges, canals, just
as my father before had tried everything from a design for the Congress building
in Washington (which was accepted but not built due to lack of money) to a process
for manufacturing army boots by machine. This process was encouraged by the
War Office in 1815. The result was that just as the Battle of Waterloo was fought
and peace descended on Europe, my father was producing the largest heap of unused
army boots the world had seen at that time. It led to a condition of
which led him briefly into a debtor's prison, a thing I have always dreaded.
Where was I? Yes, I was pointing out the multiplicity of things I attempted,
as an illustration of how engineers in my day were not limited to one activity.
A man who designed and cut a canal one year might well be building and shooting
a new cannon the next.
Science was simpler then, or perhaps it was just that we were more ambitious,
less specialized. Today, I believe, you will find an engineer who can only design
office desks. Such a thing was undreamed of in my day. And in fact the next
I was to embark on was something I had never attempted before: the building
of a railway.
I was, you will recall, in Bristol
on account of an illness and had stayed there on account of a botched
bridge. Then it was time for my fortunes to take an upward swing again.
The merchants of Bristol decided that it was time to counter the great threat
of the port of Liverpool to take over their position as the second port after
London, and that the only way to accomplish this was to engage me to engineer
a railway from Bristol to London.
I had never built a railway in my life! But then, nobody else had. Everything
we did in those days seemed to be for the first time, whether it was tunneling
under the Thames or spanning the Avon. And I might say that my winning design
for the Clifton Bridge involved a span longer than any built in the history
of the known world！
Today you have loftier plans. You aim for the moon, and we only aimed to get
to Bristol. There is this difference: that having reached the moon, you decided
it was not worth doing a second time. Our link between London and Bristol has
never been out of use or fashion.
Of course, I was never content to see Bristol as a destination. I always dream
of starting at London, proceeding to Bristol by train, transferring to the largest
and fastest new ship in the world and arriving in New York in record time. I
was to build that ship. It was, unfortunately, to be my greatest disappointment.
So my last
was like my first － both lucky and unlucky. If I had time to tell you the whole
story of my life, how elated you would be － and how tragically cast down as
well!
(1 197 words)
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