Isambard Kingdom Brunel

 Isambard, born in 1806, was the only son of Marc Brunel the celebrated engineer of the Thames Tunnel. Marc was French and as a royalist fled France after the Revolution spending six years in the USA where he built a reputation which would carry him safe through Francophobe London. He had brought with him the design for a machine to manufacture pulley blocks for sail ships. He eventually found an engineer, Henry Maudsley, capable and willing to put plans into practice. I tell elsewhere of the success of the project and how it was followed by a successful venture into sawmills in Battersea.

All the while Isambard was undergoing his education in France and receiving a technical education in part under the eye of the the eminent French watchmaker, Louis Breguet. and in part from regular visits to Maudsley's workshop. He inherited his father's skills at drawing and grew into a determined young man.

His first test came from the Thames Tunnel, a pioneering project to create a tunnel under the tidal Thames. The project was beset with challenges not least the lack of reliable information about the geology nor the extent of dredging of the river. It was a project that attracted some of the great engineers of the age. The Rennies tried and failed; Richard Trevithick took over but also without success. Marc Brunel, with the twenty year old Isambard at his side, brought a new approach to the tunnelling with a machine built by Maudsley. He was joined by William Armstrong and others. Progress was followed by disaster, regrouping and further progress and further disaster. Eventually the project was placed on hold for seven years.

There is a record of Isambard experimenting with the use of Portland cement in repairing the tunnel in 1829. Recent excavations by the University of Bristol in Bristol docks reveal that Brunel again used Portland Cement in his works on the house built for the construction of the engine of his SS Great Britain in 1839, still some five years before the full commercial exploitation of the new cement. This was a man at the forefront of technology.

This jumps ahead a little for Isambard was first occupied in early stages of building the Clifton suspension bridge and then work on Bristol docks both of which lead to the opportunity to pitch for the London to Bristol railway, named by Brunel The Great Western Railway. I write about this in the context of Swindon where the GWR workshops were based. It was a gargantuan task.

1841 was a good year for the Brunels. The Thames Tunnel was completed much to Marc's relief, and Isambard's phenominal work in digging the Box tunnel finally connected London to Bristol. These were both ground breaking projects and demanded not only skill but incredible determination.

The Great Western Railway made its way southwest of Bristol as the South Devon Railway. Here we come to an aspect of Brunel that perhaps marks him out as a visionary. He could appreciate the drawbacks of locomotives even on the broad gauge which he favoured. They were too heavy and insufficiently powerful. Elsewhere engineers were exploring what became known as the atmospheric engine which relied on a central pipe running between the rails evacuated of air by steam pump stations as intervals along the line. A piston attached to the underside of the rolling stock would run inside the pipe pushed by atmospheric pressure against the vacuum. In a few test installations it was seen to work, but not without serious drawbacks. The Stephensons were not convinced but Brunel tried the arrangement on a stretch of the line around Totnes. The systems proved impractical and conventional locomotives were used. The concept is perhaps now employed on monorails using electricity rather than air.

Brunel had other fish to fry. As those of us who know the train line into Cornwall will vouch, there are many valleys to cross. The GWR company knew there wasn't the likely income to justify stone viaducts and so Brunel used Baltic pine capable of lasting thirty years or more to build astonishing geometrical structures. Sadly all have now been replaced by stone or steel.

In May 1859 the most revered of Brunel's work, the bridge over the Tamar at Saltash was opened. It followed the principles espoused by Robert Stephenson at Menai, but over the Tamar the tubes were oval (measuring 12ft 3 in high and 16ft 9 in across) and carried the weight of the track hanging underneath. Whenever our young family drove across the much later road suspension bridge I would ask my children who it was who built the rail bridge: Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

I mentioned the SS Great Britain which was possibly the pinnacle of Brunel's shipbuilding prowess. He had built the Great Western Railway; a logical extension was to go further west across the Atlantic to New York. The answer was the SS Great Western built of timber in Bristol powered by engines fitted by Maudsley Son and Field in Blackwall. The largest ship built to date, embraced the technology that Brunel had learnt from his work on bridges. A problem remained: conventional wisdom was that the amount of coal needed for an Atlantic crossing would be too great for a ship to carry. If the ship were to be increased in size, its hull would have too great a drag. Brunel disagreed and proved his point magnificently. The SS Great Britain of which I wrote in this link about Bristol was the logical extension in strength, speed and luxury.

It was probably inevitable that the pinnacle would be followed by disappointment. The Atlantic had been conquered. Now trade was growing between Britain and Australia, but how might a steam ship travel that far let alone return? Brunel had the answer in what became known as the Great Eastern which was big enough to carry sufficient coal for both the outward and return journeys, incidentally supplied by William Cory whose name appeared elsewhere in my researches. He drew on his experience with the Great Britain and Saltash Bridge to design a robust hull. He looked to James Watt & Sons for the engine to power the screw. This alone was insufficient and so paddles were added with engines by Scott Russell. The whole structure was so vast that it took the whole of the Napier Yard at Millwall with the Scott Russell yard used for fabrication. Iron came from Beale & Co of Parkgate Ironworks, Rotherham. The Naysmith steam hammer was brought to bear on the massive castings. The Tangye Brothers of Cornwall Works, Birmingham came in the nick of time with their powerful and effective hydraulic presses which proved vital in the final launch. As with everything Brunel touched, detailed planning was present throughout. He had at his side trusted lieutenants: Captain Claxton who had masterminded the erection of the Menai bridge and Daniel Gooch who had built so many locomotives.

Reading Rolt's account of the build all was well except for the main contractor Scott Russell who did what contractors so often do, play a blame game. The problem with this was that the project was at the very forefront of shipbuilding technology where collaboration rather than exhausting confrontation is vital. The last straw was the monumental task of the launch which Brunel had planned but was denied sufficient time to for testing by lenders whose patience had come to an end. To add to this were a hostile press and crowds of onlookers hungry to see failure. All of this took an awful toll on Brunel's health and he died before the ship was successfully launched. To me one bright star was the presence of Robert Stephenson at his side; they may have been business rivals but their personal friendship endured.

Further reading

L.T.C. Rolt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (London: Longmans, 1957)

Joseph Whitworth - the world's best mechanician

 In his biography, Norman Atkinson makes the point that it is sometimes difficult to trace the early days of people who later became famous. With Joseph Whitworth, whom Atkinson describes as the 'World's Best Mechanician', the problem was that contemporary writers were keen to give the great man as great a pedigree, so early biographers paint a relatively comfortable childhood accompanied by a good education. Atkinson's and others' later research reveal something rather different.

All agree that Joseph was born in Stockport in 1803 and that he had a younger brother John and a much younger sister Susan after whose birth their mother died. Their father, Charles, was a reed maker, that is a man who repaired machinery used in the cotton industry. This was not a well paid job and the family lived in a back to back. The family's position became more precarious when steam power came in, to the sometimes violent opposition of traditional weavers. For a man who repaired steam powered machinery, daily life was dangerous with the ever present angry mob.

Charles found solace in the Congregationalist Chapel and eventually gave up his mill job for the even less well paid role of a junior minister. It was perhaps a lack of income that prompted Charles to place Susan in an orphanage and to find foster homes for John and Joseph.

Joseph ran away from his foster home to Manchester and found work with a textile machinery manufacturer.

At age 21, he set off to London hitching lifts by canal boat. The story goes that on one such boat he fell in love with the bargee's daughter. They married in Ilkeston and together made their way to London.

His destination was the workshop of Maudsley which had become the go-to place for up and coming engineers. In 1825, Whitworth took the job of an ordinary bench fitter and turner. For Whitworth this was not enough and he took a succession of posts with different engineers to broaden his experience: Holtzapffel, Wright & Sons, and then Joseph Clement. He worked briefly for Charles Babbage on his calculating machine.

In 1832 Joseph and Fanny moved to Manchester arriving at a time when locomotive engineers were pioneering their craft, so Stephenson of Newcastle and Tayleur of Liverpool plus the local Fairbairn and Sharp Roberts. Into the mix came two young German engineers, Charles Beyer who would later join with Peacock and John Bodmer, plus Scottish engineer Naysmith. These three had an academic education and fitted well with the growing scientific community in Manchester born more of chemistry. Joseph joined in hungry to learn, and succeeded. Railway locomotives were becoming more sophisticated and demanded quality machine tools.

Joseph and Naysmith both set up in the Piccadilly area of Manchester, with Naysmith on a rather more substantial scale. He gained repair work from the growing number of mechanised cotton mills and was soon employing a number of men. Joseph was more intent on developing better machine tools. He is sometimes criticised for copying, but this misunderstands the process. Joseph would take a machine tool and see its shortcomings; he would then devise an often small modification which would significantly improve performance. The problem that faced Joseph was that mill owners would only invest in machinery if employee numbers could be reduced. Joseph's improvement would enhance efficiency and improve the lot of the worker but only seldom replace people. His ventures into textile machine came to little avail.

Joseph gained the respect and friendship of Fairbairn who was by then the doyen of Manchester engineers and with Fairbairn’s encouragement he focused on machine tools and gained a glowing reputation, This led to his greatest achievement: a standard measurement.

A standard yard had been adopted by Elizabeth I but the iterations of this yard varied as did its subdivision into inches, so much so that the north of England used the 'short inch' and the south the long one. The establishment were content for standard measurement to be achieved by lines engraved on a metal bar. The first bench micrometer had been made by Maudsley building on the early work of James Watt. Whitworth was convinced that for a standard the distance between the ends of a bar offered greater accuracy.

It took argument of forty years for Whitworth's method to be adopted, but thereafter it became possible to produce interchangeable parts accurate to one thousandths of an inch. Whitworth's aim was to achieve on millionth but this was only attained in the 20th century. Standard measurement was followed by standard screws, and, again, this demanded years of arguments.

Whitworth was keen to be accepted by the Institution of Civil Engineers, for at that time Mechanical Engineering had yet to achieve that status. Whitworth was grudgingly admitted as an associate. When the Institution of Mechanical Engineers was formed in 1847 with George Stephenson as president and Charles Beyer as Vice-President. Joseph was granted full membership of both institutions in 11 January 1847.

Joseph's great claim to fame was as a maker of machine tools and I write of this in my post on Manchester's 19th century tool makers since he wasn't alone. He did stand for the advanced design of his workshop, build by William Fairbairn. A glass roof which formed the basis of the design for the roof of St Pancras Station spanned the whole workshop providing excellent natural light. It had a overhead crane and a power shaft driven by steam from which power tools would run from belt drives. He did attempt a clutch drive but this would have to wait a number of decades until a full solution was provided. He did make very large machine tools and the workshop had rails and a turntable for them to be manoeuvred. Among his successful projects were the screw cutting machine, but also a machine for the production of pottery of standard sizes and a massive brass cast screw of a steam ship.

Joseph Whitworth's legacy was in the machine tools he made, his contribution to gun manufacture but more so universal measurement and universal screw thread. To this he added a personal fortune £1 million he gave to trustees in the knowledge that they would apply it to the advancement of technical education for men and women at all grades of engineering employment in the cities of Manchester and Salford.

After Joseph's death in 1887, William Armstrong feared that Vickers may seek to purchase in particular the Openshaw armour plating works and so bid first and successfully, The machine tool business was sold to Craven Brothers in 1928.

Further reading:

Norman Atkinson: Sir Joseph Whitworth - the World's Best Mechanician (Stroud: Sutton, 1996)

300,000 blog hits - the story of manufacturing places is resonating around the world

Manufacturing had a huge impact on Britain as is clear from what some might refer to as its aftermath seen all too vividly in current political conversations.  

A timeline of Lincoln engineering produced for the spark festival 

I have been exploring its history for some five years and have seen its relevance as a reflection in modern Britain itself and the social consequences of economic change across generations. I saw the need to dig geographically as well as chronologically, my current project is the result of that geographical quest.

Manufacturing transformed the places where it took place. Villages became towns because millennia earlier great forests had been buried and became rich seams of coal. Tiny seaside communities surviving on fishing witnessed the building of ever larger ships carrying cargoes of coal or wool and returning with exotic goods from the east. Waring barons found their swords replaced by guns cast from ore left in the earth’s crust. Disperate communities were linked first by sea then by turnpike, canal, railway, road and air.

Manufacturing places emerged close to raw materials and sources of energy. Climate and topography gathered manufacturing which thrived in local conditions. In time as centres of population emerged, manufacturing followed to meet their every need. Inventions were pursued where skills had been nurtured.

None of this was planned, least of all two world wars which energised manufacturers across the land to war effort, leaving vast factories in their wake crying out for new uses.

In truth it is hard to say why Britain moved ahead of its great trading rivals: the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. But it did, only to be overtaken by America, Germany and France and replaced by developing countries.

This left manufacturers stranded with factories and workforces no longer needed, leaving populations without work, steelworks replaced by supermarkets, factories by warehouses.