September 1859 - Brunel's obituary

More than 150 years after his death Isambard Kingdom Brunel remains one of the few engineers that most British people can name.

Revered alike by Industrialists, politicians, media and the general public he regularly tops lists of “Great Britons”, is frequently held up as an example of the qualities missing from modern Britain, and even played a starring role in the recent Olympics opening ceremony

But as the Obituary that appeared in The Engineer following his death in Sept 1859 illustrates, a man regarded by many today as the greatest engineer that ever lived was viewed very differently by at least some of his contemporaries.

Dwelling on a number of projects that it asserts were failures, the article describes Brunel’s career as “unfortunate”, writing that ‘notwithstanding the number and imposing character of his works many of them, often indeed through no fault of his own, have proved unsuccessful.’