Late great engineers: Isambard Kingdom Brunel

In 2002, the BBC conducted a poll of the ‘100 Greatest Britons’. While there can be few eyebrows raised at the winner – statesman Winston Churchill – to have an engineer sit in second place, above the likes of William Shakespeare, Captain James Cook and Queen Victoria, seems to say something about just how highly the British prize their Industrial Revolution heroes. The engineer in question was Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

These days, Brunel’s fame is greater than our knowledge of his achievements. While those within the engineering community will know that he designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Paddington Station and iron transatlantic ships, it’s unlikely that those outside will remember Brunel as the man behind the Great Western Railway, and even a hospital in the Crimea that was to establish the blueprint for how field medical facilities are built to this day.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born in Portsmouth on 9th April 1806 during the reign of George III, shortly after the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was a time of social and political unrest across Europe, with Brunel’s father, French civil engineer Marc Isambard Brunel (a royalist sympathiser) forced to escape the French Revolution by fleeing to the United States, while his mother Sophia Kingdom was arrested as an English spy during the Reign of Terror. The couple were eventually reunited in England where they started a family shortly after the turn of the century. Their son was named Isambard, a Germanic name of Norman origin meaning ‘iron-axe’.