Great Britons: Isambard Kingdom Brunel Hosted by Jeremy Clarkson - BBC Documentary

Saturday, January 12, 1828 would have begun as a normal work day for the Kingdom of Isimbar. Brunel would have slept on a bale of straw for about four hours because he worked 20 hours a day. He was in charge of the most audacious engineering project. the world had ever seen a 1200 foot long tunnel dug under the river thames now it is just part of the london underground but back then it was the first submerged tunnel this was dangerous work they knew that above them the river had been dredged and they knew that where they had been dredged, large holes had been left in the river bed.

What they did not know was where the holes were, but they were about to discover that the six men who worked alongside Brunel were swept to their deaths in the frozen torrent. Brunel himself was left unconscious and dragged through the tunnel to the main shaft. The water flooded and a drowning mustache was pulled to safety by his assistant, Mr. Beamish, and with that simple action of pulling the soaked 22-year-old. The old man of the water, Mr Beamish saved the life of a man who became simply Britain's

great

est of all time. He has an image never defined in age so clearly as this one.

He was taken at the height of Victoria's reign, when Britain was pushing the world. through a revolution that changed every last detail of our lives and at the heart of this extraordinary transformation was a man who is not the

kingdom

of Brunel, so how did he take us from the old agricultural world to the modern mechanized world we have now ? people care all he did was the clifton suspension bridge in bristol it was a stunning piece of modern design bold brave brilliant the perfect monument to the man alone the clifton bridge would have put him in the history books but there was a little bit more than that, in fact I have a list, there was the Great Western Railway, the Bristol and Exeter Railway, the Taf Vale South Devon, Cornwall, Bristol and Gloucester Railway, Wiltshire, Somerset at Weymouth and the Piedmont Railway in Italy, then there was Hungerford Bridge. chepstow bridge balmoral bridge maidenhead bridge and the magnificent tamar bridge in cornwall paddington station temple mood station kensington observatory the sea wall at milford haven sunderland docks and docks and plymouth and we haven't even come to ships yet the

great

western was the first steamship built to cross the atlantic, great britain was the first ocean going ship made of iron and the great eastern well which was enormously vast so based on this list

brunel

built modern Britain and Britain built the world, which means Brunel built the modern world and that makes it a great Britain in my book. 200 years ago, Britain was the workshop of the world, but the only way you could get around was on horseback.

Brunel changed all that galvanizing. Britain with enormous and extraordinarily bold heavy engineering. However, there was nothing ugly about his work. He combined form and function to completely transform our landscape. Brunel put beauty in the beast of the industrial revolution. So why can't we build things like this today that pay for it? greatness think about it back then furs from here wheat and tobacco from here sugar from here tea from here silk and opium from here practically anything that moved anywhere in the world the profits from that transaction ended up here the money back then came into Britain in large quantities and the people who made them were keen to invest in machines so they could speed up world trade even more and make even more money and that meant they had to invest in engineering.

Engineers back then were like rock and roll gods with a touch of Hollywood they were a bold and dashing breed as they built a brave new world if someone had come here from France or Prussia or anywhere in say 1850 they wouldn't have believed what they saw, they had galleons, we had the starship Enterprise that we were. miles ahead and pushing us from the front setting the furious pace he was the king of the hill the madman the scandalous the brilliant

kingdom

of isenbard

brunel

so what kind of man was he and where did he get that name?

He was born here in Portsmouth on April 9, 1806. His mother was called Sapphire Kingdom, hence the middle part. Mark's father was a French refugee, so Isenbard and Brunel struggled to support his family, but theirs was a precarious profession. He was an inventor in London. The Thames had become irremediable. It was congested and crossing the river was almost impossible the queues on London Bridge were endless a tunnel had been attempted without success meanwhile mark brunell thought the answer to the problem might be these things worms these guys could wreak havoc they dug through the hull They made wood using the shells around their heads as cutting tools, then swallowed the wood and carried it out the back to form a soft tunnel lining that further protected their fragile little bodies.

Most people wanted to get rid of them, but Mark Brunell decided to copy them. This is a model of Which old Brunel came up with the tunneling shield? A man would stand in each of these compartments cutting off the face, then they would take the loot out the back and carry it to the surface, when they had cut off perhaps nine inches. You turn these screws, the whole shield moves forward, and then someone comes and covers the tube with another row of bricks. This is the Channel Tunnel rail link that is about to be dug under the Thames in Kent and guess what they are working on in exactly the same way. that brand brunell's tunnel shield was obviously a little more updated but otherwise identical this work is quite simple engineering now, but in brunel's time making tunnels underwater was a miracle of science very quickly the site was It became London's biggest tourist attraction.

The stress of it all left its mark. So he handed the reins to his apprentice, his genius son Isambard, unlike today's engineers, who are rarely seen in public without their Pasty-colored shoes and his plastic hats, Brunel was a showman with an eye always on opportunity, so when he saw that. Every weekend, thousands and thousands of people came to the east end of London to see how the tunnel was going. He realized that he was putting on the greatest show in the world. The public eagerly consumed the latest installments of this East End drama, every imaginable trinket and souvenir was made, but there was nothing frivolous about building it, the roof kept collapsing, the investors must have thought they were pouring their money into a black hole. , so to keep the sponsors happy, he threw a lavish party down here on the terms he would have had today.

Madonna and Guy Hugh and Liz Hi and Ok magazines would have been fighting each other for the rights to publish the photo of Elton giving David a cheeky hug during the day and then Brunel was risking his neck but at night he was chatting to save face young. Grinnell nearly died in the tunnel, but that did nothing to dampen his appetite for a challenge to the end. He was a complete workaholic, so what drove him? What was this precocious and prodigiously talented child really like? Well, he was a small man and if you read carefully. his diaries that I have here you can tell that this bothered him even from a dark knight who was returning home when I pass by an unknown person who maybe doesn't even look at me, I catch myself trying to look big in my little pony, we can also say that He was I'm not given to taking a lot of time off for my birthday.

Two steam pumps working hard but the pressure didn't stop when the afternoon shift arrived. They didn't go down but they stayed up complaining about last week's wages. In fact, it seems so. It was just one thing that was capable of keeping him away from work. The sex I've had, as I assumed, most young men have had numerous attachments. If they deserve a devilish pretty girl turn, it seemed like the real thing. The couch scenes must now seem to you. As for me, I prefer to be an excellent musician and a very sweet voice, he was a good girl and if she had improved like a girl her age she should have done well, we will never know because she cut the rest of the page, without However, a concern he had that was even more important to him than ambition, work or even sex, even though it was a locked diary and was kept in a locked box, away from prying eyes, alone. he wrote about it in a secret type of shorthand.

The topic I'm talking about is money. I'm terribly needy. The money should barely be enough to pay my debts and at the moment I am penniless, let the worst happen, unemployed and speaking of without money, my poor father would hardly survive. Tunnel Mark Brunell had done everything he could to give young Ismbard a good start in life, but he had suffered terribly trying to support his family, debts had piled up and he finally ended up in debtors' prison for three months. To think that Ism Bard's burning desire to succeed was fueled by the need to right the wrongs that had been inflicted on his father after his accident in the tunnel.

Brunel came here to Bristol to convalesce, but he wasn't very good at lounging around, so while he was here he began competing for the contract to build a bridge across one of Britain's deepest gorges, a daunting prospect, he organized. like a competition and entries were flooded, some more impractical than others, brunel who needless to say had never designed a bridge before. submitted four ideas, noted civil engineer Thomas Telford was invited to judge the entries, he rejected all of Brunel's ideas, in fact he rejected everyone's ideas until he was asked to come up with a plan, this was it and it's great, except that Those huge towers would have cost a fortune to build and everyone in Bristol hated her, so in the end Brunel won and what did she come up with for her winning design? something classic baroque romantic no, he wanted to give bristol something exotic the battle of the nile and the stories that filtered from the grand tours had triggered everyone's interest in ancient egypt, so that was the route he took, the design was a one thing, but building it was another, the Avon Gorge is 250 feet deep with sheer rock on either side, so carrying construction supplies from one side to the other was not easy.

A three hundred meter long iron bar was suspended across the chasm so that many materials could make the precarious journey in a basket, presumably to allay fears among its workers. Brunel was the first to get into the basket, he was literally risking his life for his beloved. Puente called him my first son, my love and I would risk everything for it um wait, you have, can you cut me some slack? No, I can't go down, unfortunately, when the basket got about here, the rope got caught in a kink. in the bar and Brunell was left dangling 200 feet above the River Avon.

Now, if he had had paper and pencil, I'm sure he would have invented a helicopter and taken him to safety, but he didn't, so he got out. from the basket to the astonishment of everyone watching he climbed onto the iron bar he let go of the rope then he climbed back into the basket and continued on his way he cheated death for the second time it is not surprising that one of the pubs that carry his name in downtown bristol is called the reckless engineer the basket was another fabulous publicity stunt, it says a lot about the man even with today's rigorous safety standards now look at some things, i'm sure i didn't see him do this on the road, he's still pretty hairy oh well oh my gosh stop look stop why is he shaking so much stop well stop stop stop now this is just ridiculous he made it to the other side completely unscathed but tragically Brunel's beloved bridge would not be completed until after his death, however, with a stroke of genius he defined a city as we have seen, although no one was surprised while he was in Bristol he also dedicated himself to redesigning the port of London he was building another suspension bridge over the Thames, the tunnel underneath was slowly advancing, he was also at the Sunderland docks, designing his first boat and got married.

Mary Horsley was a society beauty from a cultured family. Mendelssohn stopped by for tea and scones. Mary's brother John was a famous painter. Brunel was in love with him on their honeymoon. went to Snowdonia in Wales, it was a tour with short stops and one suspects that Isimbard would not have given Mary his full attention, he was simply a little preoccupied with his latest adventure, the railway had arrived at the beginning, trains were simply used for transporting coal, the fuel that powered the empire and when Brunel arrived there were footprints spread across the industrial north of England, from Liverpool to Manchester, from Darlington to Stockport, from Birmingham to London, even Brunel saw what was happening and thought that I could do much better than this, and so on. he started working on whatit would become the great western railroad.

He saw a future in which trains would travel at incredible speeds. His goal was to get from London to Bristol in four hours. Now one of the curious little things you should know about Brunel is that he could draw a perfect circle, but when he took a walk on the bumpy line from Liverpool to Manchester this was all he could manage. He was horrified. He wanted comfort. He wanted a ride so smooth that you could drink coffee while running at 50 miles per hour. Therefore, he had to do it. taking complete control stations locomotives cars streetlights even the width of the track would be part of its integrated design in the north the railroad tracks were four feet eight apart on that and this is because the cars in the coal yards had always had their wheels so far apart and the railroad people just copied them, but Brunel wanted his tracks to be seven feet apart.

Let me show you why it's brilliant. You see, there is a conventional railway track here. Four for the data pieces. Okay, little wheels with the wagon on top of them full of coal. Good, but. Brunel discovered that the bigger the wheel, the less the friction and that led to another problem: if you have a conventional railway track and you put big wheels on it, your car is up here, passenger. I'm going to be hopeless, so This is what Brunel thought. He places the caterpillars seven feet apart. He places the big wheels and then places the cart between them.

Then you look out the window through the spokes. Think about the advantages of this. You have a shorter height. center of gravity you have better aerodynamics and with those big wheels you have less friction, that means better economy and something that changed the world more speed Grinnell began to tour the south of England with this his cane, except that it is more than just a walker. stick, let me show you, unscrew the handle, like this, take it off, unscrew this on the bottom, unscrew this little clasp, open that piece, close it, open this piece and look, it's a perfect seven foot measuring stick, the other owners of railways did not think. the broad gauge was perfect for one man they opposed so there were objections to the railway itself not only from the landowners whose estates would be cut in half by lord brunel's supersonic iron snake the duke of wellington, for example, was horrified at the prospect of a railway it would encourage the working classes to move, he funded it and then there was the beginning of Eaton College, when he heard that the railway would pass right by the school, he said he would tempt his students to visit the London brothels, so it wasn't just Brunel.

Charged with the task of designing this railroad and getting shareholders to pay for it, he also had to use his considerable public relations skills with a skeptical public. a politician for 11 days a parliamentary committee set up to examine the feasibility of a railway from london to bristol grilled them mercilessly in the witness box to wake up their lawyer in time for the hearings brunel hung a rope between his apartments in on sides opposites of the street, a wooden bell was ringing and his legal aid was awake. How much would you give to be able to do that to your lawyer?

So what woke Brunel up? Oh, don't be silly, the man never seemed to need it. While he slept, he went on and on like the energizer bunny until finally, after 56 days of success, he won over the committee and was finally able to get started. He wanted to make traveling a pleasure, so the railway had to be efficient and fast, and to achieve this speed he had to avoid hills, he did everything he could to avoid a slope that people began to call the railway the table of Mr. Brunell's billiards, of course, was not easy from London to Bristol, that is miles of English countryside full of hills, valleys and problems, the first obstacle he encountered.

He was facing this floodplain about 11 miles west of London. Now the cheap solution would have been to dip the line into it and then climb up the other side, but the climb would have slowed their engines to save a few seconds. During the journey he built that 900-foot-long, eight-arched war cliff that lit its beauty with purpose and, like Clifton Bridge, gave it an Egyptian flavor. The safe suburb of Eling had never seen anything like it, not even the cavities in the columns. between the arches there are geometric delights like everything on the entire railway, the attention to detail was astonishing when Brunel said that this was going to be the best work in all of England, not the cheapest, but certainly the best, it was a fantastically bold vision, but it took its toll.

The stress of all this gave Brunel nightmares. If I ever go crazy, I will have the ghost of the railway opening walking before me and as it advances a small swarm of demons in the form of half-finished stations, sinking embankments, broken screws, unfinished drawings. and the sketches will silently raise my ghost and deter him some more and the nightmares were not only in his dreams the next obstacle on his route was the river thames the commissioners of the thames gave Brunel a difficult journey they wanted a bridge high enough for the shipping barges to go under brunel wanted a low bridge so that trains wouldn't have to go up to go over brunel wanted three archers the commissioners insisted on two the result was this a bridge with two huge 128 foot arches that are only 24 feet high, that's surprising, that was most people's idea of ​​an arch in the mid 19th century, tall, thin, a little boring, so when Brunel proposed an arch like that, low, flat and really amazing, all the experts said it would collapse.

Brunel found out. these whispers and murmurs and echoes echoes echoes and so the day the bridge opened He left all the scaffolding in place aha said the experts you see the man is an incompetent fool remove the scaffolding you will end up with a river full of bricks but when He removed the scaffolding a year later, nothing happened. The bridge remained here today and remains the widest and flattest brick arch in the world. It is a beautiful bridge that appeases the landowners and contractors. Brunel continued to advance westwards into Wiltshire. The locals were up in arms.

The railway would put an end to the stagecoach road trade and plans were bitterly fought against as one of Brunel's assistants suggested that a team of men sneak in at night and turn his beloved white horse into a train. . Brunel loved the idea, but it was a plan that unfortunately remained a dream; Ultimately his iron snake would destroy the coaching business, but until it was built he needed the roads, he spent his days racing around in a custom-made horse-drawn carriage, he slept in it, he always had to be on site and poor mary, well there is very little evidence that they kept in touch only one letter, in fact she wrote it while staying at a place she jokingly refers to as the cow and the candle snuffers in the village of what basset which is down there somewhere he talks. about how horrible his room is complaining about the drafts it's a normal thing in marriage except of course there was nothing normal about izanbard's married life he was never home i have no idea how he managed to start a family, he did it even though he had a son, but at the time he was a little more bothered by these hills outside Bath, they were a problem, but you don't become the greatest Brit of all time by plugging it in and going home to play dad.

He proposed a two mile long tunnel, not all. He said that he cannot make those two kilometers that would be the longest tunnel in the entire world, it is impossible, but there was more. He built this exquisitely crafted and very expensive façade, but inside it wasn't clad, it was just bare rock. Didn't the geologist say, "you can." Don't do it, he will collapse but he didn't and he still hasn't even without a liner. It was a huge task that took five years to dig a tunnel with up to four thousand men working on it using only dynamite and the bare weapons of it. hands, the death toll was horrible in percentage terms, you are more likely to die doing this than in the trenches during the first world war and, shortly after its end, the locals noticed a strange phenomenon once a year, at dawn, light emanated from inside the tunnel.

It seemed that when the sun appeared on the eastern horizon it shone throughout the entire tunnel and the date on which they said this occurred was April 9, the birthday of one Brunel of the Kingdom of Isenbard, this brilliant engineer used his knowledge of mathematics to create. an immortal birthday present to himself um no, you see, the latest research shows that the sun actually shines outside the Brunell tunnel on April 6, three days before his birthday, so did he make a mistake? It seems unlikely somehow I prefer to look at it this way. It is responsible for the only thing on the entire British railway network that arrives ahead of schedule.

The opening of the box tunnel meant a straight and level run from London to Bristol in four hours, 13 hours faster than the mail car, and Brunel did not. made the world a faster place, unlike any other britain in this series, he actually changed time when he started working on the great western railway, bristol was 11 minutes behind greenwich, meanwhile of course in Back then the time difference didn't matter because you couldn't travel fast enough to worry about it, but the new railway meant you could. The railway moved the world forward a hundred years, but as you can see from the Bristol Corn Exchange clock, which has two minute hands, it moved this city forward 100 years. and 11 minutes and the docking station for these early time travelers, the temple of brunel, meets the terminus, it is impossible to overemphasize the importance of the great western railway and not only because it put britain far ahead of the rest of the world before it came along the farthest you could hope to travel in a day was 10 miles.

Then you could travel 10 times that distance in a quarter of a day and because you wasted less time traveling you could do more you could see more you could work more you could play more you could learn more you could lead a fuller life think of it as a wrought iron superhighway a 19th century internet brunel's railway changed our expectations it changed our aspirations it changed everything something the railway did not change however it was brunel's habit of overspending on the railway cost more than six million pounds, three times the original estimate, but brilliant engineering will never be cheap.

Technological harmony. £2 billion to develop and that was in the 1960s a truly Brunellian concept through a machine that took existing ideas and pushed them further than anyone could have imagined. He would have loved it, but he would have made it five times bigger. The Concorde was the 20th century's answer to a problem that Brunel himself had had to deal with when crossing the Atlantic. He had had a big idea, as always, he wanted people to take the train. in london, get off in bristol and then board a steamship bound for new york and it doesn't matter that he had never built a ship before, everything that until then the atlantic had crossed only for sale, now you would have thought that with this At some point people would have learned to keep their mouths shut whenever Brunel proposed something, but none of his critics said that steam navigation across the Atlantic was as plausible as sending a man to the moon, for once it seemed that the prophets of doom were about to be demonstrated.

Well and with horrible consequences, the ship was built in Bristol but was fitted out in London. Brunel, as expected, was on board when he sailed up the Thames estuary to test the engines when one of them, overheated, escaped into the bowels of the ship to see what the problem was, unfortunately one of the steps of one of The stairs collapsed and he fell 20 feet. If he had landed on a solid floor, he would have undoubtedly died, but anyway, unfortunately for the man he landed on, his fall was broken. and there it is once again his refusal to delegate his need to be at the center of the action getting his hands dirty almost cost him his life brunel and his assistant julie recovered but doubts still lingered about the ship that no one believed could carry enough coal to cross an ocean, but they were not geniuses and Brunel was 10 years old and had been able to understand Euclid's geometry, so at 29 he had no problem realizing that a 200-foot ship can be twice the size. of a 100-foot ship but not needing twice as much fuel to power it, developed a complicated mathematical formula that showed a skeptical world that when it came to steamships, the bigger the better and when the great west came to new york Guess what vindicated Brunel: he still had enough coal for 200 tons.

In fact, he had such success on the transatlantic tourthat there was soon demand for a sister ship. Now, a sister ship probably expected to receive something more or less the same. that's what sister ship means, but not to Grinnell, it wasn't, so he came up with this: the ss britain, the largest ship the world had ever seen, not only the largest, but it was also the first ocean liner made of iron. and the first to have a propeller instead of paddle wheels, it was a turbo galleon, it was the space shuttle on a wooden world, God knows what they must have thought in New York when it first sailed into port, all about the great britain was gigantic its pistons were over two meters in diameter this was a brunellian nut and bolt and you should see his idea of ​​a wrench look at it sadly although britain was destined for a pretty miserable life in just its fifth voyage to new york york ran aground off ireland people thought the iron hull might have confused the captain's compass, but brunel had thought it was simply bad navigation and bad luck and that the worst was yet to come the great western steam company couldn't afford the repairs at brunel Horror, they sold it.

The new owners used her on the tour of Australia, but in a severe storm off Cape Horn she was damaged and then thrown into the Falkland Islands, where she became a warehouse to store coal and wool. It was the most advanced ship in the world. and look what they did to her, letting her rot would be like using the Apollo 11 capsule as an ashtray, although the story has a happy ending because in 1970 she was rescued and brought home to Bristol and I am delighted to say that she is now been restored and is in a permanent dry dock so you can come and marvel at what in terms of modern shipping is the genesis and the extraordinary thing is that a modern computer designed propeller in the 21st century is only five percent larger efficient than this propeller. which was designed by a victorian guy in a tall hat, he was a genius, britain opened in 1843, the same year the thames tunnel opened two amazing feats of engineering in the same year by the same man and he still had only 37 years.

At home, surprisingly, Maria had given birth to a second child and, even more surprising, it seems that Isembard was actually a good father, so one day he was at home doing that old trick where you get a coin in the ear and it comes out. his mouth or his elbow but unfortunately it went wrong and ended up in his lung now most people would have panicked when conventional medicine failed to get it out again but not Brunel, as expected, turned to engineering and made himself a pair of forceps that could be inserted through a cut in the throat into the windpipe.

It must have been incredibly painful and quite worrying because the operation did not happen. Brunel worked desperately and his father developed what we would now recognize as a physio table. Ismbard was tied to it, turned over and shaken vigorously until, to the accompaniment of much rejoicing in the streets, the coin jumped out and, apart from the physio table, he also invented rifling on the inside of the barrel of a gun, built Florence Nightingales hospitals and developed an iceberg warning device 50 years before the Titanic. You see, the thing is, Brunel always built everything for a reason that takes me clearly to the top in many ways, I suspect.

He would have loved this place. He would have loved its size. That is sure. The scale is very Brunellian. He would also have loved the extravagant use of other people's money, but most of all I suspect he would have loved it. Engineering by using these 300 foot tall steel masts to support a sort of spider web of cables that then support the roof. The actual structure weighs less than the air inside it. I think sometimes we forget how smart this place is. However, Brunel would have absolutely hated it. The uselessness of the place, if you had told him it was built for a party rather than a purpose, would have made him fit a duck.

The problem with the dome is that we had nothing to put inside. It's a far cry from 1851 when he built the crystal palace to showcase all the innovations that were driving the empire. Brunel was on the committee, of course, but he had very little to do with it; Your main concern at the time was, a mile ahead, the crowning glory of the great Western Railway Paddington station. Today you are distracted by the shops and bars or glued to the departure boards wondering if your train has been built yet but don't be distracted look up it's impressive it's beautiful but fully functional the planet and the star rib-shaped holes were places where cleaning gantries could be placed and these pillars also serve as downspouts to allow water to run off the roof and drain and now you can board the train to heathrow paddington has become london's gateway to the world just as brunel planned it 160 years ago did you know paddington would last this long?

I think there was an air of indestructibility about everything he built this is the bridge royal albert brunel built it to transport trains across the tamar estuary between devon and cornwall in 1857 still doing it today, when it was built, it was incredibly advanced, like something space age, and it's still a very clever piece of structural thinking. You see on a conventional suspension bridge like this, a tower is built like the one I'm standing on. one bank and then a tower on the other bank, then you put a couple of cables between them and hang the roadway from those cables; then, to stop the weight of the causeway pushing the two towers into the river, you have more cables going down the other side. which are anchored in solid rock, now Brunel's bridge is also a suspension bridge, if you look, the railway part is suspended under those flat and gray parts, but no one knows why Brunel didn't tie his towers together, but instead used those large tubular metal things to separate them I like to think it's because he could So, what went wrong with engineering in Britain today?

Well, there are the usual reasons why engineers don't get paid enough, we don't respect them enough, and engineering projects tend to run these days. by the accountants, but there is another reason why Brunel the man was so prolific that when he finished there was nothing left to do and there was no point in waiting for all his works to fall down because think about it at Paddington station. the box tunnel the clifton suspension bridge they are still here most people are remembered by a little blue plaque on a flophouse somewhere because whatever they did a long time ago has faded but it reminds us of brunel wherever we go his huge hardware held together with rivets the size of fists and bolts like volkswagens when he built things he built them to last when he came to see the open bridge brunel was a broken man he had grown tired of and disappointed.

His visionary gauge railways had been eliminated by the other railway companies, they were only interested in making profits, not in better railways. I struggle to understand the current extraordinary state of railway affairs when everyone around me seems crazy, looking madly crazy, the only sensible course for a sane man is to go out and stay quiet brunel did not stay quiet although far from it, in fact He was about to make the biggest noise of his entire career. These slabs stretching into the Thames from the Isle of Dogs. Here they were going to be the launching pad for the biggest, most impressive, most astonishing engineering feat, probably ever.

Once, probably once, in his mind, he had the idea of ​​another ship, he was thinking of building something called the Great Eastern, which would be able to sail to Australia non-stop, without refueling and now there was another weapon in his arsenal pr photograph this new and revolutionary medium recorded every hesitant step every anxious glance as well as the image that immortalized brunel he looks relaxed here he has no confidence but the truth is that this ship was destroying him now the great britain had been a big ship in its time, no Make no mistake about it, but now I was thinking of making something twice as big as a leviathan, technically speaking it would be something like this, this was the size of a normal ship in the middle of in the 19th century this was the size of the great western of brunel this was britain and now he was talking about doing something so huge nothing so huge had been attempted before and nothing so huge would be attempted again for 50 years until the lusitania came Along with him was an absolute monster next to the Photographers, artists came to paint it and journalists wrote about this enormous thing that rose above the London skyline like the Thames Tunnel. 30 years earlier, Brunel had written the script for another East End soap opera and Londoners were captivated by each one.

New shocking episode. He went into business with a shipbuilder named John Scott Russell, but it was a stormy partnership. They fought over who was in charge and the work fell behind. Finances got out of control. Large quantities of materials disappeared. Brunel was mortified. Money was very scarce. When he was forced to list the contents of his house for fear of having to sell his silver to save his ship, the company directors became so desperate for cash that they even tried to recover a few pounds by selling tickets for the launch. . Thousands came but the ship was too heavy to move Brunel felt publicly humiliated she was finally floated and the problems really began during the trials six men died when a funnel exploded and on her maiden voyage there were only 38 passengers there was simply no demand for such a ship so big that the leviathan became a layer of transatlantic cable and then where is it now?

Well, she didn't sink, she didn't hit an iceberg, her last days were spent as an advertising billboard on the River Mersey and then she was simply torn up to Only one piece of this magnificent ship survives in the most unlikely place, that's all there is to it. What remains of it: the flagpole that today stands outside the Liverpool football club. What a tragedy. Brunel didn't even live to see the ship leave five minutes after posing for this. in the last photograph he collapsed due to a stroke ten days later he was dead his bridge in bristol was completed five years later as a tribute and rightly so, that's how they see it in this era darwin told the world where we come from, but brunel had done something so big.

More importantly, it got us where we were going. You know, I'm a little surprised that this series talks about someone like Princess Diana. I mean, I'm sure she was a very lovely lady, but she's not really in the same class as Brunel. and john lennon i'm the eggman i'm the walrus and then there's william shakespeare a man who has brought astonishing boredom to the classroom for 400 years let me put it this way in a midsummer night's dream puck says he'll put a belt around the earth Shakespeare wrote about it, but Brunel, with his bridges, his ships and his trains, actually made it, the best in Britain.

I am absolutely sure of it. Good evening, BBC Four starts a major new series on the history of mathematics tomorrow, tracing the history of mathematics with Oxford, Don Marcus de Sortoy, make sure you join us tomorrow afternoon at nine, but let's get back to this night and Ian Hislops goes off the rails next to you.