Isambard Kingdom Brunel was Britain's greatest
engineer, he was the man who built everything on a huge
scale, he built Britain's biggest ship, some of
Britain's most spectacular bridges, a tunnel under the
Thames and the finest railway line in Britain, the
London to Bristol route of the Great Western Railway.
Everything he did was on a scale not seen before, not
just in Britain, but in the world. Brunel left a legacy
of industrial architecture and design, from the vaulted
roof of Paddington station to the SS Great Britain, the
first true ocean greyhound, from the Clifton Suspension
Bridge to the Tamar Bridge, which bears his name on its
approaches. His life was one of superlatives - bigger,
wider, taller and faster. Nearly drowning in the Thames
Tunnel, he eventually suffered a stroke aboard his Great
Eastern, the world's largest vessel for almost half a
century, and died two days before her maiden voyage. As
the historian Dan Cruikshank put it, Brunel was quite
simply 'a one-man Industrial Revolution'.Here, John
Christopher tells the story of the man and his tunnels,
bridges, railways, ships and buildings, with many new
illustrations accompanying the old, showing the changes
time has made to Brunel's greatest legacy - the things
he designed and built that we still take for granted and
use every day, over a century and a half since his
death. |
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