Marc Isambard Brunel

• 1. Introduction

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  Within 15 weeks of its opening, one million people had walked through the Thames Tunnel, the first tunnel ever built under a river. Its builder was Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, a French-British engineer best known for the work he did in Britain. He was also the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who became the more famous name. Yet the father's career was stranger than the son's shadow suggests. What kind of life prepares a person to dig beneath a river? And what did it cost him to finish the job?

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• 2. Early Talents

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  In Hacqueville, in Normandy, Marc Brunel was born on the family farm, the second son of Jean Charles Brunel and Marie-Victoire Lefebvre. His father was a prosperous farmer. In families like theirs, custom gave the land to the first son and the priesthood to the second. So the boy began a classical education. It did not take. He showed no liking for Greek or Latin, but he drew well, he was quick at mathematics, and he was musical from an early age.

  At the age of eleven he was sent to a seminary in Rouen, where the superior let him learn carpentry. He soon reached the standard of a cabinetmaker. He also sketched ships in the local harbour. Still he had no wish to become a priest, so his father sent him to relatives in Rouen. There a family friend tutored him in naval matters.

  That tuition paid off in 1786, when Marc became a naval cadet on a French frigate. During his service he visited the West Indies several times. He made himself an octant from brass and ivory and used it on those voyages. The French Revolution began in 1789 while he was still serving abroad, and it would soon decide where he spent the rest of his life.

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• 3. Revolution and Exile

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  In January 1792, Brunel's frigate paid off its crew, and he returned to his relatives in Rouen. Like most people in Normandy, he sympathised with the Royalists. In January 1793 he was in Paris during the trial of Louis XVI. There he unwisely predicted in public that Robespierre, one of the Revolution's leaders, would fall. He was lucky to leave Paris alive, and it was clear he could not stay in France.

  Sophia Kingdom, a young English orphan who worked as a governess, was someone he had met in Rouen. He had to leave her behind when he fled to Le Havre and boarded the American ship Liberty, bound for New York. Her own fate was grim. During the Reign of Terror she was arrested as an English spy and expected each day to be executed. The fall of Robespierre in June 1794 saved her. In April 1795 she was finally able to leave France and travel to London.

  Brunel reached New York on the 6th of September 1793 and went on to Philadelphia and Albany. He joined a scheme to link the Hudson River with Lake Champlain by canal. He also submitted a design for the new Capitol building in Washington. The judges were very impressed, but they did not choose it.

  In 1796, after taking citizenship, he became chief engineer of the city of New York. He designed houses, docks, commercial buildings, an arsenal and a cannon factory. No official records of this work survive. It seems likely that the documents were destroyed in the New York draft riots of 1863.

  A dinner conversation in 1798 changed his course. He heard that the Royal Navy struggled to obtain the 100,000 pulley blocks it needed each year, because every one was made by hand. Brunel quickly sketched an outline for machines that would automate the work. He sailed for England on the 7th of February 1799, carrying a letter of introduction to the Navy Minister. His ship, the Halifax, landed at Falmouth on the 7th of March.

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• 4. Block Machines

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  On the 1st of November 1799, Brunel married Sophia Kingdom at St Andrew, Holborn, having contacted her as soon as he reached London. Three children followed. Sophia was born in 1801, Emma in 1804 and Isambard Kingdom in 1806. The boy grew up in Lindsey House in Chelsea. Brunel himself preferred the given name Isambard, but history calls him Marc to avoid confusion with his more famous son.

  During the summer of 1799, Brunel was introduced to Henry Maudslay, a talented engineer who had worked for Joseph Bramah and had recently started his own business. Maudslay built working models of the block-making machines. Brunel then approached Samuel Bentham, the Inspector General of Naval Works. In April 1802, Bentham recommended installing the machinery at Portsmouth Block Mills.

  The results were dramatic. Unskilled workers could run the machines, and output reached ten times the previous rate. Altogether 45 machines were installed at Portsmouth. By 1808 the plant was producing 130,000 blocks a year. Payment was another matter. The Admiralty hesitated, though Brunel had spent more than £2,000 of his own money. In August 1808 they agreed to pay £1,000 on account, and two years later they consented to just over £17,000.

  Sawmills drew on the same experience. Brunel did much to develop sawmill machinery, with contracts from the British Government at Chatham and Woolwich dockyards. At Battersea in London he built a sawmill designed to produce veneers. It burnt down in 1814 and was rebuilt by 1816. He also designed sawmills for entrepreneurs, and he developed machinery to mass-produce soldiers' boots. That venture never reached full production, because demand ended with the Napoleonic Wars.

  Learned societies took notice. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1814 and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1828. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected him a Foreign Honorary Member in 1834, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh made him an Honorary Fellow in 1845. Honours of that kind did not settle his accounts, as the early 1820s would show.

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• 5. Debtors' Prison

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  By early 1821, Brunel was deeply in debt. Slow payment from the Admiralty and some further unprofitable ventures had done the damage, despite the success of his block machinery. In May of that year he was tried and committed to the King's Bench Prison, a debtors' prison in Southwark. Prisoners there could keep their families with them, and Sophia went in with him. He spent 88 days inside.

  As the weeks passed with no sign of release, Brunel wrote to Alexander I of Russia. He asked about moving his family to St Petersburg to work for the Tsar. News that Britain might lose so eminent an engineer stirred influential figures, among them the Duke of Wellington, to press the government to act. The government granted £5,000 to clear his debts, on condition that he abandon any plan to go to Russia. Brunel walked out of prison in August, free to take on the project that would define him.

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• 6. Shield and Shaft

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  In 1805 the Thames Archway Company set out to drive a tunnel beneath the Thames between Rotherhithe and Limehouse. It hired Richard Trevithick, who brought Cornish miners to the job. In 1807 the tunnel hit quicksand, and conditions turned difficult and dangerous. After more than 1,000 feet had been dug, the work was abandoned. Expert opinion, led by William Jessop, held that such a tunnel was impracticable.

  Brunel had already drawn up plans for a tunnel under the River Neva in Russia, but that scheme never came to fruition. In 1818 he patented a tunnelling shield. It was a reinforced cast iron structure in which miners worked in separate compartments at the tunnel face. Large jacks drove it forward at intervals, and brick lined the tunnel behind it. It is claimed that he took the idea from the shipworm Teredo navalis, whose head is protected by a hard shell while it bores through ships' timbers.

  In February 1824, after Brunel had written to every influential person who might be interested, a meeting was finally held. Shareholders subscribed for 2,128 shares at £50 each. In June 1824 the Thames Tunnel Company was incorporated by royal assent. The tunnel was meant for horse-drawn traffic.

  Work began in February 1825 with a vertical shaft of 50 ft on the Rotherhithe bank. Builders laid a metal ring 50 feet across and raised a circular brick tower on top of it. As the tower grew, its weight forced the ring into the ground, while workmen dug out the earth at the centre. The shaft was finished in November 1825.

  The shield was then assembled at the bottom. Henry Maudslay's company had made it at Lambeth, and also supplied the steam powered pumps. It was rectangular in cross section and had twelve frames side by side, each able to move forward independently. Each frame held three compartments, one above another, and each compartment was big enough for one miner. In all, the shield held 36 miners. Bricklayers followed behind, lining the walls with over 7.5 million bricks. Later engineers would build the London Underground and many other tunnels with shields based on this invention.

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• 7. Floods and Feuds

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  Brunel's son Isambard Kingdom, now 18 years old, worked beside him on the tunnel. Brunel had planned the tunnel to lie no more than fourteen feet below the riverbed at its lowest point, a choice that caused trouble later. Another hindrance was William Smith, the chairman of the company. He thought the shield an unnecessary luxury and believed the tunnel could be dug more cheaply by traditional methods. He wanted Brunel replaced as Chief Engineer and constantly tried to undermine him. The shield quickly proved its worth. Both Brunel and his assistant engineer fell ill, and for a while Isambard had to carry the whole burden of the work.

  Flooding came repeatedly, because the tunnel face lay so close to the river bed. In May 1827 crews had to plug an enormous hole that appeared in the riverbed. The company's resources were consumed, and despite efforts to raise more money, the tunnel was sealed up in August 1828. Brunel, frustrated by the chairman's constant opposition, resigned. He turned to other civil engineering work, including helping Isambard with his design of the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

  In March 1832, William Smith was deposed as chairman, after being a thorn in Brunel's side throughout. In 1834 the government agreed a loan of £246,000 to the company. The old 80-ton shield was removed and replaced by an improved 140-ton one made of 9,000 parts, which had to be fitted together underground. Tunnelling resumed, but floods still overwhelmed the pumps. Miners fell ill from the constant influx of polluted water. As the tunnel approached the Wapping shore, work began in 1840 on a second vertical shaft, similar to the one at Rotherhithe. It took thirteen months to complete.

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• 8. Opening and Legacy

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  On the 24th of March 1841, the young Queen Victoria knighted Brunel, at the suggestion of Prince Albert, who had followed the tunnel's progress with keen interest. The Wapping side opened on the 1st of August 1842. On the 7th of November 1842, Brunel suffered a stroke that paralysed his right side for a time. Even so, he took part in the official opening ceremony on the 25th of March 1843. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited on the 26th of July 1843. Although planned for horse-drawn traffic, the tunnel stayed pedestrian only.

  After the tunnel, which he considered his greatest achievement, Brunel was in poor health and never again accepted a major commission. He still helped his son on various projects. He was proud of Isambard, and attended the launch of the SS Great Britain in Bristol on the 19th of July 1843. A second, more severe stroke in 1845 left his right side almost totally paralysed. He died on the 12th of December 1849, aged 80, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery in London. His wife Sophia was later laid in the same plot, followed by their son Isambard just 10 years later.

  In 1865 the East London Railway Company bought the Thames Tunnel for £200,000, and four years later the first trains passed through it. It became part of the London Underground and remains in use today as part of the East London Line of London Overground. A charitable trust took over the engine house in Rotherhithe in 1975. In 2006 it was transformed into the Brunel Museum, in the same district where the first shaft was sunk in 1825.

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