SIR MARC ISAMBARD BRIJNEL.*
TEis is a good professional contribution towards a life of the great engineer of the Thames Tunnel, but it is not such a life. It is a pro- fessional book which needs to be assimilated by a man of general culture, and reproduced, if possible, in combination with a larger mass * Memoir of the We of Si.- Marc Iscanbard Brunei, Civil Engineer, Vice-President of the Royal Society, ec. By Richard Reamish, F.R.S. Longmans.
of personal and general materials, witliont the technicalities which render it at present a resisting medium for the non-engineering mind. Mr. Beamish is, no doubt, admirably fitted to estimate the great engi- neer's professional achievements, and especiallywell fitted to give to the greatest of his undertakings—the construction of the Thames Tunnel— all the dramatic interest which attaches to it in the mind of one of the principal actors and sufferers in that perilous work. But certainly he is not well fitted to construct anything like a literary picture of his friend, and wherever he wanders from the line of his professional career, and diverges into the border-land of private sentiment around it, there is a kind of rawness about his style which is apt to excite a smile. The really valuable part of the book is the exceedingly graphic and vivid account of the battle with the river Thames, in the construction of the great Tunnel, during the years in which Mr. Beamish was personally employed under Mr. Brunel.
Marc Isambard Brunel was born at Hacqueville, in Normandy, on the 25th of April, 1769. When called upon in after-life to give evidence on a question of patents in an English court of law, at a time when our msular prejudice against foreigners was rather more pronounced than it now is, the cross-examining counsel, hoping to make a point out of the foreign origin of the witness, began : Yon are a foreigner, Mr. Brunel ?' "Yes," replied Brunel. "I am a Norman, and Normandy is a country whence your oldest nobility derive their titles." Brunel's family had, indeed, some _claim to distinction, having had the mother of Nicolas Poussin among its members, and it is curious that Brunel's own powers were in no slight degree artistic as well as scientific. It was his wonderfully acute and accurate eye which seems to have first stimulated what we may call his geometrical and scientific ima.gination,andMr.Beamish not only tells us that his first great exploits as a child were achieved in the drawing-school, but that" the few miniatures which he has left of his own paintin.b bear ample testimony to his talent in that department of art. The truthfulness and the beauty and finish of manipulation which they exhibit, drew. from one of our first miniature-painters exclamations of astonishment, and the opinion that had Brunel pur- sued the art as a profession he would have been one of the most dis- tinguished miniature-painters of the day." There can be no doubt that between artists and engineers, really of the highest order of genius, there is a common ground in a faculty for architecture which both the one and the other class possess,—for, in architecture, while the proper artistic love for harmony and expressive beauty or gran- deur has full scope, the proper scientific love of accurate measure- ment and determinate relations between measurable fdrces has also full scope. Accordingly, we find that while Michael Angelo and Wren are architects with a considerable capacity for engineering— which one of them at least could undertake at a pinch, Michael Angelo having been actually the military engineer during the siege of Flo- 'I-once—the greater engineers, like Brunel, show no inconsiderable capacity for architecture even on its artistic side. Whether, indeed, genius of this stamp really embarks in art or engineering, probably depends on the relative strength of the love of expression, and the love of measurement, at work behind that acuteness and accuracy of eye, which is the basis of great skill in either department. Where the love of catching and recording beauty and expression predomi- nates, the eye becomes the minister of a fine art,—where the impulse to gauge and measure predominates, it becomes the instrument of a science,—and in the one case we have the artist, in the other the engineer. Brunel was by no means without either impulse, but his passion for exact measurements, and the combination of measurable forces, transcended far his pleasure in detecting or reproducing the vague expressive aspects of form and colour. But how completely he judged by the eye, and how rich a natural gift he had in this respect, several of Mr. Beamish's anecdotes sufficiently prove. For example, the following story is told of him when, in his boyhood, he first entered the French navy :
"As an illustration of the accuracy of the observing and constructive powers of Brunel at this early period, it may be here further stated that, when introduced to the captain of the vessel in which he was to sail, an instrument on the table attracted his attention. This was a Hadley's qua- drant. He had never seen one before, and was now simply told its use. He did not touch it, but, walking round the table, carefully examined it. In a few days- he produced an instrument of his own construction. " Assez grossier, b la virite;" as he used to say ; " mais assez juste ;" his only theoretical guide being a description of the instrument, in a work on navigation, supplied to him by his master. But this first attempt only stimulated the young mechanist to further efforts, and, with the unwilling aid of a few crowns from his father, he executed another quadrant in ebony with so much accuracy that, during the whole period of his connexion with the navy, he required no other."
And again, Mr. Beamish gives us the following striking account of the rapid and absolute precision with which he judged of the mechanical strength of a structure through the drawing:
"The rapid judgment which Brunel's appreciation of the value of lines enabled him to pass upon the merits of any project, where he had the opportunity of examining the drawings, was most remarkable. I remem- ber well the morning he received alongitudinal section of the first chain bridge thrown across the Seine at Paris by M. Navier, the premier Ingdnieur des Ponts-et-Chaussees of France, one of the earliest and best writers on suspension-bridges, and a man distinguished for his physico-mathematical researches. 'Look here,' exclaimed Brunel, as he examined the drawing.
You woold not venture I think on that bridge unless you woold wish to have a dive? No,' he added, that will not stand, that will tumble into the river.' I observed that M. 'Xavier bad a high reputation for his mathematical knowledge and facility in arithmetical computations. 'Ali, well!' replied Brunel, may be; but this time he has left but the last nought in his calculations.' Not long after we received an account of the fall of the bridge, said at first to have been caused by the bursting of ,a water-pipe, which softened the adjacent ground ; but afterwards acknow- ledged to have been the result of faulty construction."
Early driven from the service of the French navy by the Revolu- tion' the sanguinary violence of which was entirely abhorrent to his mild and benevolent nature, Mr. Brunel went to the -United States, and first developed his marvellous capacities as an engineer in a surveying expedition in the wilds round Lake Ontario. As an architect, too, of public buildings, he achieved some reputation in America; but it was not till after his arrival in England, in 1799, that his great career as an inventive engineer began. His attention had already been turned to improvements in the manufacture of blocks for the ropes of the English navy. The machinery for this purpose was, at the time of Bruners arrival in England, exceedingly inadequate, a great part being done by hand, though one of the con- tractors, the Messrs. Taylor, in declining to make any minute examina- tion into Brunel's discovery, stated, for the firm, that he had "no hope of anything ever (sic) better being discovered, and lam convinced there cannot." At this time (during the French war) the number of new blocks supplied yearly was 100,000, and the cost about 34,0001. (in 1808-1809, it had increased, under Brunel, to 160,000 annually, which would have been worth, on the old contract system, 54,0001.). Brunel was not disheartened, having full faith in his own invention; but, perhaps, unfortunately for him (though a foreigner, and desti- tute of capital as he was, he could not, perhaps, have done other- wise), he placed the benefit of this invention at the disposal of the Navy Board, and his own services to set it working ;—leaving to their generosity the remuneration he should expect. The saving, as at length computed by the Navy Board themselves, was at least 17,000/. a year, or about 34 per cent., and a much larger number of blocks could now be made. Brimers time was incessantly devoted to the works till 1809, and not till 1810 could he obtain any settlement of his claim, though he was in urgent need of it. The Navy Board acted as Navy Boards always did at that time, throwing all the blame of the changes and delay caused by the vast increase in the navy, and the en- larged consumption of blocks, on Bruners machinery, which was of course adapted for the demand as lie found it in 1803-1804, and de- clining to settle till everything was made clear. At last they gave him, after five years of this harassing delay, one year of the count7's savings by his machinery, 17,0001.—a rate of remuneration in which Brunel had acquiesced some years previously, but which, after all this pecuniary worry, was certainly, to say the least, niggardly. The quaint custom of the Navy Board in signing themselves, as they always did, the "affectionate friends" of their business corre- spondents, adds something of ludicrousness to the painful Fabian war of letters in which they engaged with Brunel. Brunel, however, was not so warned by this vexatious negotiation as to prevent further negotiations with the Government. Indeed, of all his business-alliances this with the Government was not the worst. The Government were tiresome, and they were slow paymasters ; but they paid at last. His partners in the saw-mills at Battersea, and in a manufactory of tin crystals, both due to his great inventive inge- nuity, were either absolutely incompetent or dishonest, and through- out life he seems to have been subjected to the fret either of very stupid masters, or of both stupid and hardly honest colleagues. The Government might have been more liberal with Brunel, as they were certainly never treated by him as by many of their contractors. The contract sails were thickened out with flour and whitening, and when washed out by a shower, were so thin that Lord Dundonald says he took an observation of the sun through them. So, too, Sir John Moore's shoeless army, on its return from Corunna, excited Bruners pity, and as a consequence his inventive genius also. These poor fellows' shoes had frequently worn out in a single day, the favourite method with the contractors, whose shoes at this time cost the country 150,000/. a year, being to fill the space between the soles with clay in order to give an appearance of weight and strength. In heat, the baking effect was insufferable ; and in wet, the shoes melted away. Sir Isambard Brunel invented a very ingenious machine for fastening the upper leathers to the soles, so that a much larger number, of known solidity, could be manufactured at a lower price than before. The Government highly approved, and took his shoes ; but, unfortunately, just as the machine came into full and remunerative work, the war came to a close, and Brunel lost largely on the venture. These are but a few specimens of his inventive power, which, in great and small things alike, was always on the stretch.
We cannot conclude our notice of this extraordinary man's career without some notice of his greatest undertaking—the Thames Tunnel. Yet the technicalities of that marvellous and hitherto, alas! use- less work, which cost the proprietors and the country together nearly half a million sterling, are quite beyond the scope of ordinary readers. It is certain that the mechanical imagination involved in the com- pletely new machinery by which the Tunnel was constructed was of no common order, and that its strength, tested by irruptions of the river and the fall of huge portions of the river-bed upon it, astounded even those who had most faith in its solidity. It is certain that no machinery half so well calculated to preserve the persons of the miners, or so inexpensive (costly as the work was), had ever been ,suggested as the shield from which the operations were conducted ; indeed, Mr. Brunel showed that while his completed and secured ex- cavation cost 41. 5s. the cubic yard, the only one previously at- tempted, and conducted on the old method, had cost 121.17s. 6d. the cubic yard, without having been secured in any way against the fall- ing in of the sides and top. But great and minute as all these me- chanical conceptions were, they cannot rouse admiration so much as the wonderful energy, perseverance, and elasticity with which he braved the ever fresh difficulties, disappointments, and perils of
more than ten years' continuous labour, spread over a period of at least seventeen years,—difficulties arising sometimes from a factious and almost spiteful directorate, sometimes from a selfish body of workmen, sometimes from the disease .or -death of his prin- cipal subordinates, as well as those which, as an engineer, he was bound to surmount. The latter, as all the world 'knows, were not trifling. He had to pierce a tunnel between a stratum of .gravel and soft slushy sand; full of water above, and a deep stratum pf quick- sand, wholly unmanageable, below; the blue clay which had been promised him by the previous experiments of the borers, and ivbich was alone fit for his purpose, failed him in the first few hundred feet.. , After that he had almost to make the bed of the river above him afresh, before he had a roof for his tunnel on which he could MY. Five times the river burst in upon his works, always interposing a delay of months, and sometimes robbing him of his best men. Sulphuretted hydrogen was even in some respects more formidable and deadly than the water itself, decimating his best labourers. Yet throughout the whole period neither trouble from above nor troubles from beneath—neither the reproaches and ill-advised urgency of his proprietary, nor the occasional ill conduct of his workmen— neither the river over him nor the quicksands under him—ever dis- heartened him in his arduous task. He was comparatively a young man when he began it, and an old one when he completed it, having already had his first touch of paralysis; yet he exercised through- out a clear, minute, and courageous intelligence that never weaned of inventing new remedies for new difficulties, and improved methods to surmount the old.
This part of Mr. Beamish's book is singularly graphic, though still too technical ; and gives us a very deep impression of the rich versa- tility, the thorough French clearness and accuracy, and indomitable perseverance of this singularly gifted man. Certainly greater than his son in the grasp and fertility of his inventive power, they were sinzularly alike in the unfortunate practical results of their greatest engineering efforts. Both of them had a touch of abstract French imagination about their genius, which prevented them from keeping, like George Stephenson, to supplying in the most practical form the most practical necessity of the time. Yet the Thames Tunnel, which absorbed the elder Bruners maturest powers, though it has never been utilized for the public service as was intended, seems certainly less of a mere imaginative conception than the Great Eastern, to which the younger Brunel fell a kind of sacrifice.
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