Brunel was turned away from France's top engineering school and apprenticed to a watchmaker
As a foreigner, the teenage Isambard Kingdom Brunel was barred from the École Polytechnique, and Britain offered no engineering degrees. So he stayed in Paris to train under the master horologist Abraham-Louis Breguet. He went on to build the Great Western Railway and three of the largest steamships afloat.
Brunel was born in Portsea, Portsmouth, on 9 April 1806, the only son of the French-born engineer Marc Brunel, who was then building block-making machinery for the Royal Navy on what was the world's first production line. His mother, Sophia Kingdom, gave him his middle name. His father taught him drawing and observation from the age of four, and by eight the boy knew Euclidean geometry and spoke fluent French. Family money was shaky: in 1821 Marc landed in debtors' prison, and was freed only after the Duke of Wellington warned that Britain could not lose him to the Russian tsar.
His first big job, the Thames Tunnel, collapsed and nearly killed him. While recuperating he began the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which was halted after riots in Bristol and finished only after his death. As first engineer of the Great Western Railway he laid out the London to Bristol line with gentle curves and gradients and drove the Box Tunnel, then the world's longest, through despite warnings it could not be done safely. His broad gauge of just over seven feet later became a burden, and an attempt at an atmospheric railway failed.
Hoping to carry the railway on to America, he turned to ships. The Great Western won the Blue Riband as the second holder and crossed profitably. The Great Britain was the first iron-hulled, propeller-driven ship to cross the Atlantic, until grounding in 1847 bankrupted her owners. The Great Eastern suffered quarrels with John Scott Russell and a huge explosion on her maiden voyage; Brunel died on 15 September 1859, soon afterwards, and she found success only laying cable.
In 2002 a BBC poll ranked him second among the 100 Greatest Britons, and his bicentenary in 2006 was marked with a programme of events.
Source: Isambard Kingdom Brunel
