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calendar   Saturday - June 18, 2011

3 bits of history at once

I spent a couple hours this afternoon reading about a highly inventive Edwardian civil engineer with the marvelous name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He built the Great Western railway in England in the 1830s, and 24 other rail lines. He and his father built a tunnel under the Thames in 1833 that is still in use today. (Peiper wrote on it a year ago). He built more than 100 viaducts and bridges, including the fantastic Clifton Suspension Bridge over the River Avon in Bristol. He built 9 pier and dock systems. He made a pneumatic subway that would have worked if decent gaskets had been available. When the Crimean War broke out, he built a prefabricated portable hygienic hospital, put it on a ship, and sent it to the front, where Florence Nightingale put it to good use.

He was a genius far ahead of his time, and he made a fortune. He was also a grand philanthropist and founded a number of schools and hospitals.

He also built ships.

His first ship, the Great Western, was the first transatlantic steamship, built in 1838. Built mostly from wood, driven by enormous paddle wheels, and an impressive 232 feet long from stem to stern, it was the largest ship in the world when it was launched. Great Western made 64 passages between Great Britain and New York between 1838 and 1846.

Brunel’s next ship was bigger yet. But it couldn’t be made from wood. It turns out that no matter how strongly you build a wooden ship, they tend to “hog” - flex in the middle - when they get longer than about 275 feet. So in 1842 Brunel built the Great Britain from iron. This was the first modern ship; it had a metal hull, metal decks, watertight compartments, a gigantic 2 cylinder steam engine that generated 1000hp, and a propeller. At 322 feet, Great Britain was the largest ship ever built at the time of her launch as well. And here she is:

image

What you are looking at is 3 bits of history all at once. This is a photograph taken of the Great Britain while it was still under construction. The photograph was taken by William Fox Talbot. In 1844. The photograph was of a type called the calotype, a very early kind of film similar to the daguerreotype but backwards. The daguerreotype created a “positive” which made making copies of the print quite difficult. The calotype made an actual negative, so making multiple prints from it was much easier. Either way, cameras that used something we might recognize today as film were only 4 to 8 years old when this picture was taken. The 3rd bit of history is rather minor: this seems to be the first picture ever taken of a ship.

All this was 16 years before Matthew Brady, whom we Americans tend to think of as the father of photography. Father of photojournalism perhaps, but Talbot had him beat by many years. And 19 years before that iconic meeting in the waters of Hampton Roads that we tend to think of as the birth of iron ships ...

image

ancient photograph of a lithograph: two wooden ships covered in iron plate have at it

was merely the modern birth of floating armored warfare. Brunels’ ships had been chugging back and forth to Australia for ages by that point. Today the Great Britain has been fully restored and is on display in Bristol, UK.

Brunel lead a fascinating life, and I’m just scratching the surface here. In 2002 he was voted the 2nd greatest Briton ever, behind only Churchill. But I found myself quite impressed by a photographic print from way way way back when, and it all sprung from there. Perhaps someday Peiper will do a good long post on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, including pictures taken while driving across it as the bridge bounces up and down under the weight of his car. Or a post on Brunel’s ill-fated final ship, the Great Eastern, which in it’s day was the largest thing that ever floated, and kept that record for a whole generation. Or you can just read about him and his fantastic projects online.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 06/18/2011 at 11:03 PM   
Filed Under: • HistoryUK •  
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