Men of Iron
This is the story of two men – Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson – who were bitter commercial rivals but maintained an astonishing lifelong friendship. In Men of Iron: Brunel, Stephenson and the inventions that shaped the modern world, Sally Dugan uses letters, diaries and notebooks to examine the legacy of these two and their contemporaries – and counts the human cost of their great feats of engineering. In this edited extract, she sets the scene …
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On 25 December 1858, two grand old men of Victorian engineering – Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Robert Stephenson – shared a Christmas dinner at the Hôtel d'Orient in Cairo. Nothing so very remarkable in that, you might think. Except that these two friends, who laughed and joked over the brandy, had been lifetime commercial rivals. And before the next year was out, both would be dead.
Brunel, the French-educated southerner and flamboyant showman, and Stephenson, the modest, cautious northerner, could not have been more different. Brunel was full of theory; Stephenson was more practical. Brunel was a liberal; Stephen a conservative. But both shared a passion for the unprecedented technical challenges posed by the new Railway Age.
True polymath
If you take a train from London to Penzance, you will cross a bridge so subtly designed that the best engineering brains of today have only just worked out how it was put together. The Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash, crossed by some 30 high-speed trains a day, is just one of any number of working memorials to Brunel's inventive genius.
Brunel was a true polymath, designing tunnels, bridges, railways, world-beating iron ships – even a prefabricated hospital for use in the Crimean War. What he lacked in experience, he made up for in confidence; he had an uncanny knack of persuading people to part with massive sums of money to fund his grandiose schemes.
Mastermind
He had started out working for his father, Marc, in the foetid and dangerous atmosphere of the Thames Tunnel. Through Bristol contacts made when designing the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Brunel came to mastermind one of the largest railway empires in the country. When he was first appointed engineer to the Great Western Railway (GWR) at the age of 26, he had no railway experience whatsoever. But he had taken a ride on George and Robert Stephenson's Liverpool-to-Manchester Railway, and was convinced he could do better.
Delegating was never his strong point – he appointed assistants to survey the line between London and Bristol, and spent his time riding round the countryside checking up on them. He commissioned steam engines to his own specifications, then had to buy some more in the light of the humiliating fact that his did not work properly. In the 1830s, the best engines in the country came from the workshops of his arch rival, the designer of the Rocket, Robert Stephenson.
Essentially practical
Robert Stephenson spent his early career overshadowed by his father, a semi-literate self-made man. In fact, for many years it was George rather than Robert who was credited with the design of the Rocket.
Robert's talents – like his father's – were essentially practical. His skill lay in adapting existing designs rather than thinking things through from first principle. He was certainly not a polymath on the Brunel scale.
Rivalry
The rivalry between Brunel and Stephenson became public over the so-called 'gauge wars'. Brunel had designed his railway lines to an expansive 7-foot (2.1 metre) width, performing a battery of scientific tests to show that this provided a smoother ride. Stephenson had gone for a cheaper and more conservative narrow gauge. Both gave evidence to a royal commission set up to decide which gauge should serve the country; both had a house near Parliament so that they could lobby the decision-makers.
At the height of the Victorian railway mania, both promoted rival bids for lines to serve the same stretch of countryside. Brunel championed the cause of the atmospheric railway, which used air, instead of a locomotive engine, to propel carriages along the track. This would have rendered Stephenson's steam locomotive redundant.
Stephenson produced a very sceptical report on Brunel's system. It was prophetic: Brunel's flirtation with atmospheric railways in south Devon proved to be the most expensive engineering failure of his time. Yet in all of this, the two men somehow managed to maintain an increasingly warm personal friendship.
No condemnation
Part of their secret was a refusal to make political capital out of each other's mistakes. In the early days of the GWR, a dissatisfied group of directors invited Stephenson to provide an independent engineer's report on the line. He refused.
Brunel repaid the compliment at the public inquiry into the Dee Bridge disaster of 1847. Stephenson's cast-iron bridge had collapsed, killing five people, and he narrowly escaped a manslaughter conviction. Brunel, reluctantly called as an expert witness, would not condemn the use of cast iron as a building material, even though he rarely used it himself.
Mutual support
Their mutual support extended well beyond the committee room. When Stephenson floated the giant tubes for the Conway and Britannia bridges in north Wales, Brunel was there to offer advice. When Brunel, in his turn, came close to despair during his last desperate attempts to launch the Great Eastern , Stephenson turned up to paddle about in the Thames mud, against doctor's orders.
Stephenson's own experience of ships was limited to the luxury yacht Titania , which he took on cruises in a vain attempt to restore his rapidly diminishing health. However, that did not stop him from being on hand when required to lend his friend moral support.
Exacting the price
The two men died within a month of each other, both worn out from overwork. They were not the only casualties of their ambitions. Some estimates put the toll on just one stretch of tunnel on the GWR – nicknamed 'God's Wonderful Railway' – at up to 100 deaths. However, it could be argued that the navvies who sweated under their orders were not asked to take risks that the two men were unwilling to take themselves. Brunel, in particular, was always to be found at the centre of the action and had several narrow escapes.
Creating the dramatic new landscape that was to shape the modern world exacted a price. It was a price measured in human lives, as well as pounds, shillings and pence. But as Brunel's faithful locomotive engineer Daniel Gooch put it: 'Great things are not done by those who sit down and count the cost of every thought and act.'
Sally Dugan is a journalist who has written for The Times and the Radio Times, among other publications. As well as Men of Iron, she is the author of Commando and, with her husband David Dugan, The Day the World Took Off: The roots of the Industrial Revolution. She lives within a stone's throw of a Great Western Railway station.
