Читать книгу The Ocean Railway: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Samuel Cunard and the Revolutionary World of the Great Atlantic Steamships - Stephen Fox, Stephen Fox - Страница 11

The dream of starting a transatlantic steamship line depended in equal measure on enterprise and engineering, or money and machinery. Engineering had to come first. Once it seemed that engines, boilers and ships had been improved enough to bear the overpowering demands of the North Atlantic Ocean, moneyed investors might come forth to launch the enterprise. Almost nothing in history is truly inevitable; any major event or turning point could have turned out quite differently if shaded by other twists of luck or contingency. But given the ongoing progress in steamship technology, the swelling commercial and political pressures for faster, surer links between Europe and America, and many interested parties on both sides of the ocean ready to invest in any plausible scheme, transatlantic steam seemed virtually certain. The only lingering questions were how soon and by whom. ‘Indeed, all things considered, ’ said the Mechanics’ Magazine of London in 1837, ‘the strangest thing about the matter is, that the object should not have been effected many years ago.’

Ocean steamships became the largest, most complicated machines yet devised. As such, they drew on engineering developments in many different fields. British engineering in general was now approaching its nineteenth-century zenith, a dazzling peak moment of practical imagination, commercial success and global impact. British engineers were, for the time being, the best in the world. They had started the first Industrial Revolution and then provided the models for its cloning in Europe and North America. Great Britain was producing far more coal, iron, machinery and technological optimism than any other country. The earliest successful Atlantic steamships could not have come from anywhere else.

Engineering as an exact science was barely a century old. It had originated in France, before the advent of the steam engine, as a real-world application of the Age of Reason. The term ‘engineer’ traditionally meant someone who built only war machines and fortifications; ‘civil engineering’ thus came to mean similar pursuits carried out in peacetime. Influenced by then-current philosophical emphases on rationalist modes of thought, French engineers adapted new ideals of mathematical precision, measurability and experimentation to their practical building tasks. Such pioneers as Pierre Bouguer and Charles Augustin Coulomb invented the fields of structural analysis, applied mechanics and hydraulics. The first engineering schools appeared in eighteenth-century France and long remained the most exacting such institutions in the world.

In Great Britain, engineering at the outset was more intuitive and direct, neither assisted nor impeded by much conscious philosophical baggage. The first British civil engineers – John Smeaton, Thomas Telford, John Rennie – mainly worked with the traditional materials of wood, stone and masonry to build improved roads, bridges and harbours. In particular, they constructed canals, the prevailing transportation fad during the decades around the turn of the nineteenth century. A canal, a water medium, had to remain as level as possible throughout its course. That meant rearranging the natural environment to an unprecedented degree: building up embankments, running high viaducts across valleys, bridging rivers, cutting down the smaller hills, and tunnelling through larger ones. The Sapperton Tunnel on the Thames and Severn Canal, finished in 1789, was over two miles long – an amazing feat at the time. Humans were imposing their will on nature as never before, for all to see, and by their success were encouraged to entertain yet more Promethean ambitions for themselves. As civil engineering matured, it shed its original honest-workman’s aura, became a more socially acceptable career, and professionalized itself. The Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818, mainly by canal men. ‘Civil Engineering is the art of directing the great sources of power in Nature for the use and convenience of man,’ explained an ICE leader. ‘The most important object of Civil Engineering is to improve the means of production and of traffic.’

The next generation of British engineers typically adopted newer building materials and power, especially iron, coal and steam engines. The line between the two groups was not quite that stark; Telford and Rennie, from the first generation, had used cast iron in their bridges as early as the 1790s. The real demarcation came down to function. The founding civil engineers built objects that did not move. The later mechanical engineers, as they were called, built machines that snorted and clanked across the landscape. One was best known for canals and bridges, the other for railways and steam power. Many individuals continued to work at every type of engineering. But with the narrowing of newer specializations, and the relentless deepening of requisite knowledge in any given field, the civils and mechanicals diverged ever more sharply, sometimes feuding with each other. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, started in 1846 by railway men, gave this hardening division an organized boundary.

Most of the early British engineers, both civil and mechanical, came from Scotland and northern England. Telford and Rennie were Scotsmen who learned their crafts in Edinburgh, then migrated south to find work. Henry Maudslay, a noted steam engine builder and inventor of machine tools, was from a Lancashire family outside Liverpool. He grew up in his father’s carpentry shop but preferred working with iron, so he switched to blacksmithing. Wielding his hammer, file and chisel, he was a true artist, deft and inventive, utterly in his element. He moved to London and opened a workshop that became famous for its marine steam engines and general excellence. James Nasmyth, one of his many apprentices who went on to notable engineering careers, fondly recalled his first impression of Maudslay’s shop at Lambeth in 1829: ‘the beautiful machine tools, the silent smooth whirl of the machinery, the active movements of the men, the excellent quality of the work in progress, and the admirable order and management that pervaded the whole establishment.’ Maudslay stressed simplicity and economy to his assistants, demonstrating the lesson by turning a rough piece of metal into a smooth, plane surface with just a few precise strokes of his file.

Civil and mechanical engineers jointly created their most significant early achievement, the steam railway. Mining operations had already produced the first small steam locomotives and had demonstrated the unmatchable rolling efficiency of iron wheels on iron tracks. Because the earliest railway locomotives lacked much pulling or braking power, the right-of-way had to avoid steep hills; that meant borrowing from the canal builders’ levelling techniques for tunnels, viaducts, embankments and cuttings. Mail coaches and coastal steamboat lines had shown the advantages of providing public transportation on set timetables at fixed fees. All these separate strands came together in tracks and trains. Because the Industrial Revolution had arrived so early in Britain, it happened there long before the railway – a sequence not repeated anywhere else. The iron horse then exploded on a society already well industrialized, quickly transforming everyday life in ways that steam-powered mines, mills and factories had not touched.

George Stephenson, the seminal British railway pioneer, was an illiterate engine mechanic born near Newcastle. He always spoke with a thick Northumbrian accent barely intelligible to southerners. After a delayed education, Stephenson built the initial two railways in England, the Stockton and Darlington (1825) and the Liverpool and Manchester (1830), designing the locomotives and rolling stock as well as laying down the track and its associated structures. The Liverpool and Manchester, the first line to run between major cities, was expected mainly to carry freight such as coal, cotton and timber between the port on the Mersey and the booming inland factory city. But passengers came forth in surprising numbers, so Stephenson started offering them fast trains on a regular schedule.

What the customers were buying was speed, achieved with a smoothness and consistency previously unknown. It seemed extraordinary that a businessman could leave Liverpool in the morning, travel thirty-three miles and spend his long workday in Manchester, and still return home by that night in reasonable fettle. A mail coach might average only about ten quite jostling miles an hour. A fast horse and rider at full gallop could reach up to forty miles an hour, but only in brief spurts, and with an exhausting clatter and commotion. Railway engines would match a galloping horse and maintain that speed serenely for hours, chuffing along in a steady rhythm with no apparent strain.

In the summer of 1830, the actress Fanny Kemble – fresh from her first great triumphs on the London stage – took an excited ride on a Liverpool and Manchester locomotive, with Stephenson himself driving. She felt inclined to pat the small iron horse, which consisted of just a boiler, stove, engine and gleaming steel pistons, a platform, bench, coals and a barrel of water. ‘How strange it seemed,’ she noted, ‘to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace.’ No horse, no sail; how did it move? They glided easily through cuttings, across bridges and a viaduct, along raised embankments, and over a swamp. Stephenson described the construction of his locomotive, which Kemble thought she understood (‘His way of explaining himself is peculiar, but very striking’). After taking on more water, he let out the throttle, pushing the engine to a giddy thirty-five miles an hour. Sensing the dramatic moment, Kemble stood up, took off her bonnet, and drank it in. The onrushing air pushed against her, forcing her eyelids down. It felt like flying, so fast and yet so smooth and free. ‘When I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful, and strange beyond description; yet, strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear.’

Fanny Kemble’s joyful initiation into railbound flight symbolized a turning point in material history. The triumphs of engineering now hooked the nineteenth century on an ongoing expectation of constant, unsatisfied acceleration: speed and progress, reaching into every area of life, ever faster, and regardless of the dangers. ‘Verily is ours the age for invention,’ said the Illustrated London News in 1842. It was in many ways a Faustian contract, balanced uncertainly between gains and losses. Critics of modernity such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris played a steady minor-keyed threnody in the background as Victorian progress boomed inexorably along. A few dissenting engineers did express timid misgivings about such headlong haste, and about the harrowing, infernal landscape of the Black Country of coal and iron mines in the industrial Midlands. But most practitioners, civils and mechanicals alike, shrugged off such criticisms. ‘If we would credit these imbecile philosophers, the introduction of every machine is an injury rather than a benefit,’ one engineer bristled. ‘There can be no greater fallacy than this.’

Most engineers apparently believed their work would improve humankind – lightening its labour, speeding and easing travel, making life more comfortable and abundant. In any case, they devoted themselves to engineering for the more basic reason that they so enjoyed their craft. Engineers worked very hard, to the point in many cases of wearing themselves out at a premature age. R. A. Buchanan, the eminent historian of Victorian engineering, has suggested that they toiled such long hours mainly because they preferred it to any other possible activity. They didn’t socialize much, avoided religious and political strifes, and lived simply and quietly. In 1838 a young railway engineer, Daniel Gooch, made an expected appearance at a dinner party thrown by his boss’s family – but quickly escaped. ‘I believe I did succeed in getting as far as the staircase,’ he scolded himself in his diary, ‘and left it disgusted with London parties, making a note in my memorandum-book never to go to another.’

Nestled into their workshops, pondering some engineering puzzle of agreeable difficulty, they found their truest happiness in making up a brand-new world. Henry Maudslay took obvious, extravagant pleasure in manipulating his tools, loving the work for its own sake as much as for its applied uses. It called on all the keenest faculties of mind, eye and hand. To plan their projects, engineers made careful drawings and crafted detailed models. ‘Drawing is the Education of the Eye. It is more interesting than words,’ James Nasmyth insisted. ‘The language of the tongue is often used to disguise our thoughts, whereas the language of the pencil is clear and explicit.’ Fondling their raw materials on a workbench, shaping and pounding and drilling, the engineers absorbed cues and knowledge directly through their fingertips. Inspiration flowed from the head and eyes out through the hands to the work, and then back again, in a seamless, tactile circuit of material creation. At their peaks, they felt the exultation of artists.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel was a prime inventive force behind the three most innovative ocean steamships built before 1870. Yet he spent most of his career on other projects ashore; he was not a naval architect or shipbuilder or any sort of marine engineer. As a landlubber, prone to seasickness, he never even took a major ocean voyage until the last year of his life. His steamships seem still more imposing as the off-hand products of a very busy engineer usually focused in other directions. During his lifetime of great fame and achievement, brunel was often called a genius for the crunching power, range and originality of his mind. More successfully than any of his contemporaries, he straddled the widening split between civil and mechanical engineering, resisting the modernist specializing trend. He deplored ‘the benumbing effect of rules laid down by authority’, as he put it, ‘this tendency to legislate and to rule, which is the “fashion” of the day’ No strict categories or conventions could ever contain him.

He made his first reputation as the engineer to the Great Western Railway. brunel surveyed its route – a winding course that ran 117 miles west from London to the port city of Bristol – and then planned every detail of its construction, from the locomotives and rolling stock down to the lamp-posts and stations. ‘No one can fill up the details,’ he explained. ‘I am obliged to do all myself.’ He made lavish use of all the canal builders’ methods for remaking a resistant landscape, so levelling the grade that the line was known as ‘brunel’s billiard table’. The Box Tunnel east of Bath ran for 1.8 miles through an insurmountable hill, much of it solid rock. The digging and blasting on this single project engaged up to 4000 workmen and 300 horses at a time, consumed a weekly ton of gunpowder and ton of candles, and killed nearly 100 men in five years. On completion it was the longest railway tunnel in the world. (The rising sun is said to shine clear through the tunnel on one day of the year, 9 April, brunel’s birthday. Given the usual spring weather in southwest England, this intriguing legend can seldom be tested, which may explain its survival.)

Queen Victoria chose the Great Western for her first trip by railway. In June 1842, returning to London from a sojourn at Windsor Castle, she and Prince Albert boarded a special train at Slough. The royal party, in six carriages, was greeted at the station by the Great Western’s top brass, and brunel personally took charge of the locomotive. The train reached Paddington Station in twenty-five fast minutes. Victoria and Albert alighted on a crimson carpet that stretched across the platform, and were cheered by crowds at the station and along the avenue outside. ‘Free from dust and crowd and heat,’ the queen noted of her railway baptism, ‘and I am quite charmed with it.’ A year later, Albert flew from Bristol to London in just over two hours, averaging a breathtaking fifty-seven miles an hour. Nothing could have better advertised the Great Western Railway – and its chief engineer.

brunel became a celebrity, an engineering superstar at a time when the public works of engineers were remaking everyday life in large, visible ways and sparking the popular imagination as never before. ‘Even to shake hands with one so remarkable,’ an acquaintance later wrote of meeting brunel, ‘was a thing to be remembered for a lifetime.’ He loved any spotlight, courting it and capering in it, presenting himself in dramatic ways. He was a small man, about five feet four inches tall, with an olive complexion and blazing dark eyes under a strong brow. He moved about quickly under clouds of cigar smoke, vital and vigorous, gesturing expansively with his hands as he spoke. brunel worked killing hours, even by engineering standards, but maintained a boyishly playful disposition, fond of jokes and pranks. Regardless of any contrary fashions, he wore a tall, cylindrical silk hat everywhere, even in his own travelling carriage. He explained, perhaps seriously, that it would protect his head from any blow by collapsing before the skull was struck. ‘It is at once warm and airy,’ he elaborated, ‘and you cannot improve upon it.’ (It also made him look taller.)

The extent of his fame was revealed in the spring of 1843 when, performing a coin trick for the children of a friend, he accidentally swallowed a half sovereign. It settled in his windpipe, causing pain in the chest and fits of coughing, and could not be dislodged. brunel designed an apparatus for holding himself upside down, hoping that gravity would help expel the coin. He was inverted and tapped on the back, causing such convulsive coughing that the experiment was abandoned. Sir Benjamin Brodie, a prominent physiologist and surgeon, was summoned. He performed a tracheotomy and poked around with his forceps, but without success. Newspapers issued regular bulletins. Even the august Times, which liked to define serious news coverage, kept its readers well informed. ‘Mr. brunel passed a quiet night,’ The Times reported. Four days later: ‘He was able on Thursday to take a small quantity of fish.’ And three days more: ‘Mr. brunel is going on favourably.’ At last, after almost six weeks, he was again turned upside down, with the incision in his windpipe kept open. Hit gently between the shoulder blades, brunel coughed twice, and the coin dropped from his mouth. The Times published a detailed final report (‘And thus, under Providence, a most valuable life has been preserved’).

Over his career, brunel contrived great triumphs and equally great failures. Everything about him was exaggerated; he vividly displayed both the strengths and deficiencies of genius. He reasonably believed that he knew more, across a wider range of engineering fields, than almost anybody he encountered. Among railway men, only Robert Stephenson, the accomplished son of George Stephenson, was greeted as a peer. ‘Stephenson is decidedly the only man in the profession that I feel disposed to meet as my equal, or superior, perhaps,’ brunel noted. ‘He has a truly mechanical head.’ Anyone else was expected to defer to brunel’s authority. His unorthodox mind and dead-sure tenacity pushed him through any obstacles into bold, original achievements – and also made him a quite difficult associate and boss. It was generally best not to resist or disagree with him. ‘Admit him to be absolute,’ one colleague noticed, ‘and he was not only reasonable, but kind. Hint to him that you had rights, and he was inexorable.’

As an engineer, he most valued ‘usefulness’, he insisted, ‘that characteristic of which we are most proud, and for which we have the vanity to think we are peculiarly distinguished.’ But ‘usefulness’ to brunel meant deploying the newest, strongest materials and methods, as called for by the most extravagant engineering standards available. The Great Western was the fastest, most solidly built railway of its time, but also the most expensive at £6.5 million, well over twice brunel’s initial estimate. He characteristically would brush aside budgets and spiralling expenses, preferring not to think about money, wanting only to be left free to do his finest work – thereby distressing his helpless financial associates, endangering and sometimes wrecking the whole enterprise. ‘He was the very Napoleon of engineers, thinking more of glory than of profit, and of victory than of dividends,’ a harsh contemporary estimate in the Quarterly Review concluded. ‘He seemed to love difficulties so much that he not infrequently chose the most difficult manner of overcoming them. Whatever was fullest of engineering perils had the greatest charms for him. That which was easy was comparatively uninteresting.’ Despite his declared focus on usefulness, he was actually the purest of engineers: a demanding, relentless artist intent on finding the most elegant solution regardless of costs or circumstances.

None of his debacles ever impeded his uncanny ability to get jobs and attract new investors. He caught and embodied the relentless engineering optimism of his time. ‘The most useful and valuable experience is that derived from failures and not from successes,’ he once wrote. ‘But what cannot be done?’ When testifying before a board of directors or a committee of Parliament, he was a formidable advocate: overflowing with esoteric knowledge, diplomatic yet seemingly candid, speaking tersely to the point, and charming and witty when that seemed appropriate. He could usually persuade even the most sceptical listeners. He disliked writing and thought he had no talent for it, but his memoranda piled up compelling arguments by steady accretion. brunel was also a facile, accurate draughtsman, decorating his workbooks with fine small drawings tossed off for the apparent fun of it, and if necessary he could go to his workshop and make a skilful model of a design in wood or iron. With his command of speaking, writing, drawing and modelling, he had the rare capacity to explain himself with clarity and eloquence in four modes and three dimensions – a key to his overwhelming powers of persuasion.

Today brunel remains the only British engineer of his era with an enduring popular reputation. In Great Britain he is virtually a folk hero. Some of his notable engineering works have survived as reminders of his wide-ranging inventiveness. The Great Western Railway still runs across many of his bridges and through the Box Tunnel. At one end of the line, his station at Bristol Temple Meads still stands, though now reduced to a humble car park. At the other end, his Paddington Station in London encloses tracks and platforms in a space 700 feet long and 240 feet wide, under a vaulting roof of wrought-iron arched ribs covered with glass and corrugated iron. The Royal Albert Bridge, his greatest feat of bridge building, crosses the River Tamar near Plymouth in two spans of 455 feet each, an artful blend of arch and suspension techniques. With its approaches added, the Royal Albert traverses a total of almost 2200 feet. The Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, over the dramatically deep Avon gorge, was finished to his designs as a posthumous memorial. The Great Britain, his second ocean steamship, was improbably salvaged after a long, chequered career and was brought home to Bristol to be reconstructed and opened to the public.

Other brunel traces help keep his name alive. The reputations of historical figures often depend on the written footprints they happened to leave behind; brunel’s private papers and manuscripts, amounting to at least twenty-seven thick letterbooks and many other files, are housed at the University of Bristol and at the Public Record Office in Kew. Other brunel letters are scattered in a dozen archives across Great Britain. One of the fullest research troves available for any Victorian engineer, these materials allow historians an uncommonly rich record of his life. At Westminster Abbey, a brunel window in the south aisle memorializes him. A brunel statue stands on the Thames Embankment in London, looking upriver towards the Charing Cross site of his Hungerford pedestrian bridge, now long gone. At Paddington Station, another statue has him sitting down, looking thoughtful, holding his tall silk hat in one hand and a notebook in the other. In Bristol, a third statue presents him standing up, a jaunty hand in his waistband, gazing off towards the river and his preserved Great Britain steamship.

Brunel’s biography recapitulates the history of engineering in his time, from its French origins to its ultimate mid-Victorian feats in iron and steam. His father, Marc Isambard brunel, came from a family of tenant farmers in northern France, halfway between Paris and Rouen. Over his father’s opposition, Marc decided to be an engineer and spent six years in the French navy. Came the Revolution, and his Royalist sympathies exiled him to America, then to England, where he married an Englishwoman and settled into a picaresque engineering career. He always dressed and carried himself like a gentleman from the ancien régime, with its antiquated manners and costume. Once, in a British court proceeding, he was asked if he was a foreigner. ‘Yes, I am a Norman,’ he replied, ‘and Normandy is a country from whence your oldest nobility derive their titles.’

Marc brunel met Henry Maudslay in 1799, two years after Maudslay had opened his own machinist’s workshop. Their complementary skills meshed well: the French-trained engineer explaining his concepts, the skilled British mechanic bringing them down to ground and to practical execution. brunel and Maudslay worked on projects together for the next twenty years. At the Portsmouth Royal Dockyard, under the supervision of the naval architect Sir Samuel Bentham they devised steam-powered machinery for making the wooden blocks (pulleys) used in great numbers by sailing ships, turning out a cheaper, more consistent product than by the old hand methods. From this first success, brunel went on to inventions for sawing and bending wood, making shoes and boots, and improving marine steam engines and steamboat paddle wheels. He never quite regained the early heights of his novel blockmaking machinery. Abstracted and absentminded, he would lose umbrellas and take the wrong coach, ending up somewhere out in the country. A financial innocent, at one point he spent three months in a debtors’ prison.

Marc’s greatest work was his son, Isambard, born at Portsmouth in 1806. The boy resembled his father in appearance – small, a large head, dark complexion and eyes – and in his apparently innate knack for drawing and machinery. Isambard grew up in Chelsea, swimming in the Thames and meeting a stream of famous visitors at home. He found his métier at the Maudslay workshop: ‘your firm,’ as he later wrote to the Maudslays, ‘with which all my early recollections of engineering are so closely connected and in whose manufactory I probably acquired all my early knowledge of mechanics.’ Sent off to school near Brighton, he wrote home that he had been making boats, thus injuring his hands, and asked for his father’s eighty-foot tape measure. He spent two years in Paris, studying maths and the French language, and apprenticing under a famous maker of chronometers and scientific instruments. Denied entrance to the elite Ecole Polytechnique because of his foreign birth, he returned to England in 1822 and went to work for his father.

Still a teenager, he had already accumulated a range of education and experience – from Marc, Henry Maudslay, and in France – that few British engineers of his generation could match. Bilingual, bicultural, he displayed a precocious sense of engineering theory and practice. His intellectual gifts were obvious. Marc fully recognized them and pushed his son onward. As Isambard’s career took flight, his immersion in real engineering projects eventually crowded out his more theoretical French background. ‘One sadly loses the habit of mathematical reasoning,’ he noted. He became very much an Englishman, speaking with no French accent, and ever wary of continental tendencies. Later he advised a young man to spurn any writings by French engineers. ‘Take them for abstract science,’ he suggested, ‘and study their statics dynamics geometry etc etc to your heart’s content – but never even read any of their works on mechanics any more than you would search their modern authors for religious principles. A few hours spent in a blacksmith’s and wheelwright’s shop will teach you more practical mechanics – read English books for practice. There is little enough to learn in them but you will not have to unlearn that little.’

In 1825 the brunels embarked on a daring, unprecedented project to build a 1200-foot carriage tunnel under the Thames. Nobody had ever run a tunnel beneath a navigable, tidal river. The watery riverbed overhead consisted of unpredictable mixtures of clay, sand, gravel and mud, and was constantly disrupted by tides and river traffic. For these daunting conditions, Marc invented a novel construction shield. It resembled a giant bookshelf, three men high and twelve men across. Each man stood in a separate compartment, digging with pick and shovel; as the ground was excavated, the shield was screwed forward; bricklayers came in behind and shored up the tunnel. The work inched along, beset by leaking water and lighting and ventilation problems. At times the men stood in black water up to their knees.

After a year of difficulties, Marc took sick and told Isambard, twenty years old, to take over. The response of the brawny workmen to their new boss – so young, small, and French-educated to boot – may be imagined. Given all the circumstances, he managed well enough. At one point, with water leaking into the tunnel again, he did not get to bed for five straight nights. ‘No one has stood out like him!’ Marc wrote in his diary. Two hard years into the project, the river broke through from overhead in a gushing flood. Isambard descended on a rope to rescue a workman. For three weeks he could not plug the holes. Marc was harshly criticized by the authoritative Mechanics’ Magazine of London for not accepting advice or taking responsibility for his crucial mistakes. The leaks were finally sealed and work resumed, but in a changed climate of watchful outside scepticism.

Isambard sought refuge in an extraordinary private journal, the most candid and searching self-appraisals he ever committed to paper. He recorded the details of his daily life, the tunnel work, sleeping five hours a night, and stray thoughts about girls. At twenty-one, despite his adult responsibilities in the tunnel, he was between adolescence and grownup-ness. Still under construction, he took an unsparing look at himself. ‘My self-conceit and love of glory or rather approbation vie with each other which shall govern me,’ he wrote. ‘I often do the most silly, useless things to appear to advantage… My self-conceit renders me domineering, intolerant, nay, even quarrelsome with those who do not flatter.…I am always building castles in the air, what time I waste.’ Yet that self-conceit had quite adequate cause; he fully appreciated his own special talents and sought fame and reputation. ‘My ambition, or whatever it may be called (it is not the mere wish to be rich) is rather extensive.’ So probably he should never marry. ‘For one whose ambition is to distinguish himself in the eye of the public, such freedom is almost indispensable.’ Or maybe he should. ‘Yet, in sickness and disappointment, how delightful to have a companion whose sympathy one is sure of possessing.’ In this journal, he is less the engineering wunderkind, more any young man in baffled turmoil about his future.

In January 1828 water again broke into the tunnel, more seriously this time. Six men were killed. Isambard was knocked down, suffered internal injuries, and barely escaped alive. It took him over three months to heal. The Mechanics’ Magazine, no fan of the brunels, praised his coolness under pressure and brave concern for his men. But investors had lost confidence in the project, still only half completed. Work was stopped and the tunnel sealed. ‘Tunnel is now, I think, dead,’ Isambard later wrote in his diary. ‘This is the first time I have felt able to cry… However, nil desperandum [never despair] has always been my motto – we may succeed yet.’

At the time, he felt crushed by such a public defeat. The halting of the Thames Tunnel project did, however, free brunel from an endless, risky, dreadful burden – and from his father’s orbit – to pursue other work on his own. In Bristol, his designs for docks and the Clifton Suspension Bridge brought him to the attention of men involved in starting the Great Western Railway. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society at the early age of twenty-six, he was entering the most successful decade of his career. (The Thames Tunnel project was later resumed, but without brunel fils. It opened in 1843 just for pedestrians, not carriages, and ultimately became part of the London Underground.)

In step with the general progression from civil to mechanical engineering, brunel’s attention moved from tunnels to railways. He took his first trip late in 1831, on the Liverpool and Manchester. The carriage shook too much for easy writing. ‘The time is not far off,’ he decided, ‘when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 miles an hour – let me try.’ He got his chance with the Great Western, the longest railway yet conceived in Great Britain. Appointed its engineer in the spring of 1833, he threw himself into this new work with all the energy of a good engineer at play. He spent long days on horseback surveying and plotting its route, placating resistant landowners along the way, and stayed up late writing letters and reports. Against the advice of most railway men, he convinced his board to accept a broad gauge of seven feet, more than two feet wider than the tracks of existing lines: a bold departure, ultimately proven wrongheaded, but early evidence of brunel’s forceful persuasive gifts.

For two years he was too busy even to scribble in his diary. The day after Christmas in 1835, he finally sat down and took stock. ‘The most eventful part of my life…emerging from obscurity,’ he wrote. ‘What a change – The Railway now is in progress. I am thus Engineer to the finest work in England…and it’s not this alone but everything I have been engaged in has been successful.’ (He was perhaps repressing any memories of the Thames Tunnel.) ‘And this at the age of 29 – Faith not so young as I always fancy tho’ really can hardly believe it when I think of it.…I don’t like it – it can’t last – bad weather must soon come.’ He moved into plusher quarters at 18 Duke Street in the Westminster area of London, with easy access to the corridors of influence at Parliament and Whitehall. It remained brunel’s home and office for the rest of his life. Resolving his earlier doubts about possible marital intrusions on those boundless ambitions, in July 1836 he took a trophy wife, a fabled beauty named Mary Horsley whom he had known and intermittently courted for five years.

Marriage and, later, fatherhood did not affect his usual work habits. During the first four months after his wedding, he made decisions about the brick-arched Maidenhead Bridge over the Thames, the Box Tunnel, the tile drains along the track, the heating and welding of iron bars, the sinking of bridge arches and the proper way of laying bricks, the ordering of four locomotives, the size of engine valves relative to piston area, the question of allowing Great Western work on Sundays, and the cheapest wood for posts. It was brunel’s line, all down the line. He installed his own methods for putting down the roadbed and securing the rails, served as architect for every station along the way, and even picked the names for the first locomotives. ‘It is an understood thing,’ he wrote to one of his men, ‘that all under me are subject to immediate dismissal at my pleasure.’

brunel’s control of every aspect of the Great Western made him the culprit when anything went wrong. As construction took longer and longer, and costs more than doubled, directors in London and Liverpool started having doubts about their young engineer. ‘The Box Tunnel is operating a good deal against the Great Western,’ noted George H. Gibbs, a London director. ‘Connecting it with the name of brunel, the difficulties of the Thames Tunnel are not unlikely to come into people’s mind.’ The first section of the line, from London to Maidenhead, was opened to passengers in June 1838. When trains did not run as fast or as smoothly as expected, brunel recommended reballasting the roadbed, replacing springs in the cars, and improving the locomotives. As the trading price of Great Western stock kept falling, shareholders in Liverpool moved to dismiss brunel. Even George Gibbs, who usually defended him, felt torn. ‘With all his talent,’ Gibbs wrote of brunel, ‘he has shown himself deficient…in arranging his work in his own mind so as to enable him to proceed with it rapidly, economically and surely. There have been too many mistakes, too much of doing and undoing.’

Under fire, for a brief time brunel felt shattered, even unable to work. His creation, so subject to costly revisions, was mockingly called the Great Experimental Railway. Gibbs had a blunt conversation with him; brunel promised to cooperate and retained the support of Gibbs and his faction. At a tense showdown during a meeting of the directors, brunel was again persuasive, defending himself with an even temper and compelling effect. The Liverpool contingent was outvoted, and brunel proceeded to finish the Great Western. Upon completion, it was acclaimed as the fastest, most strongly built railway in the world, and its engineer’s characteristic problems along the way were forgotten.

Brunel’s first steamship began with a famous jest in October 1835. At a Great Western directors meeting in London, someone objected to the unprecedented length of the line, planned to run all the way to Bristol through many expensive tunnels at the western end. Rising to the challenge and topping it, brunel replied with what he apparently meant as a joke: ‘Why not make it longer, and have a steamboat to go from Bristol to New York?’ A director from Bristol, an engineer turned sugar refiner named Thomas R. Guppy, took the riposte seriously. He and brunel talked it over that night. brunel had almost no prior experience with steam on water, but he recognized few boundaries to his engineering skills. He brought in an acquaintance, a semi-retired Royal Navy officer named Christopher Claxton, whom he knew from his earlier work for the Bristol docks. The three men started an informal steamship committee.

Claxton and William Patterson, a local shipbuilder, toured the main steam ports of Great Britain and sailed on every coastal and channel steamboat line. ‘Great improvements are being gradually introduced,’ they reported in January, ‘more particularly observable in the Clyde than elsewhere.’ For crossing the ocean, they recommended a much larger steamship than any yet built. They invoked a common principle, well known to shipbuilders of the time: that a vessel’s resistance as it moved through the water did not increase in direct proportion to its tonnage. As a measure of interior space, tonnage was computed from three dimensions. Resistance was then estimated from just two dimensions, the width and depth of the hull. Thus tonnage increased as the cube of the dimensions, resistance only as the square of them. A much larger ocean ship could therefore include the necessary space for coals and machinery, well beyond the capacity of a conventional ship, without requiring intolerable increases in power and fuel consumption to maintain adequate speed. Claxton and Patterson estimated that a steamship of 1200 tons and 300 horsepower, loaded with 580 tons of coal, would average between six and nine knots and cross the Atlantic in less than twenty days to the west, and just thirteen days to the east: roughly half the average voyages by sail.

The Great Western Steam Ship Company first planned to build two ships of that size, then decided on a single larger vessel of 1400 tons and 400 horsepower. Patterson – ‘known as a man open to conviction,’ according to Claxton, ‘and not prejudiced in favour of either quaint or old-fashioned notions in ship-building’ – would build her in Bristol. As managing director of the new company, Claxton looked after day-to-day operations. The building committee of brunel, Guppy, Claxton and Patterson met about once a week, whenever railway business brought brunel to Bristol. In general, on this committee Patterson took charge of the ship, brunel of the engine. ‘Mr. Patterson drew the lines,’ Claxton later recalled; ‘Mr. brunel, Mr. Guppy, and myself, often sat over them; Mr. Patterson got instructions and made his own calculations accurately; Mr. brunel made his also often by my side.’ Over the next two years, they planned and built the largest steamship yet, the first designed for regular crossings of the North Atlantic.

They were racing against a competing group in London organized by Junius Smith, an expatriate American businessman. His British and American Steam Navigation Company drew investors from both sides of the ocean. This final sprint to steam across the Atlantic came down to three separate but overlapping rivalries: Britain against America, Bristol against London, and the Clyde against the Thames (or the North against the South). Subtly complicated and multiply crosshatched, the contest was played out amid fierce regional loyalties for rich stakes of prestige and fortune.

The crucial technical questions involved engines and boilers. The two leading British builders of marine steam engines were Robert Napier of Glasgow and Maudslay, Sons and Field of London. (Clyde and Thames.) After Marc brunel’s old friend Henry Maudslay died in 1831, the firm had passed on to his sons, Thomas and Joseph, and in particular to Joshua Field, a skilled engineer and manager. ‘No vessel ever had a sufficient power yet,’ Field had declared in 1822. ‘There is a limit, but that limit has never yet reached its fullest extent.’ As horsepowers kept on growing, the upper border was continuously extended. Progress already seemed infinite. By the 1830s, both Napier and Field were intrigued by the potential honour of powering the first true Atlantic steamship. ‘I have not the smallest doubt upon my own mind,’ Napier wrote in 1833, ‘but that in a very short time it will be one of the best and most lucrative businesses in the country.’ ‘The distance is limited,’ Field added a few years later, ‘only by the quantity of coal she can carry.’

By then both Scottish and English engineers had settled on the side-lever engine as the best mechanism for an ocean steamship. Derived from Watt’s old overhead beam engine, it placed the main weight of the power source at the bottom of the ship, lowering its centre of gravity to limit rolling and pitching in heavy seas. A vertical engine cylinder drove a horizontal beam pivoted in the middle, with tandem connecting rods at its ends running downward to side levers, which drove a crank on the paddle shaft to turn the paddles. It was complicated and inefficient, moving massive weights up and down, with each stroke coming to a dead stop and then reversing. The bulky rods and levers added weight and took up precious cargo space. But the various parts were easily accessible and well balanced, minimizing friction and strain and needing less lubrication than other engine types. The piston’s long stroke made full use of steam in the cylinder. Confined to the ship’s closed hold, it was protected from foul weather and did not interfere with sailors moving about on the deck. Napier changed the framing from cast to wrought iron, making it lighter and stronger. The side-lever engine was considered exceptionally rugged and reliable, important qualities for crossing 3000 miles of ocean.

The earliest marine boilers were kettle types, simply a drum of water heated by an external fire. Around 1830, Maudslay and others introduced a variation on the locomotive boiler, featuring an internal furnace that expelled its exhaust gases through long, narrow flues, making fuller use of the heat to produce more steam. But steamship boilers remained primitive and inconsistent, box-shaped and riddled with fragile seams. Each engine builder made his own boilers, using construction methods and metals of unpredictable quality. No one as yet dared push a seagoing boiler beyond a modest pressure of about five pounds per square inch. Lower pressure held down horsepower and made the engine use more coal, which limited the ship’s range and cargo capacity. More than any other technical factor, the state of boiler technology was keeping steamships off the Atlantic.

Several steamers had already crossed the ocean, but not under continuous power or as part of a regularly scheduled service. The American vessel Savannah went from the United States to England in 1819, steaming only for about eighty-five hours of the twenty-seven-day passage. Over the next fourteen years, at least five other steamships made an Atlantic crossing, down to the Scottish-Canadian Royal William in 1833, Samuel Cunard’s first venture into steam navigation. None of these ships could carry enough fuel to steam all the way. In any case, the salt water’s scaly deposits in the boilers had to be blown off or laboriously chipped out with hammer and chisel at frequent intervals; that meant stopping the engine for up to a day and proceeding under sail until the puny boilers could be cleaned, refilled, and get up steam again.

One possible solution to these fuel and boiler limitations was to reduce the route across the ocean. The shortest great circle course between Europe and North America ran just 1900 miles between Valentia, at the southwestern tip of Ireland, to St John’s, Newfoundland. The run from there to Halifax brought the total to 2400 miles. In 1824 a group in London under Maurice Fitzgerald, the knight of Kerry – an Irish statesman and member of Parliament – launched the Atlantic Steam Navigation Company to carry traffic from London to Valentia to Halifax to New York. The company included Alexander Nimmo, a government civil engineer who was building piers and harbours along the Irish coast, and other men of influence. They planned steamships of 1000 tons, almost twice the size of any vessel then afloat. In the autumn of 1825, American newspapers declared it ‘almost certain’ that the service would start in the following spring. But it never did. In these years, just before the railway, the journey by coach and steamboat from London to Valentia took fifty hours, and forty hours from Liverpool. The whole trip would have demanded at least four changes of conveyance, with the usual uncertainties of baggage and schedules, to reach New York. It was much easier just to take one of the swift sailing packet lines the whole way from London or Liverpool. The Valentia company disappeared, though the general idea was periodically revived.

Junius Smith’s protracted crusade for an Atlantic steamship line began with an interminable fifty-four-day sailing voyage from England to New York in the autumn of 1832. He was then fifty-two years old, a Connecticut Yankee and Yale graduate who had lived in London since 1805, prospering as a merchant. Dawdling across the Atlantic for almost two months, Smith had plenty of time to ponder an alternative means of ocean travel. In his innocence of steamship technology, he conceived a line of four steaming packets, to cost £30,000 each and make the hard westbound run from Portsmouth to New York in just twelve or thirteen days. ‘I shall not relinquish this project,’ he vowed, ‘unless I find it absolutely impracticable.’ For two years, nobody he contacted in London or New York expressed any flicker of interest. Smith kept trying, virtually alone. ‘The patience and labor of forming a company in London is beyond all that you can imagine,’ he wrote to an associate in New York. ‘It is the worst place in the whole world to bring out a new thing, the best when it is done… All the old sailing interest of course is against me.’

The project became credible when Smith extended his search for supporters to northern England. Macgregor Laird, from a Scottish shipbuilding family that had moved down to Liverpool, became the secretary of Smith’s projected company. He brought acutely needed technical expertise and steamship contacts to the enterprise. They planned four ships of 1200 tons and 300 horsepower, to make the trip from London (and now Liverpool as well) to New York in fifteen days on average. After The Times announced the scheme in November 1835, over £1 million in stock was subscribed – though not actually paid up – in a few weeks. Many English investors, scenting any reasonable plan, were ready for transatlantic steam. ‘Job’s patience is much celebrated,’ Smith remarked, ‘but I don’t think that he ever undertook…to establish a steam company.’

Meantime brunel and his Bristol associates were getting ready to build their own Atlantic steamship, the Great Western, starting out a few months behind Smith and Laird. brunel decided on the size of the engine and picked its builder. He went through the motions of a careful search, taking tenders from three firms. But given his family’s intimate ties to Maudslay over four decades, the five years that Thomas Guppy had spent there as a young engineer, the company’s long experience in making powerful marine engines, and Joshua Field’s eminence as an engineer, the contract could have gone nowhere else. The Maudslay firm agreed to build a two-cylinder side-lever engine of 400 horsepower. For this special project, with its high and public stakes, Field designed a system of engine cams that improved steam economy – useful for the broad Atlantic – and invented new, more efficient double-storey boilers. brunel occasionally dropped by the Maudslay works at Lambeth, checking on the engine’s progress, and he mediated squabbles between Claxton and the firm’s management about bills and payments. ‘There are but few good Engine builders,’ he reminded Claxton, ‘and it will not be prudent to quarrel with the principal one.’

brunel’s role in the ship herself has been exaggerated. He came to the project with no shipbuilding experience and throughout its construction was intensely preoccupied with the Great Western Railway. Claxton and Patterson, the real ship men, had already recommended a very large vessel, and Patterson designed the hull and fittings with just occasional advice from the others. brunel, drawing on his knowledge of bridge stresses and bracings, did recommend adding to the ship’s longitudinal strength with extra iron bolts and trusses. (A longer ship, so the logic went, would need additional strength when suspended from the bow and stern between two high ocean waves.) brunel wanted to make the ship 400 to 500 tons larger, but Patterson doubted her stability at that size, so she was kept to 1320 tons. brunel and Guppy, his fellow landlubber, urged fitting larger cabin windows at the stern for more light and air, as in drawing-room windows ashore. Claxton ‘took the liberty of reminding them’, he recalled, ‘that there was water outside which was sometimes very uneven in its surface, and unlike the generality of lawns; and strange as it may appear, Mr. Patterson, their builder, agreed.’ brunel played a vital part in creating the Great Western, but no more than Claxton, Patterson and Field did. Most accounts ever since have slighted their contributions in favour of their more famous colleague.

In London and Liverpool, the rival steamship project of Junius Smith was splintering into sniping factions. Instead of four ships at once, they had pulled back and decided to build a single enormous vessel of 1800 tons. As an apparent compromise, the construction of the British Queen was split between the Thames and the Clyde. The shipbuilding contract went to the London firm of Curling and Young. Macgregor Laird wanted his friend and fellow Scotsman Robert Napier to make the engine, but Napier’s bid of £20,000 was rejected, presumably by the London faction – a fatal error. Another Clyde engine builder, Claude Girdwood of Greenock, got the job instead at a lesser price. ‘The steamer is going forward in all its branches,’ Smith noted in March 1837. ‘I look back with amazement and see how I was guided by Providence in this thing.’ A few months later, though, Girdwood went bankrupt, and no other builder would complete his unfinished engine. In August, Napier – no doubt with a certain grim satisfaction – agreed to build another engine, of 420 horsepower, for £21,000: more than his spurned offer of a year earlier. This long delay let the Great Western company pull ahead in the race to steam across the Atlantic.

By the spring of 1838, after more than two years of planning and building, the Great Western was ready. At that moment she was, as designed, the biggest and most up-to-date steamship in the world. Most of the technical improvements came from Joshua Field. His version of a spray condenser, which converted some of the engine’s used steam back into fresh water, limited scale deposits enough to let the boilers fire continuously across the ocean. Along with his innovative engine cams and double-storey boilers, Field had addressed the besetting inefficiency of paddle wheels: the pointless thrashings up and down as the paddles entered and left the water. Borrowing from the geometric figure of the cycloid (the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line), Field added three staggered boards to each paddle, stepped in from the circumference towards the hub so that each section entered the water at the same place in immediate succession. This ‘cycloidal wheel’ was supposed to reduce both the initial downward slap of a paddle on the water and the heaving motion at the other end of the immersion, as it allowed the paddle to clear and shed the water more smoothly. From boilers to paddles, the Great Western was engineered specifically for service on the North Atlantic.

The overall dimensions of her wooden hull, 236 feet long and 35 feet wide, didn’t make her look much different from other large ships of the day. ‘Her size, when seen by herself, does not appear so great as it really is,’ one visitor noticed, ‘and it is only when on board, or seen alongside other vessels, whose size is known, that her magnitude is appreciated.’ The black-painted hull of the Great Western presented a flaring clipper bow with a figurehead of Neptune holding a gilded trident. The deck was dominated by four low masts, one looming black smokestack, and two elevated bridges that linked the paddle boxes. A double wheel on a circular platform at the stern allowed two (or more) sailors to muscle her rudder and steer the vessel. Three structures on the deck enclosed a forecabin 46 feet long, the top of the engine room at midship, and the 75-foot main saloon at the rear, the showplace of the ship.

The saloon offered a seagoing opulence and high-ceilinged airiness matched, at the time, only by Edward Knight Collins’s Dramatic Line of American sailing packets. The ornamental work was contracted out to Frederick Crace of Wigmore Street and the Messrs Jackson of Rathbone Place, two noted London decorating firms. In early Victorian style, they festooned the saloon with columns that imitated palm trees and large pier glasses that suggested Dresden china, and they painted the walls and ceiling in warm, delicate colours with gold highlights. Edward Thomas Parris, the historical painter to the queen, contributed door panels five feet high that presented vignettes across a carnival of cultures: rural scenery and farming, music, interior views and landscapes, sports and amusements, and the arts and sciences, all in the rococo manner of Louis XV. The main staircase, to the cabins below, had a bronzed and gilded ornamental railing, with woodwork painted in imitation oak. The small cabins accommodated up to 128 passengers and twenty servants. Regardless of brunel’s relative share in her creation, the Great Western had emerged as a recognizable brunel product: made of the finest materials and newest engineering, extravagant and original, truly the Great Western Railway at sea. (One impressed observer inevitably called her a ‘floating palace’.)

Engined and finished in London, on 31 March she left Blackwall for Bristol, whence she would embark on her maiden voyage to New York. She steamed in large majesty down the Thames to the English Channel, the engine pumping easily with contained power, black coal smoke pouring from the stack. brunel and Claxton were aboard, watching and approving. Everything seemed in fine order on this shakedown cruise – until a serious fire broke out in the engine room. The felt insulation around the boilers, installed to improve steam efficiencies and keep the room temperature tolerable for the stokers, had ignited from the heat of the pipes, and the fire was quickly spread by oil paint and gas to the wooden beams and deck overhead. The flames licked as high as the top of the smokestack, holding back attempts to reach into the engine room. Claxton took a leather hose down to the fore-hatch and from there poured water on the fire. brunel started down to help him, lost his footing on the burned rung of a ladder, fell heavily on top of Claxton, and lay unconscious, facedown in a puddle of water. (It recalled his accident in the Thames Tunnel ten years earlier: nearly killed by his own engineering project.) Claxton saved his life by breaking his fall, pulling him out of the puddle, and calling for a rope. brunel was hauled up on deck, suffering from a dislocated shoulder and a broken leg.

The fire burned on. The commander, Lieutenant James Hosken of the Royal Navy, thought about running out the lifeboats and taking off passengers, but he instead beached the Great Western on a flat riverbank, where she sat upright on her bottom. Men finally broke through the deck into the engine room and put out the flames. Refloated on the next high tide, surprisingly undamaged except for the burned felt and some charred wood, the ship proceeded to Bristol. After three days, brunel felt well enough to dictate a long letter to Claxton about the generally satisfactory performance of the ship and her engine, hardly mentioning his injuries. ‘I hope the Vessel will be a long way on her Voyage to New York,’ he wrote, ‘before I could be in a state to go onboard again.’

The fire must have pleased Junius Smith. Nursing an exalted opinion of his own historical significance, he liked to call himself ‘the father of Atlantic steam navigation’. Smith believed that he alone owned the very concept of a transatlantic steamship. He had started his company before the Bristol group got under way, and now, with the long-delayed British Queen not even launched yet, he could not bear in frustration and defeat to let the Great Western beat him across the ocean. So Smith and Macgregor Laird chartered the Sirius, a well-regarded channel steamer of only 700 tons, loaded her down with fuel, and sent her on a risky, shortened passage to New York from Cork, on the southern coast of Ireland. (Starting from Cork knocked a day’s sailing off the course to America from Bristol.) The voyage of the Sirius was just a heedless, dangerous publicity stunt, a desperate gambit by sore losers, and hardly worth the historical attention it has received ever since.

The Great Western left Bristol for New York as scheduled on 8 April, four days behind the Sirius. The first Atlantic steamship race, contrived and unequal, was under way. brunel had provided Hosken with an engraved Mercator-projection chart of his great circle route, marked with bearings and soundings, to help keep the ship on the fastest course. The Great Western carried only seven passengers at thirty-five guineas (about thirty-seven pounds) apiece; fifty additional passengers had intended to go but were scared away by the fire. These seven brave pioneers in transatlantic steaming were amply serviced by fifty-seven crew members, including twenty-four seamen above deck and fifteen sweating coal stokers below. During the entire voyage, the engine was only stopped three times, briefly, for minor adjustments and to take soundings on the Newfoundland Banks. That meant little rest for the stokers. They struggled to bring coal by basket and wheelbarrow from holds at the bow and stern, where the ship’s pitching and rolling motions were exaggerated. The stokers complained; Captain Hosken warned them to obey the chief engineer. Without enough coal, the boilers were barely maintaining adequate steam pressure. The stokers were pushed harder and promised extra pay. One exhausted stoker named Crooks got drunk and unruly, which inspired him to try to throw the captain overboard. For this egregious lapse of discipline, Crooks was restrained and tied up. The other stokers stopped working until he was released: not a near-mutiny by real sailors but a hint of proletarian industrial unrest transferred from land to the unfamiliar regimen of a seaborne boiler room.

Up on deck, the more experienced passengers noticed differences from life on a sailing packet. Morning conversations brought fewer fretful speculations about the wind and weather; the wind hardly mattered now. Instead the novel, somewhat frightening steam engine dominated everything on board. Nobody had ever crossed the ocean in the relentless presence of so audible, tangible a machine. All day and night it hissed and clanked, smoked and steamed, heating the deck from below so that tar bubbled up between the seams, sticky and persistent. The smoke and smuts blew around unpredictably, blackening clothes and alighting on hair. The engine lubricants, derived from animal fats with low combustion points, burned and smelled pervasively like a constant, enormous kitchen fire, a bilious irritant to anyone fighting seasickness or confined to a cabin below. The sea atmosphere, usually clean and bracing, felt cooked and greasy. Some people worried about being blown up by the overworked boilers or getting suddenly forced out of bed with no time to get dressed.

The machine was working, though, with the strong and steady rhythm of a heartbeat, practically without stopping, all the way across the ocean. A new era was finally at hand. ‘How this glorious steamer wallops, and gallops, and flounders along!’ wrote a passenger on the Great Western. ‘She goes it like mad. Its motion is unlike that of any living thing I know; puffing like a porpoise, breasting the waves like a sea-horse, and at times skimming the surface like a bird. It possesses the joint powers of the tenants of the air, land, and water, and is superior to them all.’ As the days passed, the ship clicked off daily runs never before achieved on a westward crossing. A new speed record seemed easily in reach.

The Sirius, nearly out of fuel, reached New York on 23 April. The Great Western came in only twelve hours later after a voyage of fifteen and a half days, the fastest crossing ever from England to America. Of her initial 660 tons of coal, she had 203 tons left in her bunkers – a reassuring margin of safety, for prospective customers, in the most doubted, uncertain aspect of transatlantic steam. The Great Western took sixty-six passengers on her trip back to Bristol. After losing almost £4000 on her first passage out and home, she made four more round-trips that year, turning small profits and lowering her own records in both directions. Already, at this early point, ocean travellers had begun to accept the modernist bargain of steam dangers and discomforts in exchange for consistent, unprecedented speed. In September the Great Western carried 131 passengers to New York and had to refuse 30 more for lack of space. This passage took sixteen days, nine hours – almost one day slower than her maiden, but still two weeks faster than a crack sailing packet.

The Great Western puffed back and forth across the ocean while the British Queen inched along towards completion. It was a surprising reversal of expected form, Bristol over London, the fading western port over the burgeoning urban colossus; so London, seeking an explanation, blamed Glasgow. During the spring and summer of 1839, partisans of the Thames and the Clyde engaged in a ferocious public debate about the practical wisdom of sending the British Queen north for her machinery. ‘Here we have a magnificent vessel dragged from the Thames to Glasgow, at great risk and expense, in search of engines,’ wrote a man from Cheapside in London. ‘All the world, except the sapient gentlemen connected with the “British Queen” are perfectly aware that London-made steam-engines (like most London-made goods) are decidedly the best… Our good friends, the Scotch, proverbially know how to pass off certain inferior birds “as swans”.’ In rebuttal, Robert Napier’s friends pointed out that he had been obliged to replace and reinforce much of the carpentry work installed by the British Queen’s southern shipwrights. Napier also had to lower the keelsons (heavy bracing timbers that ran parallel to the keel) by about six inches just to fit his taller machinery into the engine room. ‘The people in the North,’ said one rebutter, ‘…consider the London-built ships very light and flimsy; in proof of which, amongst many other improvements made in the British Queen at Port Glasgow, it was deemed absolutely necessary to strengthen her with several additional iron knees. It is notorious that steam and other ships can be built and fitted out, decorated, and finished, as expeditiously on the Clyde as on any other river in the world.’

These arguments drew on ancient, bitter rivalries between Glasgow and London, Scotland and England, North and South. British political and commercial power was centred in London, to the continuous irritation of the provinces. But Scotland could still claim a better educational system and an older, more eminent engineering tradition than the Thames – and the famous Scottish thrift. Clydeside builders paid lower wages and enjoyed closer, cheaper access to coal and iron than Londoners, which meant they could build steam engines less expensively. That introduced another element to the public debates: ‘the avarice or parsimoniousness of steam-boat companies,’ as one Clyde defender put it, ‘who, finding that their orders can generally be more cheaply executed by Scotch engineers than London ones, run to them, and instead of being liberal in their dealings, screw them down to contracts, not consistent either with good materials or workmanship.’ Such sharp practices, so this explanation ran, left Clyde engineers the unhappy choice of losing highstandard business or producing shoddy work at cut rates that harmed their reputations as engine builders.

The contest between the Great Western and the British Queen, overtly a race to dominate Atlantic steam, became an acrid showdown between the two main centres of British shipbuilding and marine engineering. With a lucrative market for transatlantic steamers just opening up, the outcome could have a decisive impact on the steam futures of London and Glasgow. ‘If our Scotch friends would puff their work less, and perform more, it would be more creditable to them,’ a shipping official in London suggested. After all, shipboard explosions of Glasgow boilers had caused far more deaths than accidents on London vessels; but perhaps – came the reply – that was just because the Clyde had produced so many more steamships than the Thames. ‘Let any one travel by the Thames river steamers,’ wrote a Scots enthusiast, ‘and then go and take a trip by the fleet, strong, and beautifully-built Clyde boats, and then say without prejudice which he prefers… No engineers in the world are more ably qualified for the just, cautious, and accurate execution or manufacture of marine steam-engines, than are the Scotch.’

Provincial rhetorics aside, the real-world proof of the matter lay in the ships themselves. The British Queen did replace her rival as the biggest, highest-powered steamship in the world: 275 feet long, 1863 tons, and an engine jacked up beyond its contracted size to 500 horsepower. Robert Napier sent the ship down to the Thames for final fittings before her maiden voyage; his cousin David Napier, who had moved to London, gave her a suspicious inspection. ‘They unfortunately let one of the boilers get dry while coming round, either carelessly or willingly,’ David informed Robert, hinting at possible Thamesian sabotage, ‘which has given the Cockneys another handle against Scotch engineers.’ The British Queen at last left for New York on 12 July 1839 (fifteen months after the Great Western’s maiden). Junius Smith and Macgregor Laird went along as her most interested passengers. Also aboard, and quite interested himself, was Samuel Cunard of Halifax, returning home from business in England, and by this time quite intent on developing his own steamers across the Atlantic.

Laird’s unpublished diary of the voyage, recently discovered and donated to the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, is a doleful litany of worries and discomforts. As the ship’s main designer, he felt the burden of responsibility for her performance. At midsummer the weather should have been as favourable as the westward run ever allowed. Instead the British Queen fought unusually strong opposing winds and currents, and Laird – famous for an earlier African river expedition, but normally an armchair sailor – spent most of the trip miserably seasick. For days he could eat nothing but brown biscuit; he envied the nine or ten women who lay supine in the ladies’ cabin, quaffing six expensive bottles of champagne a day to relieve their queasiness. Hopefully overestimating the ship’s speed, a proud father ever blind to his offspring’s limitations, Laird kept losing bets on the daily run. ‘Summer passage indeed!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s hard, very hard upon me – there she goes, pitch and toss! Talk of her being large! She is a plaything on the ocean.’

Seven days out, they were still not halfway across. ‘I’ll get nervous if we don’t go faster homewards, the only comfort I have is that the ship answers [her rudder] beautifully and is as easy as any slipper, all on board are loud in her praise.’ Even the large complement of paying passengers did not please him. Laird rather disapproved of the ship’s diverse company, which included Englishmen, Americans, Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, Portuguese, Russians and Poles, about 120 people in all, eating and jabbering loudly in strange tongues at dinner. Miserable, lonesome, and ever worried about his ship, Laird longed for home and dry land. ‘It being my duty I came, but certainly if I could get my living in any other way, than being connected with these passenger steamers, I would most thankfully do it. I am never well, thoroughly well on board ship – I don’t care for the talk and society of people I care nothing about and who care as little for me.’ In the final days, a more favourable wind helped the ship cruise at eleven knots. The British Queen reached New York after fourteen and a half days, excellent time by sailing standards but twenty-four hours worse than the Great Western’s latest record. ‘The public will look at the time only,’ Laird knew, ‘and not to all the circumstances of the voyage.’

A fairer test came at once, as both Atlantic steamships left New York for home on the first of August. The Great Western carried 59 passengers, the British Queen 103. Sailing at the same time, by similar routes, they encountered essentially identical winds and currents; no differing ‘circumstances’ would console the loser. This first true transatlantic steamship race, between the only two vessels yet designed and built for the North Atlantic trade, was keenly followed on both sides of the ocean. After a head start of forty-five minutes, the Great Western steadily lengthened her lead for most of the voyage. On the last two days, though, the British Queen— still breaking in her machinery – closed the gap rapidly and reached Portsmouth only about two hours after the Great Western came into Bristol on 14 August. The British Queen did set a new elapsed round-trip record of thirty-two days, twelve hours. Engineers from both the Thames and Clyde could find reasons to preen themselves.

Later voyages, however, proved that Smith and Laird had built a larger but slower vessel. ‘The British Queen was a fine ship,’ noted Sam Cunard, who was paying close attention, ‘but she had not power sufficient. ’ During the 1839 season, in three round-trips she averaged seventeen days, eight hours to New York and sixteen days, fourteen hours home. (The latter figure was skewed by an extended December voyage, hobbled by machinery breakdowns, of twenty-two days, twelve hours.) The Great Western in six round-trips beat her rival’s averages by twenty hours out and three days, five hours home. With a higher ratio of horsepower to tonnage, she showed more effective power against the wind, better sailing qualities with it, and the durability necessary for regular ocean crossing. ‘Is it not reasonable to conclude,’ offered a Londoner, ‘that the engineers of the Thames must be vastly superior to those of the Clyde?’

In the entrepreneurial contest over building and managing an Atlantic steamship, brunel and Bristol had beaten Smith and London. In the engineering battle of the rivals for transatlantic engine-building supremacy, the Thames had won the first round. Across this combined arena of enterprise and engineering, Glasgow – the founder and still centre of British steam navigation – had not much to brag about, as yet.