In the life of Thomas Telford, we have another striking instance of a man who, by the force of natural talent, unaided save by uprightness and persevering industry, raised himself from low estate to take his stand among the master-spirits of the age. He was born in 1757, in Dumfriesshire, sent to the parish-school, and employed as a shepherd-boy; in his leisure, delighted to read the books lent him by his village friends. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a stone-mason, and for several years worked on bridges and stone-buildings, village-churches, and manses, in his native district. In 1780 he went to Edinburgh, and for two years closely attended to architecture and drawing. He then removed to London, and worked upon the quadrangle of Somerset House, under Sir William Chambers, as architect. His next practice was in the construction of graving-docks, wharf-walls, and similar engineering works; and he built above forty bridges in Shropshire. His greatest works are, the Ellesmere Canal, 103 miles in length, with its wonderful aqueduct-bridges; the Caledonian Canal, which cost a million of money; the Bedford Level, and other important drainage works; 1000 miles of Highland roads and 1200 bridges; St. Katherine’s Docks, London, constructed with unexampled rapidity; and the great road from London to Holyhead, and the works connected with it. The Menai Suspension Bridge is a noble example of his boldness in designing, and practical skill in executing a novel and difficult work; and it is related of him that, just previous to the fixing of the last bar, he knelt in private prayer to the Giver of all good for the successful completion of the great work. Telford left an account of his labours of more than half a century; yet he found time to teach himself Latin, French, Italian, and German. He was the first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, in whose theatre is a noble portrait of him; and in Westminster Abbey, where he is interred, is a marble statue of the Eskdale shepherd-boy, whose works, in number, magnitude, and usefulness, are unrivalled.
John Rennie, who designed three of the noblest bridges in the world, in addition to other great engineering works, was born in 1761, in the county of East Lothian. He learned his first lessons in mechanics in the workshop of a millwright; before he was eleven years old he had constructed a windmill, a pile-engine, and a steam-engine; he next learned elementary mathematics and mechanics, and drawing machinery and architecture, and attended lectures on mechanical philosophy and chemistry. His greatest works are the Plymouth Breakwater; Waterloo, Southwark, and London bridges; the London, East and West India Docks; and great steam-engines; his principal undertakings having cost forty millions sterling. He was rarely occupied in business less than twelve hours a day; he seldom illustrated his information with any other instrument than a two-foot rule, which he always carried in his pocket. He owed his good fortune to talent, industry, prudence, perseverance, boldness of conception, soundness of judgment, and habits of untiring application: his works were indeed executed for posterity.
Sir Edward Banks, who built Rennie’s three stupendous bridges, was a labourer at Chipstead on the Merstham railway, some sixty years since: by his own natural abilities, which had not been cultivated to any extent, and by his integrity and perseverance, he became contractor for public works, and acquired great wealth: and it shows the simplicity of his nature, that, struck with the retired picturesqueness of Chipstead churchyard, he chose it for the depository of his remains, where the tablet to his memory bears his bust, and an arch and the three great bridges,—the goal of his remarkable career.
The history of the life of the elder Brunel is strangely tinged with romance. He was born in Normandy in 1769, was early intended for the priesthood; but when at the college of Gisors, he would steal away to the village carpenter’s shop, and draw faces and plans, and learn to handle tools; and one day, seeing a new tool in a cutler’s window, he pawned his hat to purchase it. He was next sent to the ecclesiastical seminary of St. Nicaise at Rouen; there, in his play-hours, he loved to watch the ships along the quay; and seeing some large iron castings landed from an English ship, he inquired, Where had they come from? and on being told from England, the boy exclaimed, “Ah, when I am a man, I will go and see the country where such grand machines are made.” On his return home, he continued his mechanical recreations; made musical instruments; and invented a nightcap-making machine, which is still used by the peasantry in that part of Normandy. His father now gave up all hope of his son for the priesthood, and had him qualified to enter the navy, and at seventeen he was nominated to a royal corvette; but while serving there he continued his mechanical pursuits, and made for himself a quadrant in ebony. His ship having been paid off in 1792, Brunel went to Paris, where he nearly fell a victim to the fury of the Revolution; but he escaped to Rouen, and thence fled to the United States, where he landed in 1793. While at New York, the idea of his block-machinery occurred to him. He now executed canal surveys, and designed the Park Theatre, and superintended its erection; he was next appointed chief engineer for New York, and there erected a cannon-foundry, with novel contrivances for casting and boring guns. He left New York in January 1799, and landed at Falmouth in the following March: there he met his early love, Sophia Kingdom, and the pair were shortly after united for life.
Brunel brought with him to England a duplicate writing and drawing machine; a machine for twisting cotton-thread and forming it into balls; a machine for trimmings and borders for muslins, lawns, and cambrics. The famous block-machinery was Brunel’s next invention; then various wood-working machinery, and machines for manufacturing shoes; and next the Battersea saw-mills; but the failure of the two latter speculations brought Brunel into difficulties, from which he was extricated by a government grant of 5000l., in consideration of the savings by the use of his block-machinery. He then improved the stocking-knitting machine and steam-engine; metallic paper and crystallised tinfoil; improvements in stereotyping and the treadmill. In engineering, he designed suspension, swing, and other bridges, and machines for boring cannon. He next experimented with a boat on the Thames, fitted with a double-action engine, and made his first voyage in it to Margate in 1814, when he narrowly escaped personal violence from the proprietors of the sailing-boats. Marine engines and paddle-wheels were next improved by Brunel; and these were followed by his carbonic-acid gas engine, which proved too costly a machine. Then came the crowning event of his life, the construction of the Thames Tunnel, taking the idea of his excavating-machine from the boring operations of the Teredo navalis. In this formidable work he was assisted by his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, then only nineteen years of age; and after most perilous operations, the tunnel was completed, and opened March 25th, 1843. This was the engineer’s last work: as a commercial adventure it proved disastrous, which preyed on the mind of Brunel; though he lived six years longer, until he had attained his 81st year.
The younger Brunel’s first great work was the Clifton Suspension Bridge, followed by docks at Bristol and Sunderland, and several colliery tramways. In 1835, he was appointed engineer of the Great Western Railway, being then only about twenty-eight years of age, but skilful and ingenious, and anxious to strike out an entirely new course in railway engineering. He adopted the broad-gauge, then a great and novel enterprise, but now ascertained to be unnecessary: the works were unusually costly, and so novel that the line was called the Grand Experimental Railway; while it rendered Brunel famous as a railway engineer. He next attempted the atmospheric principle; but this proved unsuccessful, and the loss exceeded half a million of money. His last and greatest railway engineering achievements were his “bowstring-girder” bridges at Chepstow and Saltash: the latter has two wrought-iron tubes, each weighing upwards of 1000 tons, and the viaduct and bridge are nearly half a mile, or 300 feet longer than the Britannia bridge. The central Saltash pier foundations, upon solid rock, 90 feet below the surface of the river, were laid within a wrought-iron cylinder 37 feet in diameter and 100 feet high, and the whole work involved six years’ toil, anxiety, and peril.
Next, Brunel devised an iron-plated armed ship capable of withstanding the fire of the Sebastopol forts; but his grand triumphs as a naval engineer were, the Great Western, steam-ship, propelled by paddle-wheels; and the Great Britain, propelled by a screw; but these were thrown into the shade by his Great Eastern, combining the powers of the paddle-wheel and the screw; and which, with the aid of Mr. Scott Russell, its builder, was completed and launched,—the largest ship that has ever floated. But this stupendous labour had undermined Mr. Brunel’s health; he was seized with paralysis, and died at the comparatively early age of fifty-three.[[100]]
Of Brunel’s great engineering skill there can be no question; he loved difficulties and engineering perils: he has been styled “the Michael Angelo of Railways;” and his victory in “the Battle of the Gauges” gained him extraordinary prominence in the railway world. His ruling passion was magnitude, without regard to cost: “he was the very Napoleon of engineers, thinking more of glory than of profit, and of victory than of dividends.” Capitalists subscribed to his projects freely, and he put his own savings into the same risks; if shareholders suffered, he suffered with them; and it must be conceded that both railway travelling and steam navigation have been greatly advanced by the speculative ability of Mr. Brunel’s Titanic labours.
The career of Joseph Locke, civil engineer, though less brilliant than that of Brunel, was one of more sterling worth. He was born in Yorkshire, in 1805, the son of a fellow-workman with George Stephenson at the pit. Locke had little schooling, and failing in two or three humble services, at the age of nineteen he became George Stephenson’s pupil, and then his assistant, taking charge of the survey of railway lines; he was appointed engineer-in-chief of the Grand Junction and South-Western lines; and next initiated the Continental Railway system, promoting the rapid communication between London and Paris. He was made a chevalier and officer of the Legion of Honour, and sat in the British Parliament for Honiton. He died at the early age of fifty-five, leaving great wealth to his widow (a daughter of Mr. M‘Creery, the literary printer), to form in the North a public park, and found a scholarship.
The high celebrity of Mr. Locke was not due to the fact of his making railways. It was, that he made them within the estimated cost,—an achievement which would sooner or later have been attained by the ordinary operations of capital. The Grand Junction Railway was eventually constructed for a sum within the estimate, and at an average cost of less than 15,000l. a mile. The heavy works on the Caledonian line were completed at less than 16,000l. a mile. This economical success was in a great measure owing to the adoption of a bold system of steep gradients—an expedient which Stephenson, it appears, disliked to the last, and which was a prevailing feature in his active rival’s designs. Locke hated a tunnel, and with embankments and inclines would encounter any difficulty.[[101]]