American Scientist

One of the early columns in this series was devoted to the achievements of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (see Engineering, American Scientist, January–February 1992), perhaps the most well known and most frequently lionized, if not canonized, of British Victorian engineers. As related in that column, Brunel's career culminated in the troubled, embarrassing and ambiguous achievement of the Great Eastern steamship, the leviathan that took months to launch but that in time successfully laid the Atlantic cable. Among the reasons that the saga of the Great Eastern was so wrenching for Brunel and others involved in the technologically daring and financially devastating enterprise was the strained relationship between Brunel, the conceiver and chief engineer of the ship, and John Scott Russell, its naval architect.