Transcript
Introduction
A century is a brief span as a historian measures time. Between 1760 and 1860, a small group of men transformed the face of England and brought about an economic and social upheaval so vast that the life of no single person in this country remained unaffected by it. They set in motion a process of rapid technical evolution that still continues. Of this small group of men whose lives had such prodigious consequences, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was perhaps the outstanding personality.
He has a statue in marble. Every boy's railway book refers to him. You may have seen his name engraved upon that great bridge. We may know of him as the overambitious author of the broad gauge or of that premature giant among ships, the Great Eastern. Perhaps we only remember him by virtue of the evocative overtones of that remarkable name. A name in which all the pride and self-confidence of an era seems to wring out like a brazen challenge.
What sort of man was this Brunel? That is the question which this book tries to answer. Although I've always admired Brunel's work, my inquiry was inspired by curiosity and not by hero worship. But the further I went, the clear did it seem to me that large though the achievement was the man was larger still. Brunel, in fact, was more than a great engineer.
He was an artist and a visionary, a great man with a strangely magnetic personality, which uniquely distinguished him, even in that age of powerful individualism in which he moved. To learn something about such a man, about his private thoughts, his hopes and ambitions, and about the spirit, which drove him, is to know about the sources from which the greatest of all revolutions derived its dynamic strength.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the definitive biography of the engineer, visionary in Great Britain, and was written all the way back in 1957 by L.T.C. Rolt. So before I jump back into the book, I just want to tell you where I got the idea to read a biography on Brunel. Last week, I read -- I re-read the autobiography of James Dyson.