Isambard Kingdom Brunel

The greatest engineer of his age, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), accomplished works that others refused to contemplate: The Clifton suspension bridge over the Avon gorge at Bristol; the tunnel through almost two miles of solid rock at Box in Wiltshire; the first ship to be built completely of iron; and the precision with which his great bridge over the Tamar was assembled. He did have his failures, however, such as the atmospheric railway, in which his plans were thwarted by the limitations of nineteenth-century technology. However, his life was dogged by tragedy and near disaster, from his narrow escape from death when the water burst into the Thames tunnel he was building, to the heartbreaking problems of the Great Eastern. He died, saddened, before his great ship proved its worth, before the Clifton bridge was completed, in every sense a man who lived before his time.