Today, the Thames Tunnel. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
In 1799 the great French
engineer Marc Brunel moved to England. He was as
grandiose a developer as he was an engineer. His
various money-making schemes collapsed in 1821, and
he was sent off to debtors' prison. But the Duke of
Wellington got him out. England needed his
services.
Brunel bounced back, immediately getting into a
huge variety of projects. In 1824, he formed a
company to undertake the grandest project of them
all -- a horse-carriage tunnel under the Thames
River. That may not sound like much today; but
tunneling under a large river was a truly radical
notion two centuries ago.
The next year, Marc Brunel put his son Isambard
Kingdom Brunel in charge of operations. (Kingdom
was the maiden name of Marc's wife). Isambard was a
nineteen-year-old mechanical prodigy who worked
like a demon -- both at the tunneling and at
publicizing it.
Father Marc invented the first tunneling shield --
an iron structure with thirty-six one-man chambers
in it. This shield was driven into the earth as
workers dug their way forward, and others followed,
building the masonry supports for the tunnel.
By the time Isambard reached his 21st birthday,
three hundred feet of tunnel were finished, and he
threw himself a great birthday party under the
river. By then seven hundred visitors a day paid a
small fee to walk in the tunnel as the work went
on. All the while, leakage was increasing. Marc
furrowed his brow and said, "May [disaster not
occur] when the arch is full of visitors." Finally
water leakage killed one worker, and it halted the
work.
Repairs were made, and the public-relations blitz
continued. Marc Brunel held a concert in the tunnel
that November, taking pains to praise the
acoustics. The clarinet sounded especially nice. He
also staged a banquet in the tunnel for fifty
notables and 120 miners. This time, Coldstream
Guards provided the music.
Then, the next April, water burst in. Six people
died, and Isambard was badly hurt. That ended the
digging for seven years, but it didn't kill the
project. Isambard went down in the diving-bell used
to repair the breach. And he boated visitors
through the flooded tunnel -- his River Styx. On
one of those trips, he nearly drowned Napoleon
Bonaparte's nephew Charles, who couldn't swim.
The tunnel was finally drained, and it was finished
in 1843. Queen Victoria walked through it, and then
she knighted Mark Brunel. But it never did open to
horse traffic. Instead, it became a somewhat
dubious pedestrian crossing.
Only in 1860, long after Marc was gone, and the
year after Isambard had also died of exhaustion at
the age of 53 -- only then did rail interests buy
the tunnel and make it a part of the London
underground. And so it remains today. Isambard did
much more. He became the prototypical Victorian
engineer -- a heroic artist in iron. But
if the ghosts of father and son live
anywhere, it can only be here -- down below the
turbid waters of the Thames River.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
J. Pudney, Brunel and His World. London:
Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1974.
For more on the Brunels see Episodes 1405, 1473, 1402, and 229.
