Marc Isambard Brunel

Marc Isambard Brunel, engraving by G. Metzeroth, circa 1880

Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, FRS (April 25, 1769 – December 12, 1849) was a French-born engineer who settled in the United Kingdom. He preferred the name Isambard, but is generally known to history as Marc to avoid confusion with his more famous son Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

The younger son of a farmer in Normandy, initially he was set to train for the priesthood, but had a more practical mind, and became a naval officer cadet instead. In 1793, after the French Revolution, he fled to the United States, becoming chief engineer of New York. In 1799 he moved to Britain, which presented greater opportunities for the development of mass-production machinery, and which was the home of his future wife Sophia Kingdom, whom he had met in France. His initial success was with a method for production of rigging blocks (pulleys) for the navy at the Portsmouth Block Mills - the first genuine industrial production line: (his collaborators included Samuel Bentham and Henry Maudslay).

He was a notable mechanical engineer, and did much to develop saw milling machinery, undertaking contracts for the British Government at Chatham and Woolwich dockyards, building on his experience at the Portsmouth Block Mills. He built himself a sawmill at Battersea, London (burnt down in 1814), and designed sawmills for entrepreneurs. He developed machinery for mass producing soldiers' boots, but before this could reach full production demand ceased due to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Brunel subsequently was bankrupted and served time in the King's Bench prison in Southwark.

a plaque commemorating the Brunels

His most notable achievement was the Thames Tunnel, which was built for horsedrawn traffic but due to bankruptcy was first used by pedestrians, and now carries the East London Line of the London Underground. In the construction of the tunnel he pioneered the use of the tunnelling shield, a moving framework which protected workers from tunnel collapses when working in water-bearing ground. The shield was designed by his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and built by Maudslays who also supplied the steam pumps. The tunnel was authorised by Parliament in 1824, and started in 1825, but due to technical and financial difficulties was not opened until 1843. He was knighted for his contribution to engineering in 1841 and had been made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1814. Like his son, he is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London.

External links

*Biography

References

*Jonathan Coad, The Portsmouth Block Mills : Bentham, Brunel and the start of the Royal Navy's Industrial Revolution, 2005, ISBN 1873592876
*Harold Bagust, The Greater Genius? A Biography of Marc Isambard Brunel, 2006, ISBN 0711031754