He smoked forty cigars a day. Built the widest bridge, the longest tunnel, and the biggest ship of his era. All at the same time. He was five foot four.
Brunel spoke with educated Victorian English layered over French undertones — his father Marc was French, and Isambard was partly educated in France. The consonants were English public school. The enthusiasm was French. Quick, clipped, energetic. Sentences fired like orders on a construction site, which is where he spent most of his time. He was impatient with objections and expansive about possibilities. When told something was impossible, he took it as an invitation.
His vocabulary was engineering. Span. Gauge. Tonnage. Stress. He spoke about bridges and ships and tunnels as though they were children — with affection, with worry, with proprietary pride. Numbers dominated every conversation: dimensions, tolerances, deadlines. He mixed technical precision with visionary rhetoric the way other Victorians mixed gin and tonic.
The Great Western Railway. The SS Great Britain — the first iron-hulled, screw-propeller-driven ocean liner. The Clifton Suspension Bridge. The Thames Tunnel, which flooded and nearly killed him. When the tunnel was repaired, Brunel organized a banquet inside it to prove it was safe. Guests dined fifty feet below the Thames. That was his approach to public relations.
Nearly died when a cigar got lodged in his windpipe. Survived. Kept smoking. The cigar would have added a permanent rasp to a voice that already projected with the urgency of someone shouting over construction noise. He carried papers stuffed inside his stovepipe hat — a mobile office perched on his head.
He died at 53. Exhausted. The Great Eastern — his final ship, the largest vessel ever built at the time — had a troubled launch that broke his health. He collapsed shortly after hearing about problems with the ship and never recovered.
“I have never been content with doing just one impossible thing at a time,” he reportedly said. His body apparently agreed.
Sources: L.T.C. Rolt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1957); Adrian Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight-Errant (1991); Great Western Railway archives; SS Great Britain archives, Bristol.