Yes indeed a great engineer:
There can be no greater tribute to Britain’s most inventive engineer,
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, born 200 years ago tomorrow, than the fact
that so much of what he created is still in everyday use. When
travellers catch the train to Heathrow they leave London under the
great roof of his Paddington Station. If they head for Bristol on the
Great Western line, still one of the country’s fastest, they travel
over his bridges, through his tunnels and arrive at his Temple Meads
station. When travellers cross under the Thames on the tube in east
London they do so through a tunnel he engineered (and in which he
nearly drowned when the river flooded in). His Clifton bridge in
Bristol and Saltash bridge into Cornwall are both still busy and among
the nation’s most spectacular.
Although, although. I remember walking along the Kennet and Avon canal, going from Bath to Bradford on Avon, with my father, an engineer. At times you go alongside his Great Western line (Brunel’s that is, of course). I said something about how great he was because he built the bridges for 200 tonne trains and now they were used by 2,000 tonne ones and they hadn’t had to be changed. Wasn’t that great!
Err, no, not really came the reply. It actually shows how wasteful an engineer he was. He either grossly over-specified or didn’t actually know how to calculate the tolerances properly. A truly great engineer would have built then only just strong enough for what they were planned to carry.
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