Текст 2. Marc Brunel – British Engineering Genius

Marc Brunel – British Engineering Genius

Marc Isambard Brunel (1769 - 1849) was born near Rouen in northern France, and as an 11-year-old he had already decided he was going to be an engineer. By the age of 24 he had completed six years in the French navy. But France was at that time caught up in the throes of revolution, and Marc Brunel was a royalist. He had to leave.

So, he sailed away to the United States, becoming chief engineer of New York City. His projects there included building the old Bowery Theater (the largest theatre in North America at that time) and many other buildings, including an arsenal, and a foundry for cannon. He was also responsible for improvements to the channel between Staten Island and Long Island, and a canal between Lake Champlain and the Hudson River.

He went to England in 1799 with plans for mechanising the manufacture of pulley-blocks for ships, which until then had been made by hand. The British government accepted his plans, and he installed machines of his design in the Portsmouth Naval Dockyard. These machine-made blocks were not only ten times more efficiently produced than the hand-made ones, but were of a much higher and more consistent quality.

In 1809, Marc Brunel was so horrified at the condition of the feet of soldiers returning from war that he decided to invent a series of machines to mass-produce boots and shoes. He filed a patent in 1810, and this was so successful that in 1812 he was persuaded by the government to expand production. At this time he decided to take out a patent in Scotland as well.

A prolific inventor, he also invented machines for sawing timber; for knitting stockings; and for printing. But in 1814, his sawmills at Battersea, London, were nearly destroyed by fire. This incident, coming on top of poor financial management by his partners, drove him into debt and in 1821 he found himself locked up in the debtors' prison. He managed, with the help of friends, to secure his release several months later.

At the beginning of the 19th Century London was a bustling city with a number of bridges spanning the River Thames. However, another crossing was needed to enable people to commute from the south side to the Port of London at Wapping on the north bank. A bridge at this point would have interfered with the busy shipping traffic, so various attempts were made to construct a tunnel. Early attempts in 1801 and 1807 failed, however, because there was no means of tunnelling through the water-bearing sand strata below the river bed. Expert engineering opinion at the time was that tunnelling under the Thames was impossible.

But not to Marc Brunel.In 1818, he designed and patented a huge device called a Tunnel Shield. In essence, it was a cylinder pushed ahead of the tunnelling equipment, to provide advance support for the tunnel roof. Something like this was needed when tunnelling in soft or unstable ground. The shield was pushed forward by hydraulic jacks, about four inches at a time. While the iron shield held up the wet sandy muck, workers lined the tunnel walls with brick.

Work on the tunnel began in 1825. It started at Rotherhithe, on the south bank, and Marc Brunel laid the first brick himself, the second being laid by his 19-year-old son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The design of the tunnel was to allow two carriages and a footpath. But construction was slow. Each foot of tunnel required 5500 bricks to be laid. On several occasions the works were flooded, and on one of these seven workers were drowned, and young Isambard himself was nearly drowned in the waters (the River Thames at that time was an open sewer). Isambard saved the lives of several men but was seriously injured himself.

During the period 1828-1835, all work on the tunnel was halted because the money had run out. Further financial aid was obtained from the government, however, and finally on March 25, 1843, the 1300 feet long and 35 feet wide tunnel was opened. There were insufficient funds available to build the ramps needed for carriages, in accordance with Marc Brunel's original design, so it opened as a foot tunnel, charging a small toll. About 50, 000 people walked through the tunnel during the first two days of operation, and more than one million used it in the first four months.

But it was not a particularly pleasant experience. As the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1855: It consisted of an arched corridor of apparently interminable length, gloomily lighted with jets of gas at regular intervals... There are people who spend their lives there, seldom or never, I presume, seeing any daylight, except perhaps a little in the morning. All along the extent of this corridor, in little alcoves, there are stalls of shops, kept principally by women, who, as you approach, are seen through the dusk offering for sale multifarious trumpery. So far as any present use is concerned, the tunnel is an entire failure.

The tunnel was later adapted for railway use, and remains to this day as an important part of the East London Line on the London Underground system. It is a measure of the quality of the original construction that no major refurbishment was needed until the 1990s, some 150 years since the tunnel first opened.

It was the first tunnel ever constructed beneath a navigable river for public use. It is considered the greatest of Marc Brunel's many great achievements, and Sir Marc was knighted in 1841.

Ответьте на вопросы по тексту:

1. Where was Marc Brunel born?

2. Why did Brunel leave France?

3. What were his projects in the USA?

4. Why did Brunel decide to mechanize the manufacture of pulley-blocks for ships?

5. What machines did Brunel invent?

6. When did he design a Tunnel Shield?

7. How many people did walk through the tunnel during the first two days of operation?