Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Iron, Steam, Empire (Audiobook)

In January 1828, the Thames burst through the roof of the tunnel Isambard Kingdom Brunel was digging beneath it. Workmen drowned in the dark. Brunel, twenty-one years old and the resident engineer of his father's impossible project, was swept to the foot of the shaft and pulled out more dead than alive. He went to Bristol to recover — and Bristol changed everything. The convalescent entered a design competition for a bridge across the Avon Gorge, won it at twenty-four, and began the career that would rebuild Britain in iron.

In this sweeping audiobook biography — 10 chapters, more than 100,000 words, 10 hours 35 minutes of listening — you will meet the engineer's son who at twenty-seven took charge of the Great Western Railway and staked his name on a broad gauge of seven feet and a quarter, on the longest tunnel in the world and the flattest brick arches ever built. The ships that made him immortal: the Great Western, first steamship built for the Atlantic crossing; the Great Britain, the first iron-hulled, screw-driven ocean liner; and the Great Eastern, six times larger than anything afloat — so vast she stuck fast at her own launch, ruined her backers, and outlived her maker to lay the cable that finally wired the world together.

The honest failures are here too, chief among them the atmospheric railway, the boldest gamble of his life, which Brunel himself advised abandoning when it failed. And the quiet triumph: the prefabricated hospital he designed in weeks for the Crimea, where the dying nearly stopped. The disputed stories are told with both sides in view — the tunnelling shield credited to his father Marc, the Box Tunnel sunrise told as the legend it is.

He worked himself to death at fifty-three, days after a stroke aboard his great ship, with the Royal Albert Bridge opened and the Clifton bridge still unfinished — the bridge they completed five years later as his memorial. In 2002 the British public voted him the second-greatest Briton who ever lived, behind only Churchill. This is the life that earned it.

Inside this biography:

Chapter 1: The Engineer's Son (1806–1825)

Chapter 2: Down in the River (1825–1831)

Chapter 3: The Clifton Leap (1831–1835)

Chapter 4: Seven Feet and a Quarter (1835–1841)

Chapter 5: Ships of Iron and Steam (1836–1845)

Chapter 6: The Atmospheric Gamble (1844–1848)

Chapter 7: Hospitals and High Water (1849–1855)

Chapter 8: The Leviathan (1854–1858)

Chapter 9: The Last Crossing (1859)

Chapter 10: The Colossus Remembered (1859–Today)

Format: MP3 audiobook, delivered as chapter files, yours to keep and listen anywhere. From Bedtime Biographies — the library of more than one hundred full-length lives, told for modern listeners.