Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Nearly drowned in his first tunnel and went on to build railways, bridges and the biggest ships afloat
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the son of Marc Brunel, a French engineer who had fled the Revolution. At 20 he was working on his father's tunnel under the Thames, the first ever dug beneath a navigable river, when the river broke in. Six men drowned and Isambard was pulled out badly injured. He spent months recovering, and while he did, he entered a competition to design a bridge across the Avon Gorge at Clifton. He won, though the bridge was not finished until after his death.
At 27 he became chief engineer of the Great Western Railway from London to Bristol. He surveyed the route himself on horseback, chose a broad gauge of seven feet because it gave a smoother, faster ride, and drove the Box Tunnel nearly two miles through hillside. Rivals called the broad gauge a folly and it was eventually abandoned, but the line he built is still one of the straightest and flattest in Britain.
Then he decided the railway should continue to New York. The Great Western of 1838 proved a steamship could cross the Atlantic with fuel to spare. The Great Britain of 1843 was the first large iron ship with a screw propeller. The Great Eastern of 1858 was five times bigger than anything afloat and nearly ruined him and everyone connected with it.
He worked eighteen-hour days, smoked constantly and died of a stroke at 53, days after the Great Eastern's first voyage.