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1 The 'Great Eastern' By Shane Winser Last updated Isambard Kingdom Brunel In his stove-pipe hat, with his cigar always in his mouth and mud-caked shoes and trousers, Brunel gave everything to his work. He designed and built over 1,000 miles of railway, including numerous tunnels and stations. He also built over 125 bridges, and three groundbreaking ships - to designs far ahead of their time. Among his creations were Paddington Station, the Great Western Railway, the Thames Tunnel, the Royal Albert Bridge, Bristol Docks. His influence in engineering is unparalleled. After the collapse of railway mania in the late 1840s, Brunel turned his interest to long-distance travel, and in 1851 the first sketches of what was to become the SS Great Eastern appeared in his notebooks. The ship was designed to carry goods and people to India and Australia, without stopping for fuel. It would be the biggest ship the world had ever seen. Twice the length and five times the weight of any previous ship, it would be the largest moveable object man had ever created. It was designed like a bridge beam, with innovative cellular construction and transverse bulkheads, and would have both a screw propeller and giant paddles powered by the cast-iron steam engines. Most importantly, the ship's hull would be built completely of wrought iron. It was first proposed to the Eastern Steam Navigation Company in 1852 by Brunel's partner on the project, the shipbuilder John Scott Russell. The two men had worked together on committees in connection with the Great Exhibition in 1851, and it's known that at the outset they had a high regard for each other. Brunel usually had complete control of his projects - from the promotion to the design and management. However, Brunel's and Scott Russell's roles on this project were never clearly defined, and this caused severe conflict between them. Brunel felt he should review and approve each aspect of the ship's design and construction, whilst Scott Russell, as an established shipbuilder, expected some latitude in both design and construction.

2 By 1852, Brunel was probably aware he was facing a serious kidney disease, and hoped that the Great Eastern would be his crowning achievement. This made him particularly sensitive about being credited with the concept and design of the ship. There was considerable scepticism in the press, however, about its viability, and a war of words about who should take the credit for its design. This also caused tension between the two men. Double Hull Construction The most significant and original engineering feature of the Great Eastern was the concept of the double hull - essentially the application of the cellular system of girder construction to the structure of a ship. The Great Eastern had two hulls, one inside the other, 2ft 10in apart and heavily braced. Each hull plate was shaped by means of hand operated rolls and was cut by steam operated shears, all in accordance with wooden patterns taken from lines that in their turn were taken from a wooden model of the hull. Every plate was marked and numbered on the model. A boy painted the positions of the rivet holes, using another template, and the holes were made by a steam punch. Each plate was then transported on a bogie to the site, where it had to be lifted by primitive block and tackle to its position, clamped or bolted in place, then hand riveted. Each hull plate was fixed alternately overlapping the adjacent plate. This innovation was known as 'in and out' strakes. The transverse bulkheads and inner skin were fitted first, then the longitudinal ones, and the webs to which the outer skin was riveted. The ship was built entirely with single riveting and double riveting, with two sizes of angle iron and two thicknesses of plate. The Riveters The ship required three million rivets, each an inch thick, all driven by hand by 200 rivet gangs. Each riveting squad had five members - two riveters, one 'holder-on' and two boys ('bash-boys' - one to heat the rivets, the other to insert them into the hole). While the outer skin was being riveted, the 'holder-on' and his boy were often passing whole days or weeks in the confined space between the hulls, with little light other than that from a candle, and enduring the deafening thunder of 400 riveters' hammers, twelve hours a day, six days a week.

3 Working on the site was dangerous, and during construction several workers fell to their deaths. One workboy fell head-first from the structure, and was impaled on a standing iron bar. 'After he was dead, his body quivered for some time' said a witness. Another casualty was a visitor, who, 'in prying about, was bending over the head of a pile, when the monkey came down, flattening his head'. Technical Specification The length of the Great Eastern was 680ft, with a breadth of 120ft over the paddle wheels. Its gross tonnage was 18,914 tons, whilst its displacement was over 27,000 tonnes. The nominal horsepower of the paddle-wheel engines was 1,000, and the screw engines generated 1,600hp. The paddle-wheels were 56ft in diameter, and 13ft wide. The four-bladed screw propeller was made of cast iron, 24ft in diameter, with a 37ft pitch, and it weighed 36 tons. When both were operating the ship moved at approximately 12 knots. Apart form the innovation of the double hull, the other extraordinary feature of this design was the degree of standardisation that Brunel achieved. Standard plate sizes and thicknesses (1in, 3/4in, 1/2in), bar sizes (4in x 4in by 5/8in), rivet diameters (7/8in) and fixing arrangements (single rivet seams, double rivet butts) were used throughout. No ship of comparable size has been built of so few standard elements. Despite the increase in structural weight that such standardisation generally implies, the ratio of hull structure weight to displacement was less than a quarter. The Launch Against all advice, the 'Great Ship' was designed by Brunel to be launched sideways on iron rails into the Thames: 'Men and women of all classes were joined together in one amicable pilgrimage to the East, for on that day at some hour unknown, the Leviathan was to be launched at Millwall... For two years, London - and we may add the people of England - had been kept in expectation of the advent of this gigantic experiment, and their excitement and determination to be present at any cost are not to be wondered at when we consider what a splendid chance presented itself of a fearful catastrophe...' Extract from The Times, 4 November 1857

4 Just after noon, there was a cry of 'She moves, she moves'. The multiplying winch that was to control the launch spun out of control, throwing the men operating it into the air. John Donovan, aged 74, died from severe internal injuries, and a further four men were injured. The ship had moved just three feet. Brunel was publicly humiliated. John Scott Russells' view was that: '... the ship slid a few feet until the lubricating stuff was rubbed off, and then the rails simply bit one another as the wheels of a locomotive engine bite the rails, and then held the ship firmly in place: so firmly that not only was the inclination of 1 in 12 with the whole weight of 12,000 tons of ship on it unable to move it down the inclined plane.' Three months later, on 31 January 1858, having used numerous hydraulic rams to push the Leviathan to the shore line, the high tide floated the iron hull into the Thames. The cost of the launch was 120,000, and for the remainder of the completion of the ship, Brunel took no fees and met the salaries of the men from his own pocket. Nearly 750,000 had been spent on an iron hull containing incomplete machinery, and there was no money left to fit it out. The Ship's Lounge Originally designed for the India and Far East route, the Great Eastern could hold up to 4,000 passengers. However, financial pressures meant that the ship was instead first used for the transatlantic run. This didn't prove to be a success, as the ship couldn't compete with the smaller and faster ships of the other companies. The later opening of the Suez Canal was to prove another disaster for the ship, which was too big to use it. The Great Eastern was then converted into a cable layer, and worked in this capacity for a number of years before becoming a tourist attraction in Liverpool. Completion of the ship and Maiden Voyage On 8 September, following frantic last-minute preparations, thegreat Easternstarted its maiden voyage to Holyhead, but there was another disaster just four days later. As the ship steamed along the south coast, an explosion destroyed the forward funnel and filled the boiler room with scalding steam. Five stokers were killed and many others were injured. Having collapsed from a stroke just before the ship left London, Isambard Kingdom Brunel lay ill at his home in Duke Street. The disastrous news about his greatest engineering achievement was relayed to him and he died just three days later on 15 September Although Scott Russell came under suspicion, a later inquest at Weymouth failed to apportion blame, and found only that the cause of the explosion was a stopcock mistakenly closed during the testing of the engines.

5 The Trans Atlantic Cable During the first five years after the ship was launched, the Great Eastern did not find enough passengers to take to either Australia or the Americas. Failure of commercial ventures forced the company to liquidate, and on 14 January 1864 the ship was put up for sale, but no purchaser could be found at auction. In April 1864 the ship was then chartered to the Telegraph Construction Company, for the purpose of laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable. The Great Eastern was the only ship big enough to take the length of cable required for this huge operation, and it took five months just to load it. The first voyage of the new venture took place on 14 July After several mishaps involving lost and broken cables, the transatlantic cable linking Europe to America was completed on 1 September Breaking Up At the end of its days, in August 1888, having been used as a fairground and advertising hoarding, the fate of the Great Eastern was sealed when it was sold for scrap. Deconstruction work on the ship started on 1 January 1889, on the banks of the Mersey. Taking the iron hull apart was a matter of brute force, and over the next two years men chiselled, levered and hammered its plates apart until there was nothing left. The destruction of the ship gave birth to the macabre legend that two skeletons, the remains of a riveter and his bash-boy, were found inside the sealed double bottomed hull. At the time it was thought that perhaps it had been the souls of these poor unfortunates that had cursed the great ship with so much bad luck.