Badasses Of History: Isambard Kingdom Brunel, And The Breguet Connection

The "Second Greatest Briton Of All Time" has some surprising connections to horology.

In today's installment of Badasses Of History 😀it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of Britain's greatest engineers, and stovepipe hat aficionado (Brunel was short of stature and suffered very much from insecurity about his height, which sadly dogged him all his life. You wonder how he would have felt about being chosen as the second greatest Briton of all time, in a BBC reader’s poll).

Brunel received a rigorous early education in physics and mathematics thanks to his father, Sir Marc Brunel, who sent him to France for his studies when IK Brunel was 14. The young Brunel’s teach noted the teenager’s impressive head for numbers and Rhian Tritton, director of the Brunel Museum, told the BBC, “As a boy Brunel could already do very complex calculations and technical drawings.”

Sir Marc was a brilliant engineer in his own right but the son even surpassed the father. IK Brunel is known for many spectacular engineering achievements too numerous to list, but here are a few. Brunel founded the Great Western Railway (1835) which was responsible for the first synchronization of local times into one standard time – in 1840 Great Western adopted Greenwich Mean Time across its network, and by 1855, 98% of British towns and cities had adopted GMT as standard time (before the establishment of railway time, the various railroads used to publish tables for stations along different routes showing how to reset to local time as you traveled). He oversaw the completion of the Thames Tunnel, begun by his father, which was the first underwater tunnel (1843) and which was called when it opened, the Eighth Wonder Of The World. He was, famously, the builder a series of increasingly large steamships culminating in SS Great Eastern, a single screw double paddle wheel iron hulled vessel which at the time of her launching in 1858 was the largest ship ever built. SS Great Eastern would go on to become the first ship to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable, in 1866.

Lithograph of SS Great Eastern at her launch

Through a series of associative jumps on the Internet while unable to sleep one night, I discovered some fascinating links between Brunel and the history of horology, including the fact that he apprenticed for a year with none other than Breguet in 1822. Breguet apparently though highly of Brunel and found occasion to praise him lavishly in letters to Brunel's father, Marc. Brunel was also related by marriage to Thomas Mudge, Jr. whose father is of course the inventor of the lever escapement; Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, Isambard Kingdom's father, was Mudge's business partner.

This iconic image of Brunel posing in front of the launching chains of Great Eastern was taken in 1857 by Robert Howlett, just two years before IKB's untimely death at 53 from a stroke (which may have been partly brought on by both stress and his 40+ day cigar habit). I have been looking for any evidence of his personal pocket watch or watches online but so far no dice, although I did find a Dent precision pendulum regulator (second slide) which once hung in IKB's office and which he used to set his watch ... whatever it might have been. That clock was sold at auction at Christie's in 2006; the lot essay says that the regulator, purchased in 1845, was – perhaps unsurprisingly – partly designed by Brunel himself:

“Brunel purchased this regulator in about 1845 towards the height of his career. Given his short but illustrious horological education, one can imagine that Brunel gave considerable thought to his choice of regulator. The fact that he chose one by Dent was almost certainly because in 1843 Dent had taken over from Arnold as Breguet's London agent. The family history relates that Brunel had a hand in designing part of the movement - indeed the escapement, with external deadbeat and two-piece crutch are of very definite French influence.”

Dent regulator owned by IK Brunel; image, Christie’s

I would have thought that any watch owned by such a giant of the Industrial Revolution would have been treasured and passed down to us (the Dent regulator was apparently both retained and offered for sale by Brunel’s descendants) but there is no evidence I can find anywhere of such a thing. The historical interest of such a watch would be enormous, however, and a reminder of the early fascination of this gifted and tireless engineer with the very small in mechanics, before going on to create some of the biggest feats of engineering of his day.