Chapter 34: Brunel and Vanderbilt
This week we explore the lives and careers of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Cornelius Vanderbilt – two of industrial history’s most prolific individuals. One was from the UK, one was from the US. One cared little about profits, the other cared for nothing but profits. But both men had a major impact on the Transport Revolution, spreading railroads across their respective countries and steamships across the world.
Sources for this episode include:
Allitt, Patrick N. “The Industrial Revolution.” The Great Courses. 2014.
"Cornelius Vanderbilt: American Industrialist and Philanthropist (1794-1877)." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Sept 2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cornelius-Vanderbilt-1794-1877
"Isambard Kingdom Brunel: British Engineer." Encyclopaedia Britannica. Last updated: Sept 2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Isambard-Kingdom-Brunel
Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. PublicAffairs. 2012.
Herreld, Donald J. "An Economic History of the World Since 1400." The Great Courses. 2016.
MacGregor, J.R. Cornelius Vanderbilt – The Commodore: Insight and Analysis Into the Life and Success of America's First Tycoon. CAC Publishing. 2019.
Full Transcript
Reminder: Footnotes for the transcript are available to Patreon supporters. To become one, go to Patreon.com/indrevpod to sign up.
Trying to pick the exact year an Industrial Revolution began or ended is a somewhat trivial exercise. I mean, its not exactly like the world ever stopped industrializing since the mid-18th Century. But for the purposes of this podcast, I generally consider the first Industrial Revolution to have taken place between 1760 and 1848.
Now, for most of that time, the economic revolution unfurling had to do with the means of mass production – the introduction of the factory system, new machines for spinning and weaving textiles, new processes for producing chemicals, and a new source of power in the steam engine.
But toward the end of this first Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most major advancements were in transportation. Steamboats were now moving up and down navigable rivers and canals. The railroads were moving freight and passengers across land at speeds never before imaginable. And still more changes were coming to the transport sector – changes that would make the world smaller, with speedier means of communication and the mass proliferation of news; changes that allowed corporations to grow larger, more structured, and more profitable; changes that created a new, large-scale consumer culture; and changes that allowed millions of immigrants to find new homes around the globe.
And in many cases, these changes were thanks to the breakthroughs made by immigrants, and the children of immigrants, both in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Among them was a Swedish-born inventor named John Ericsson. Born into a mining family in 1803, Ericsson got his start building canals and steam engines for the Swedish military. Skilled in mechanics, he decided to emigrate to England in 1826. There he collaborated with another engineer to build the locomotive Novelty, which lost to George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket in the Rainhill Trials. (Shout out Chapter 30!)
Then, in the 1830s, Ericsson moved on to another idea: The screw-propeller.
Up until that point, steamships were operating with large paddle-wheels, usually flanking both sides of the center hull. The rotary motion of the paddle-wheels was easy enough to produce with the Watt-era steam engines, since they were designed for that kind of motion.
But by modifying things a bit, a screw-propeller could be placed in the back of a vessel and completely submerged underwater, making the vessel faster and more fuel-efficient.
Ericsson could find no takers for this concept in Britain, so he emigrated once again in 1839, this time to the United States. Over the next 50 years of his life, he built several steamships for the Navy (including the USS Princeton and famous USS Monitor), improved torpedo technology, and invented new steam engine technologies, as well as an early solar power engine.
Ericsson wasn’t alone, either. An English farmer-turned-engineer named Francis Pettit Smith also independently invented the screw-propeller in the 1830s, which he used for new ships for the British Royal Navy.
And this technological breakthrough both men made – one for the UK, one for the US – was adapted in the works of two of industrial history’s most prolific men – one in the UK, one in the US. And both men built storied careers that involved much more than steamships.
---
This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 34: Brunel and Vanderbilt
---
Before we get started, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who is supporting the podcast on Patreon. In particular, I want to recognize the support of Brian Long, John Bartlett, and Walter Torres. Thank you so much for your support.
You can support the podcast too, by going to www.Patreon.com/indrevpod, and that link is also in the episode notes for this episode.
---
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born in Portsmouth, England in 1806. He was born there because his father, the French-born Marc Isambard Brunel, was at the time working on the Portsmouth Block Mills. (Shout out Chapter 13!) His mother, Sophia Kingdom, came from an English military family and was working in France as a governess when she met Marc. While in France, she got caught up in the Reign of Terror and was nearly executed for alleged espionage, but was spared when Robespierre fell.
Marc began educating his son as early as 1810, teaching him French, mathematics, and more. And even though Marc frequently had money problems, thanks to his London sawmill burning down, he still managed to send the young Brunel to English and French boarding schools.
After he was released from his stint in debtors’ prison, Marc began working on the Thames Tunnel – the first tunnel under the River Thames in London. For decades now, such a project had been considered too dangerous and had never been completed. In fact, two previous attempts to tunnel under the Thames had failed.
But in 1818, Marc patented a new “tunneling shield” – a massive, though temporary structure that would prevent the tunnel from collapsing during the digging process. In 1824, a group of investors formed the Thames Tunnel Company and hired Marc to construct it. And Marc hired his 18-year-old son, Isambard, to join the project as an assistant engineer. Within a couple of years, the younger Brunel was promoted to Chief Site Engineer.
Even with the tunneling shield, digging the tunnel was still incredibly dangerous with early 19th Century technology. No one really knew the conditions of the soil beneath the river. As it was constructed, methane gases from the sewage in the river above seeped into the tunnel, causing the workers – including Brunel – to get sick. On two occasions, the roof of the tunnel caved in, drowning several workers and nearly killing Brunel.
His involvement in the tunnel ended in 1829, when the company ran out of money. For seven years, then, the half-completed tunnel was left abandoned. Finally, by 1835, Marc raised enough money to continue. It was finally completed and opened to pedestrians in 1843. Marc was subsequently knighted by the young Queen Victoria.
Isambard, meanwhile, had moved on to new projects. The same year tunnel construction shut down, he submitted four designs to Bristol merchants seeking to build a bridge over the Avon Gorge. All four, as well as another 18 designs submitted by other engineers, were rejected by the competition’s judge, our old friend, Thomas Telford. The committee asked Telford to design the bridge then, which he did.
But after the bridge received Parliamentary approval, Brunel submitted a new proposal, which would cost some £10,000 less than Telford’s. At that point, another competition was held – this time with new judges, including our old friend, Davies Gilbert – and Brunel won. This 630-foot suspension bridge – a good 200 feet above the gorge – took about 30 years to build. But it’s still in use today.
In 1833, Brunel was made Chief Engineer of the Great Western Railway, at the age of 27. As I mentioned in Chapter 31, he used a 7-foot gauge (rather than the shorter standard gauge used by George Stephenson and others) in order to give passengers a smoother ride. It also meant that larger locomotives and more thoughtful construction was needed, hurting the profitability of the line.
And the construction faced constant setbacks. He wrote to a friend how he was encountering “a little swarm of devils in the shape of uncut timber, half-finished station houses, sinking embankments, broken screws, absent guard plates, unfinished drawings and sketches” which constantly put completion of the railway out of reach.
Between Bath and Chippenham, Brunel needed the railway to go under a 1.75-mile-long tunnel – the longest railway tunnel to date. Building this Box Tunnel took three years, blasting through the earth with an average 1 ton of gunpowder per week. A hundred workers died in the process.
Brunel was also quite inventive. In the late 1840s, he experimented on an extension line of the Great Western Railway, installing what he called an “atmospheric caper.” Running along the rail tracks was a long pipe, in which a piston would connect to the train. A stationary steam engine would then create vacuum in the pipe, pulling the train along. The hope was to have a cleaner, quieter, and more fuel-efficient railway.
Unfortunately for Brunel, it was not possible to create a tight enough seal inside the pipe with the technology of the time. After one year in operation, Brunel conceded the experiment was a failure, and converted the line for traditional locomotives. Not until the 1990s were any successful atmospheric railways constructed.
Also during these years, Brunel began turning his attention to another interest: Steamships.
While steamboats were becoming increasingly used on rivers and canals, nobody had yet built a steam-powered ship that was traversing oceans. In fact, many people at the time believed that in order to make such a journey, the entire ship would need to be filled with coal, meaning there’d be no room for passengers or cargo.
But Brunel believed that, with a much larger ship (a much longer ship), steam power could be used to cross oceans. He proposed expanding his Great Western Railway to New York City, via an ocean liner. Investors then formed the Great Western Steamship Company for just that concept, and they appointed Brunel to design their first ship – the SS Great Western.
Completed in 1838, the Great Western was the longest ship in the world (to date) at 236 feet. Using both paddle-wheels and traditional sails, it was meant to be the first steamship to cross the Atlantic. But then, a director at the Saint George Steam Packet Company suggested that their ship – the SS Sirius – should beat the Great Western to it.
Built a year earlier, the Sirius was a 178-foot vessel moving passengers back and forth between London and Cork, Ireland. On April 4th, 1838, it set sail from Cork in route to New York City. Stocked full of coal for the journey, it moved its 45 passengers and cargo across the Atlantic at an average speed of just over 8 knots.
The race was on. Four days later, the Great Western launched from Bristol. It had suffered a setback on March 31st when a fire broke out in the engine room, but damage had been minimal. Nevertheless, almost everybody who had tickets for the maiden voyage cancelled at the last minute, and only 7 passengers made the trip. Moving at an average speed of 8.66 knots, the Great Western closed the gap on the Sirius.
Both ships arrived on April 22nd. Coal had run low on the Sirius, and the crew allegedly burned furniture and cargo to keep it moving. It arrived in New York just hours before the Great Western, earning it fame as the first steamship to cross the ocean. But the Great Western made the shorter time, arriving 15 days after departure from England, compared to Sirius’ 18 days from the closer port in Ireland.
But compared to other ships of the day – which typically needed 40 days to cross the Atlantic – both steamships were a major triumph.
How? Well, it’s important to remember that, with traditional sails, a ship needed to follow the large, clockwise currents of the North Atlantic, adding several weeks to a voyage to America’s upper east coast. But with steam power, the ship’s captain could set a direct course. Transatlantic voyages would never be the same.
Brunel immediately got to work building another steamship: the SS Great Britain.
At 322-feet long, the Great Britain was even larger than the Great Western. It was also the first ocean-faring steamship built with an iron hull.
Over a half century had passed since John “Iron-Mad” Wilkinson had launched his iron boat The Trial on the River Severn, and in the years that followed, iron barges and ships were gradually becoming more common. New iron-producing techniques were making the material more affordable than timber in Great Britain. And an iron ship wouldn’t face the rot issues that wooden ships did.
Still, the biggest ship with an iron hull at this point weighed 500 tons. The Great Britain would weigh 3,000.
Constructing a vessel of this size brought enormous challenges. The engine builder, Francis Humphrys, frantically wrote to our old friend, James Naysmith, “I find there is not a forge-hammer in England or Scotland powerful enough to forge the paddle-shaft of the engine for the Great Britain! What am I to do?” This inspired Naysmith to invent his famous steam hammer, which was patented in 1842.
Construction on the Great Britain began in 1839, but then – about a year into it – Brunel abruptly changed the design. Francis Pettit Smith’s Propeller Steamship Company had just produced the first ever screw-propeller ship, the SS Archimedes. Right away, Brunel saw the speeds and fuel economies of such technology as totally irresistible. He instructed Humphrys to change the propulsion system from paddle-wheels to propeller shafts. Humphrys was so overwhelmed by the challenge – redesigning the ship engine mid-construction – that it literally killed him. He collapsed and died in 1841.
Brunel and his team soldiered on. They completed construction in 1843, although it took another two years before they could launch it, as they waited for the Bristol docks to undergo modifications necessary for a ship of this size. It finally set sail – so to speak – in 1845 and shaved another 36 hours off the journey time to New York. Over the next 40 years, it sailed all across the globe.
Brunel followed it up with yet another ship – the SS Great Eastern. Built at the unbelievable size of 705 feet long, it was the largest ship the British would build until the 20th Century. Powered with a combination of paddle-wheels, propellers, and old-fashioned sails, it could transport over 4,000 passengers and their cargo directly from London to Sydney, Australia and back before needing to restock on coal.
Building the Great Eastern was an incredible feat. It took four years and 2,000 men. It required huge, standardized metal plates to assemble the watertight double-hull. It was constructed at a London dockyard owned by collaborator Scott Russell, and Brunel and Russell did not get along with each other very well. Toward the end of construction, Russell went bankrupt, and the nearly-finished ship just sat there for months.
Launching the huge vessel was complicated too. The River Thames was too narrow for a normal launch, so it had to be launched sideways – a very new and untested idea at the time. Two attempts to launch it failed and Brunel started getting bad press. Finally, it was successfully launched in 1858, using giant hydraulic rams. The launch itself ended up costing £120,000 – the equivalent today of about $19 million.
Additional setbacks followed. First, the Great Eastern suffered a massive engine explosion during a trial in the English Channel. A few years later, it hit a reef, but was spared from sinking thanks to the double hull. In 1860, it made its first transatlantic voyage to New York City.
And it was in New York City where another transport revolutionary was building a business empire – and a family name that became synonymous with extraordinary wealth.
---
Cornelius Vanderbilt was born into a financially struggling Dutch-American family on Staten Island, New York, in 1794. His father ran a ferry service in New York Harbor and, at age 11, young Cornelius quit school to work for him. When he was 16, he told his mother he was going to leave home to join a ship’s crew and live a life at sea. His mother was not so keen on that idea. Instead, she loaned him $100 to stay in New York so he could buy his own ferry.
He took his mother’s offer and bought a small sailing sloop, which he used to ferry people from Staten Island to Manhattan. He took this little business of his seriously, and he soon earned the nickname “The Commodore” for his energetic spirit on the waters.
Over the next ten years, he expanded his business considerably, buying a whole string of vessels that he had sailing up and down the East Coast, moving freight, passengers, and even fish catches. And in 1817, Vanderbilt was hired by another ferry owner named Thomas Gibbons – one of the richest entrepreneurs in the United States at the time – to captain a steamboat back-and-forth from New Jersey to New York.
Now, this created some commotion. Years earlier, the New York Legislature had granted monopoly status for steamboats in its waters to Robert Fulton and Robert R. Livingston. (Shout out chapter 12!) The former governor of New Jersey, Aaron Ogden, had previously purchased a license from Fulton and Livingston to operate his own steamboat in these waters. Originally, Ogden and the Georgia-born Gibbons were supposed to work together, but at some point they had a falling out over personal issues. When Gibbons launched his own steamboat service, Ogden sued for a violation of the monopoly license.
The case not only made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it has become one of the most important Constitutional cases in American history: Gibbons v. Ogden. In it, the court reviewed the Constitution’s commerce clause, which gives Congress the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”
The court decided that this regulation of commerce among the several states – or “interstate commerce” – was solely the responsibility of the federal government. The State of New York had no right to grant a monopoly on waters that connected it to New Jersey or any other state. Gibbons won.
In the years since, the Commerce Clause has been used to justify Congress’s ability to do a lot of stuff, even if it’s only tangentially related to interstate commerce. For example, the Civil Rights Act. (Because drinking fountains can theoretically be sold across state lines, Congress has the power to say drinking fountains can’t be segregated.) Now, as a result, a lot of Constitutional originalists and state’s rights people hate this clause, arguing this is not what the founding fathers had in mind.
But if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense that the Commerce Clause should give the federal government more and more power as time goes on. Because – with the introduction of steamboats, steamships, railroads, interstate highways, airplanes, telephones, the internet, and more – the country is just more economically interconnected than it was at the founding. And therefore, it makes sense that the power of the federal government should increase. It might not be what the founders had in mind, but let’s be honest, almost none of them could have predicted the profound changes brought by the Industrial Revolution.
Okay, editorial over. I digress.
As the case languished in the courts, Vanderbilt continued working for Gibbons. And as he did, the Commodore learned valuable business lessons from Gibbons – namely, how to manage a large, growing, and complex business. He learned a bit of law along the way, working with Gibbons’ lawyers – including the great Daniel Webster – on the Supreme Court case. All the while, Vanderbilt ran his own shipping business on the side while his wife opened and managed an inn and tavern in New Jersey.
Finally, in 1829 – three years after Gibbons died – Vanderbilt left that company to focus exclusively on his own. In the decade that followed, he came to dominate the cut-throat ferry business in the tri-state area, operating several steamboats across New York Harbor, Long Island Sound, and up the Hudson River to Albany.
Throughout the 1830s and 40s, he also saw the expansion of railroads across the United States, particularly the freight services moving cotton from the South up to New England textile mills. He bought small rail lines here and there and, by 1847, he had enough clout to lead a hostile takeover of the Stonington Railroad. The Commodore used it as a platform to create a whole rail network to compete with the Erie – the New York Central – in the 1850s and 60s. He also started buying up New York area real estate.
So, he was a pretty shrewd businessman and, by any modern standards, he was a total dickhead – brash, disrespectful, heavy handed, and quite uninterested in philanthropy or political correctness (even by 19th Century standards). Vanderbilt saw every relationship he had as transactional. He was a terrible husband and father – although a very good customer at brothels throughout his life.
More importantly for this episode, he was something of a visionary. And when, in 1849, word of a Gold Rush came from California, Vanderbilt envisioned a major opportunity. He turned the attention from his regional steamboat business to ocean faring steamships. In the days before the transcontinental railroad, there were only two ways for Americans to get to California. One was taking your chances on the old Oregon Trail, riding with the covered wagons over the Rockies and Sierra Nevada. But that journey took months, and – by the time you made it to California – the gold rush could be over.
The more popular option – a more dangerous, but faster option – was to sail down to Panama, take a mule across the isthmus jungle, and catch another ship up to San Francisco. That or you could sail all the way around South America. The Commodore knew that the steamships (like the ones built by Brunel) would offer gold rushers an even faster way to and from Central America. In fact, he even approached the government of Nicaragua about building a canal from the Atlantic to the San Juan River, where it would lead to the giant Lake Nicaragua on the country’s west coast. Now, this didn’t work out, but he still used Nicaragua as the site for his Accessory Transit Company, which brought the prospectors down by steamer from the US east coast, shuttled them across Nicaragua by stagecoach, and then put them on another steamer to California.
To build his steamships, Vanderbilt bought control of the Allaire Iron Works in 1850. First opened by engineer James P. Allaire in 1816, the iron works was one of the first in the world dedicated to the construction of marine steam engines. One of the first completed during the Vanderbilt reign was a ship called The Vanderbilt – a 3,360-ton behemoth with two 90-inch cylinder beam engines, making it one of the world’s fastest. Others followed, including the North Star, St. Lawrence, Yankee Blade, and Plymouth Rock. So successful was the steamship business that, when his 321-foot ship Atlantic sunk off the coast of Long Island (killing 50 passengers and crew), the Commodore could shrug it off.
Vanderbilt would go on to become a major defense contractor for the Union during the American Civil War. Following the war, he became one of the most notorious rail barons of the 19th Century. He was able to pass a massive fortune to his heirs, turning them into the American equivalent of aristocracy. When the Commodore died in the 1870s, he was worth an estimated $100 million, making him one of the richest persons to ever live.
How did he do it?
For starters, Vanderbilt was an unscrupulous negotiator who pre-planned negotiations to go the way he wanted them to, like a chess player who sees his next three moves ahead of time. He was unsentimental, really only caring about how to make as much money as possible. He was opportunistic, not just in terms of taking advantage of people (which he did) but also taking advantage of any profitable situation which presented itself to him. He was a long-term thinker, willing to take short-term losses if they gave him an edge to crush the competition.
But most importantly, Vanderbilt mastered the art of management at a time when management was in its infancy.
Even in the growing mills and factories of England, the new breed of capitalist who owned the machines and buildings and employed the workers was still pretty close to the ground. He went to the factory to work every day (albeit, in a different capacity from his employees). Rarely did he have shareholders to worry about – usually just a couple of business partners who he spoke to regularly. He’d walk the factory floor inspecting the work. He might have a few foremen who oversaw things, but that was the full extent of middle management for most of the First Industrial Revolution.
But with the railroads, steamboat services, and global shipping operations, the business owners could no longer oversee things directly. A new, corporate, and hierarchical structure was needed. This was the dawn of the modern firm.
The Commodore couldn’t captain every steamboat he owned himself, and so even early on he had to rely on others to pilot ferries, collect fares, and more. He never would have been able to make decisions for individual stations across the hundreds of miles of his railroads. He didn’t know the people on the ground, nor the local supply and demand, nor all the mechanical details for running a locomotive. He needed to oversee people who oversaw people who oversaw people – a multi-level management hierarchy that never existed in commerce like this before. Vanderbilt learned these management practices from Gibbons and applied them across his business empire.
Of course, this new management structure didn’t need to be limited to transport businesses. It was soon adapted and applied to others as well. Industrial enterprises became bigger and more complex. By start of the Second Industrial Revolution, massive corporations were taking the place of relatively small businesses. Line managers and staff managers, a new class of white-collar professionals, began to appear. No country more readily adapted this system than the United States, which helps explain its explosive economic growth during the late 19th Century.
It also allowed for new business models – built on widescale distribution networks – to develop, such as the retail catalog of Sears, Roebuck, and Company. The new, national consumer culture shortly followed.
Also explaining America’s massive economic growth was a swelling of new immigrants sailing in on those steamships from Europe and elsewhere. They were entrepreneurial, but willing to do any kind of work that paid – hoping to give their children a life not thought possible in the Old World.
Thanks to the railroads and steamships, it was easier to pick up and move across one’s country or across the world. Travelling was faster than ever before. To get from England to California once would have taken a good 3 months or more. By the start of the Second Industrial Revolution, it took as little as 3 weeks.
This also meant that communication was speeding up. News was travelling faster than ever. By the start of the Second Industrial Revolution, you could be in Washington, DC and receive news from as far as New York, or Chicago, or London, in just minutes. It was thanks to a new invention: the telegraph – next week, on the Industrial Revolutions.
---
Remember, if you have a friend, family member, or colleague who like history, please be sure to tell them about this podcast. They say nothing is more effective than word of mouth. And if you’re enjoying this podcast, please make sure you are subscribed so you can keep getting new episodes as they come out. Thank you.