Victorian Engineering Brilliance - Do We Still Have It Today? 1

[Ussuri]

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. During the course of his career he designed railways, bridges, tunnels, cruise liners and a whole host more. His skills traversed boundaries such as civil, mechanical, structural, architectural. For a single engineer he was remarkbly prolific with a large number of his structures still in daily use. In addition to this he was a superstar of the day.

But, do we still have the ability to create engineering masterpieces today, or has all the legislation, standardisation and code development taken that away from us? Will we ever see the likes of IKB again?

Any thoughts?

http://www.brunel200.com/

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"The world keeps turning, it keeps me in my place; where I stand is only three miles from space"
Spiritualized

 

[MikeyP]

Many of Brunel's projects were over-budget and delivered late. I think you could say we have retained (even improved upon) that skill in the 21st century.

M

--
Dr Michael F Platten

 

[ozmosis]

Following the theme of Victorian brialliance, I visited a few weeks ago the "Falkirk Wheel" (

http://www.thefalkirkwheel.co.uk/index.asp?cat=HISTORY :: DESIGN).

It is, I would say, following the great traditions of 'large scale engineering, simple design and it works.'

 

[Ussuri]

Sed2

I have also visited the Falkirk Wheel and I think its a good example of unique engineering to suit a specific purpose. And it will probably be talked about for many years to come. I though the boat ride was a bit of a waste of time though.

But I dont know the name of the person in charge of the engineering. But that could just be my ignorance.

 

[ozmosis]

I was trying to sift through the blurb I had to find out who actually put their name to it but it appears no one person can claim overall credit, other than Archimedes. I like the part where it says " a design life of at least 120 years...". Not many structures/designs can say that these days

 

[THEReifleman]

Coffee mug holder? That's what my two legs are for.
:-\

 

[OliB]

THEReifleman,

Isn't that why Macdonalds warn people that the contents of their coffee cup may be hot?

 

[jmw]

RB1957,

The Victorian sewers were exceptionally well engineered by Bazalgette who was also responsible for the thames Embankment.
Not just an engineering excercise but a boundary pushing project where particulalr attention was paid to the cement used ... portland ... and the daily testing of the cement.

But if you want "deisgned for durability" in York there are still Roman sewers in perfectly ggod working order....1700 years or more old.

The pyramids are still there and bits of the Acropolis (we can hardly blame the designers for not anticipating that the Turks would use it to store gunpowder which then blew up).
However, what is most remarkable about Victorian engineering is the love of adornment .... fomr function and esthetics. Aesthetics is given far less priority today because it costs money..... it always did but ostentation was part of the game then, not now.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[IRstuff]

The biggest difference is that IKB could actually manage the design and analysis of a design by himself. Most newer systems are too complex for one person to manage, so the credit gets diluted.

One could certainly argue that the latest Norwegian Cruise ship or the latest ViiV processor from Intel is a masterpiece, of sorts, but there are literally hundreds of engineers involved in these designs. In the case of Intel, whoever designed their various math processor architectures were probably extraordinarily good engineers, their contribution is buried as a subtext to the overall processor.

As a more concrete, albeit obscure, example, consider the Wallis tree encoder that was the mainstay of computer multiplication processing for nearly 4 decades. Clearly, a classic, clearly elegant, but, since it was rarely designed as a standalone product, almost no one has ever heard of it.

TTFN

 

[Ashereng]

Hadrian's wall still stands in norther England. It is known as Hadrian's wall. The engineer, designer, architect, whoever, is lost to most people today.

It happened before, during and since the Victorian age - lots of engineers are not recognised for their brilliance and contribution because the owner/boss took the credit.

"Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater."
Albert Einstein
Have you read FAQ731-376 to make the best use of Eng-Tips Forums?

 

[jmw]

Hadrian built the second and most eduring of the Roman defenses; further north is the line of the shorter Antonine wall (between Edinburgh and Glasgow) which was more simply constructed of forts and a connecting earthwork embankment.
(

http://www.roman-britain.org/frontiers/antonine.htm)

The Romans were very excellent engineers and many of the leading engineers are indetified from the recorded history.
So Haadrian had the wall constructed but yes, his engineers were in fatc responsible for the design and construction... of course we could ask which engineer is the most important, the one who was responsible for the wall's construction of the engineers who laid down the guidelines for the construction... hadrians wall was an application of existing engineering skills.

I would aks if it is absolutely true that IKB really did everything himself?
In fact, with the Great eastern what he did was create the concept and promote it but he then was very careful to shoose a marine architect to draft it out and build it.
So in his day it was already a multi-disciplinary engineering environment.

By the way, Citroen were also a very oinnovative company in the pre-war years.... I don't remember which car company it was that announced it had "invented" headlights that folloewed the steering only to be told to go look at the DS 21'S.

I think the interesting question would be if Brunel were born into todays engineering environment, and had all the advantages of modern engineering education, computers and software, would he still emerge as one of the most brilliant engineers of the day? Be noice to think so or even that any engineers could reach such heights.

As for being overtime and over budget, i think we will find that with some of the msot worthwhile projects, not all of which could be ever said to be commercially viable but are socially desirable... for example, the underground railways, the Channel Tunnel and so on...

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[JStephen]

Seems like the great ship that the guy built was pretty much a dud as I recall- ended it's days laying cable because it was too unstable for passenger use.

Perhaps the question should be turned around, to ask, why didn't they put more time and effort into optimizing designs back then? Sure, some things were overbuilt and still are with us. But how about the failures? We have the capability of building every structure ten times stronger than it needs to be now as well, just we choose not to do things that way.

 

[zeitghost]

As in the bridge over the silvery Tay...

Immortalised in very bad poetry...

Interesting that some of the girders of the original failed Tay bridge were reused in the replacement bridge and presumably are still there to this day.

 

[JRMacGregor]

JMW is right about IKB. A great engineer indeed, but he did not do it all himself.

In fact, since he was the client's engineer, he left behind a long string of engineering contractors who took on his projects and lost heavily.

This applied to the Great Eastern. John Scott Russell was the man who took the contractual responsibility to execute the detailed design and construction of Brunel's concept. He went bankrupt in part due to Brunel's interference in a scope for which he had handed over commercial responsibility (same happens today in many cases).

The Great Eastern might have been a dud as a passenger ship, but had no stability issues I am aware of and was a success as a pioneering Atlantic cable layer.