Although Brunel’s career could be conveyed in a thematically linear way, his real life wasn’t like that at all. While he was hectic with railway building, he was also juggling ship construction. When his GWR company directors complained about the great length of their railway (all of 100 miles), Brunel suggested extending transportation right to New York. One director exclaimed, ‘He’ll have us going to the moon yet!’ Thus the Great Western Steamship Company was formed, and work began in Bristol in 1836 on the SS Great Western as part of a proposed integrated transport system, by rail from London, then sea to America.

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As always, Brunel turned to first principles to pursue the ‘impossible dream’ of a transatlantic steamship. Ignoring accepted wisdom that no steam vessel could carry enough fuel to make the crossing, he calculated the true relationship between a ship’s size/carrying capacity and power/resistance that became a fundamental rule of naval architecture. The 236-foot-long, oak-hulled paddle steamer Great Western made its maiden voyage to New York in 1838 in 15 days, half the time it would normally take under sail. It was not quite the first to accomplish the crossing, but it became the first steamship to engage in regular transatlantic service — heralding a new era of ocean-going transport.

By now, Brunel had the success and wealth he craved. In July 1836, he had married Mary Horsley and set up home at 18 Duke St., Westminster, in London. There, an off-duty Brunel could be found entertaining their three children with conjuring tricks. One, in 1843, almost did for him when he accidentally swallowed a half-sovereign that threatened to choke him to death. Never short of inspiration, he knocked up a board pivoted between two uprights, strapped himself in, spun rapidly head over heels, and the coin was expelled from his windpipe by centrifugal force!

Touching interludes of home life apart, Brunel in truth remained wedded to his work. In 1839 he began building an even larger vessel, SS Great Britain. The only one of his ships to survive, it lies in the same dry dock where it was made, in Bristol’s Great Western Dockyard. On the ferry from Temple Meads, visitors get a fine waterborne tour of Bristol city center and historic harbor, before the masts of SS Great Britain hove into view. Beside it sits the replica of John Cabot’s Matthew in which he sailed for Newfoundland in the 15th century.

‘The Great Britain is the forerunner of modern passenger liners,’ commented Dagmar Smeed, the Great Britain Trust’s marketing and communications manager. ‘At 322 feet long she was the biggest vessel in the world when launched in 1843, and she was the first screw-propeller-driven iron steamship to cross the Atlantic. Brunel had the vision to combine the latest technologies of the day; he was the Victorians’ answer to Renaissance man.’

The welcome at the end of its 14-day, 21-hour maiden trip from Liverpool to New York in 1845 was rapturous. But — the fate of many pioneering enterprises — its early voyages were not commercial successes. It was later deployed as an emigrants’ ship, conveying some 15,000 people to new lives in Australia at the height of the gold rush. In 1970 Great Britain was a wreck, having been towed ‘home’ from the Falkland Islands, where it had ended its working life as a floating warehouse. Now impressively restored, it is resplendent in its gold, black and white livery.

From the diaries of passengers, curators have recreated conditions on board and audio tours that allow visitors to SS Great Britain to eavesdrop on the upstairs, downstairs life of first-class and steerage travelers. Visitors can also descend beneath the water-covered glass’sea’ in which the ship’s hull is sealed, to inspect the giant propeller. In fact, the glass is the roof of a state-of-the-art dehumidification chamber that preserves the hull in the same 20 percent relative humidity found in the Arizona desert.

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