Posted on 03/12/2010 7:16:12 AM PST by C19fan
The public is to get its first chance in 145 years to see the Brunnel tunnel under the Thames that was hailed as an eighth wonder of the world and a triumph of Victorian engineering. The tunnel is open today and tomorrow and a Fancy Fair originally held in 1852 below the river will be recreated at the nearby Brunel Museum. It was built between 1825 and 1843 by Marc Brunel and his son, Isambard, and was the first known to have been built beneath a navigable river.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I read a book about the Brunels. They are simply geniuses.
I thought I recognized the name - but it was Marc Brunel’s son who built the Bristol (U.K.) suspension bridge. Very beautiful bridge, especially in the spring during the Bristol Hot-Air Balloon festival. Love Bristol!
WOW
That must be something...
*ping*
In some way, there was more common sense intelligence prevailing, before electronic intell., I mean.
Now, of course I'm NOT refering to the sin nature of man, but his more temporal abilities.
America is a wonderful example of what can happen in a short time when men with ideas and passion are allowed to make the attempt to succeed or fail.
Government, with all it's rules, regulations and laws stifle that momentum.
That’s because they memorized multiplication tables.
Cool stuff.
Very interesting, thank you for the ping!
Thats why Tiny Tim had to use a crutch. He was injured working the night shift on the tunnel construction.
“Isambard Kingdom Brunel”. Dickens himself would be hard pressed to come up with a better name for a character.
Except perhaps for “Lady Remington” and “Matthew Drudge.”
But if the ye olde shoppes were tempting and engrossing enough, I might be motivated enough to take the plunge.
(....gurgle......)
Leni
Indeed. Try telling a group of college students that workable fax machines have been in use for over a hundred years, as I did a while back. Several of them all but called me a liar. "How did they digitize the signal?" one of them demanded. Similarly, it is hard for young people to conceive of things like the SR-71 or the first Moon rockets being designed without what we would consider substantial computing power. The accuracy of 19th century navigators, equipped only with mechanical chronometers, a sextant, and some astronomical tables, would seem like some kind of witchcraft to the present generation. This kind of ignorance could well explain the popularity of nutball theories about all modern technology being borrowed from UFOs or recovered from ancient Atlantis.
I wonder how they avoided the bends.
Well, the son took over day to day overseeing in the 1820s. He was almost killed in a tunnel flooding in 1828, I think, and then sent to recover at Clifton, where he witnessed the building of the Clifton suspension bridge. The article didn’t make clear why that was significant, but you’ve cleared it up for me. And I’ve cleared something up for you.
FASCINATING story. I love that era.
I worked in Bristol for just under 6 months a few years back. Love the area. Fascinating how the sailing ships rode the tide up the river - Avon? - making Bristol a seaport.
They didn’t if it was pressurized. It’s called Caisson’s disease
They discovered that they had to depressurize slowly, just like modern day divers.
America’s closest equivalent to the Brunels were the German immigrant John Roebling and his sons and grandsons. Responsible for the Brooklyn Bridge (1867), workers (and Roebling himself) were badly injured by the ‘bends’ when coming up from the pressurized footing-construction caissons extending below riverbed level. They shortly rigged up decompression chambers to combat the problem.
cool , bookmarked
I gotta plead ignorance. Is that guy named Brunel?
Mark Brunell-QB
Yes, but this was like 30-40 years before Roebling. It was the Roebling case that made me wonder. Maybe the Thames, not being very deep, was not far enough down to create as hazardous a situation.
OK, I’ve been reading about this all afternoon, rather than working. I think the reason they didn’t experience it is that they weren’t breathing pressurized air. The caissons on the Eads and Brooklyn bridges were closed at the top and air was pumped in, which was also the mechanism by which the castings were brought out the center tube, called the “muck tube, i.e., the muck tube sucked the castings out. Apparently muck is a combination of mud and rock, which I never knew. I thought it was mud that sucked.
Brunel was also instrumental in the building of the Crystal Palace.
You may be right about the Thames tunnel construction not being pressurized.
There are stories of polluted water and gases forcing their way into the tunnel. That suggests that they were working at essentially ground-level atmospheric pressure.
On the other hand they must have been 100 feet below the surface, and that would mean significant hydrostatic pressure to hold off with the sliding-form system (invented by the elder Brunel) without assistance from air pressurization.
Yeah they had a lot of trouble with methane gas getting in and catching fire, but I don’t think they had the knowledge or ability to pressurize the whole tunnel at the time, which probably saved many lives, though it didn’t help the construction time any. The methane got in because apparently the bottom of the river was essentially a bog of sh!T... err, sewage from hundreds of years of the thames being used as a toilet.
Now, Downstream they got the wonderful tidal flushes.
Some of the older guys at work and I have had conversations along this line.
I read some of the report of the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
That whole project was paper and pencil, careful planning and thinking, etc. And within cost and under budget. The sections of pipe were manufactured back east, then shipped to the aqueduct project, and all the pipe lengths and rivet holes lined up — just one of the amazing features.
You can download the report here. Over 300 pages, but it has pictures.
http://books.google.com/books?id=7yIWAAAAYAAJ
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Thanks hennie pennie. |
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