On his decease, his son and heir, I.K. Brunel, whose
practical experience in the Thames Tunnel job, where his biographers
assert he had occasion more than once to save his life by swimming,
qualified him to tread in his father's shoes, took up his trade.
Brunel, Jr., having demonstrated by costly experiments, to the
successful proof, but thorough exasperation, of his moneyed backers,
that his father's theory for employing carbonic acid gas as a motive
power was practicable enough, but too expensive for anything but the
dissipation of a millionaire's income, settled down to the profession
of engineering science, in which he did as well as his advantages of
education enabled him. Like all men in advance of their time, when he
considered himself the victim of arbitrary capitalists ignoring the
bent of his genius, he did his best work in accordance with their
stipulations. He designed the Great Western, the first steamship
(paddle-wheel) ever built to cross the Atlantic; and the Great
Britain, the original ocean screw steamer. Flushed with these
successes, Brunel procured pecuniary support from speculative fools,
who, dazzled by the glittering statistical array that can be adduced in
support of any chimerical venture, the inventor's repute, and their
unbaked experience, imagined that the alluring Orient was ready to
yield, like over-ripe fruit, to their shadowy grasp; and tainted as he
evidently was with hereditary mania, Brunel resolved to seize the
illusionary immortality that he fondly imagined to be within his reach.
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