The greatest engineer of his age, Isambard Kingdom Brunel accomplished works that others refused to contemplate: the Clifton suspension bridge over the Avon gorge at Bristol; the tunnel through almost two miles of solid rock at Box in Wiltshire; the first shop to be built completely of iron; and the precision with which his great bridge over Tamar was assembled. 

          Brunel saw things on a larger scale than ordinary men: his Great Eastern Railway at the broad gauge of 7 feet and a half inch. He did have his failures, however, such as the atmospheric railway, in which his plans were thwarted by the limitations of nineteenth-century technology. Indeed, despite his incredible success with the GWR and other projects, his life was dogged by tragedy and near disaster, from his narrow escape from death when the water burst into the Thames tunnel he was building, to the heartbreaking problems of the Great Eastern. He died, saddened, before his great ship proved its worth, before the Clifton bridge was completed, in every sense a man who lived before his time.