Month: February 2020

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59) certainly had a penchant for ‘big’ and ‘first’ achievements, epitomised in the iconic 1857 photo of him dwarfed by the giant launching chains of his SS Great Eastern steamship, the world’s largest and longest luxury liner of its time. Born in Portsmouth, he grew up in London and followed in the footsteps of his father, mechanical engineer Sir Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1849), becoming his works assistant on the world’s first underwater tunnel, the Thames Tunnel.

Young Brunel then started work on the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, where he also upgraded the docks. Any thought of specialising in one type of project obviously never crossed the workaholic Brunel’s mind, as railways, trains, steamships and multi-purpose stations line the pages of his portfolio along with more bridges and docks.

The grand size of these ambitious engineering feats inevitably led to some failures but he is remembered rather for pushing the boundaries of the fledgling field of civil engineering. His three massive steamships. SS Great Western, SS Great Britain and the aforementioned SS Great Eastern travelled the oceans like no other ships had done before. Only the SS Great Britain survives, thanks to a rescue mission in 1970.

(Top image of Brunel’s Bristol Temple Meads station: Wikimedia Commons / Public domain)

Plate glass was initially manufactured in the UK in the thirteenth century by a method which produced ‘broad sheet glass’. Molten glass was blown into a long tube, the ends were severed and the cylindrical glass form was split and flattened. This glass was nothing like the perfectly clear float glass of today, but was used in leaded lights.

Over the centuries, other techniques were developed but it took until 1952 for a revolutionary, cost-effective process to be invented and thereby provide us with the high quality plate glass we have today. Pilkington Brothers Ltd. was founded in 1826 in St. Helen’s on Merseyside and by 1860 it was producing 75% of the UK’s plate glass. It became Japanese-owned in 2006 but is still our largest glass manufacturer.

Sir Alastair Pilkington (1920-95) and Kenneth Bickerstaff devised ‘the Pilkington process’ which is an automated method of heating the ingredients in a huge furnace and floating the resulting liquid on top of molten tin. It does not mix with the tin, which is denser and does not boil at the specified temperature, so this provides a flat bottom with gravity providing the flat top. The glass sheet is gradually cooled and rolled off, to be machine-cut and processed.

(Image: Alan Wright at pixabay.com)