The shoulders of giants
This column was first published in Maverick, 9 August 2007. If you live in South Africa, and like great photography and copy marred only by my own, do subscribe.
We think we’re so smart. We think the problems we face are unique and modern and unprecedented. We think things are different now. They aren’t. When the invisible hand is bound, the dead hand rules.
Who wouldn’t kill for a name like Isambard Kingdom Brunel? It has the grandeur of his life about it. He was driven by an iron will and untiring work ethic. Even his failures – such as propelling trains by a sort of very long pea shooter with a vacuum pump at the end – were stupendous feats of grand engineering.
He died in 1859, aged only 53, yet his life story reads like the parallel lives of two men – one a railway engineer of renown, and another a famous ship builder. Throughout his life, while working on some of the most complex and grand projects of the golden age of engineering, he fought tirelessly against his commercial rivals. Yet he reserved his strongest animosity not for his competitors, but for the government.
