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.

He wasn’t the first to observe the “dead hand” of the state at work. The term itself belongs to Adam Smith. But like so many before and after him, Brunel witnessed it first-hand.

Brunel is perhaps most famous for the trials and tribulations of his last great achievement, the leviathan that the public baptised the
Great Eastern, a steam ship more than twice as long and eight times the displacement of anything he’d built before. It was large enough to make the Australia run without coaling, and would later be used to lay transoceanic telegraph cables to connect the world.

This was the third time he had built the largest ship in the world. The first was the Great Western, the pioneering trans-Atlantic steamer. He also built the Great Britain, the first steamer built of iron and driven by the newfangled screw propeller, and the only reminder of Brunel’s shipbuilding career to have been salvaged and restored as a museum.

His other life was dedicated to the railways that began linking towns and cities across England. At age 24 he won a design competition to build the magnificent Clifton Suspension Bridge across the Avon near Bristol. For lack of funding, it wasn’t completed until after his death, but he did build several other major bridges, including the beautiful Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash.

He surveyed, engineered and built the longest railway to date, the Great Western Railway line from London to Bristol. At either end, he built the glorious Victorian steel structures of Temple Meads Station and Paddington Station, and in the middle, the town of Swindon has Brunel to thank for its existence.

His rivalry with Robert Stephenson over the gauge of railways – Stephenson advocated narrow gauge, while Brunel insisted that broad gauge was superior – lasted his entire life. He lost that battle, because of a government edict that made cost the only criterion. He never blamed Stephenson, and the two remained friends for life. Not so with Brunel and the government.

When asked to advise a Royal Commission on how and when iron should be used in railway structures, he said: “If the Commission is to inquire in the conditions ‘to be observed’, it is to be presumed that they will … lay down, or at least suggest, ‘rules’ and ‘conditions’ to be observed in the construction of bridges, or, in other words, embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices and errors of today. … No man, however bold of however high he may stand in his profession, can resist the benumbing effect of rules laid down by authority … Devoted as I am to my profession, I see with fear and regret this tendency to legislate and to rule.”

His most special scorn, however, was reserved for government officials, and the Admiralty in particular. Despite needing an Act of Parliament to approve almost all his work, he avoided government projects like the plague.

The Crimean War, however, changed that. Brunel could hardly refuse to help the war effort. But at every turn, he was thwarted by bureaucracy.

“It would exercise the intellects of our acutest philosophers,” he wrote in a letter to a general, “to investigate and discover what is the powerful agent which acts upon all matters brought within the range of the mere atmosphere of [the Admiralty]. They have an extraordinary supply of cold water and capacious and heavy extinguishers, but I was prepared for and proof against such coarse offensive measures. But they have an unlimited supply of some negative principle which seems to absorb and eliminate everything that approaches them. … It is a curious and puzzling phenomenon, but in my experience it has always attended every contact with the Admiralty.”

He would have occasion to demonstrate the truth of this view when he was invited to design a remarkable modular hospital (the first “prefabricated” building), equipped with a range of innovative hygiene facilities for use in the Crimea. It was intended to replace the festering charnel house that made Florence Nightingale famous.

He had ordered materials for the hospital buildings within a week, but the War Office Contracts Department disapproved of such haste. He retorted: “Such a course may possibly be unusual in the execution of Government work, but it involves only an amount of responsibility which men in my profession are accustomed to take. … It is only by the prompt and independent actions of a single individual entrusted with such powers that expedition can be secured and vexatious and mischievous delays avoided. … These buildings, if wanted at all, must be wanted before they can possibly arrive.”

L.T.C. Rolt, in the 1957 biography, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, described the denouement: “He had designed, built and delivered on shipboard an entire portable hospital, unique of its kind, only to find that officialdom had been unable in that time to assemble the perfectly ordinary small stores with which to stock it.”

That hospital, those bridges, all the works of that golden age of engineering stand as monuments to the inventive power of free individuals, raising their own capital and taking their own risks. By contrast, Brunel’s every encounter with government was testament to the “dead hand” of the state.

Every generation thinks that things are different now – that the state can be an effective means of service delivery. Yet like Brunel, every generation discovers anew that Adam Smith was right in An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.

Surprised that something written that long ago is still so true?

“Take no action and the people of themselves are transformed. … Engage in no activity and the people of themselves become prosperous. … The more laws and orders are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”

That was Lao Tzu’s advice to his ruler, written in the Tao Te Ching. It appeared more than 2 000 years before Adam Smith was even born.