Read Online Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms by Stephen Jay Gould - Free Book Online

in the Quarterly Review in 1836, praised Turner for creating “a new object of admiration—a new instance of the beautiful—the upright and indomitable march of the self-impelling steamboat.” He then specifically lauded “the admirable manner in which Turner, the most ideal of our landscape painters, has introducedthe steamboat in some views taken from the Seine.”
    This reviewer then credits Turner for his fruitful and reinforcing union of nature and technology:
    The tall black chimney, the black hull, and the long wreath of smoke left lying on the air, present, on this river, an image of life, and of majestic life, which appears only to have assumed its rightful position when seen amongst the simple andgrand productions of nature.
    The steam tug in The Fighting Temeraire is not spiteful or demonic. She does not mock her passive burden on the way to destruction. She is a little workaday boat doing her appointed job. If Turner’s painting implies any villain, we must surely look to the bureaucrats of the British Admiralty who let the great men-of-war decay, and then sold them for scrap.
    Whichbrings me to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the engineer who goes with Turner in my second pairing. How many of you know his name? How many even recognized the words as identifying a person, rather than a tiny principality somehow never noticed in our atlas or stamp album? Yet one can make a good argument—certainly in symbolic terms for the enterprise he represented, if not in actuality for his personalinfluence—that Isambard Kingdom Brunel was the most important figure in the entire nineteenth-century history of Britain.
    Brunel was the greatest practical builder and engineer in British industrial history—and industry powered the Victorian world, often setting the course of politics as firmly as the routes of transportation. Brunel (1806–1859) built bridges, docks, and tunnels. He constructeda floating armored barge, and designed the large guns as well, for the attack on Kronstadt during the Crimean War. He built a complete prefabricated hospital, shipped in sections to the Crimea in 1855.
    But Brunel achieved his greatest impact in the world of steam, both on land and at sea—and now we begin to grasp the tie to Turner. He constructed more than one thousand miles of railroad in GreatBritain and Ireland. He also built two railways in Italy and served as adviser for other lines in Australia and India. In the culmination of his career, Brunel constructed the three greatest steam vessels of his age, each the world’s largest at launching. His first, the Great Western , establishes the symbolic connection with Turner and The Fighting Temeraire. The Great Western , a wooden paddle-wheelvessel 236 feet in length and weighing 1,340 tons, was the first steamship to provide regular transatlantic service. She began her crossings in 1838, the year of the Temeraire ’s last tow and demise. In fact, on August 17, 1838, the day after the sale of the Temeraire , the Great Western arrived in New York and the Shipping and Mercantile Gazette declared that “the whole of the mercantile world . . . will from this moment adopt the new conveyance.” The little tug in Turner’s painting did not doom or threaten the great sailing ships. Brunel’s massive steam vessels signaled the inevitable end of sail as a principal and practical method of oceanic transport.
    Brunel went on, building bigger and better steamships. He launched the Great Britain in 1844, an iron-hulled ship 322 feet long,and the first large steam vessel powered by a screw propeller rather than side paddles. Finally, in 1859, Brunel launched the Great Eastern , with a double iron hull and propulsion by both screws and paddles. The Great Eastern remained the world’s largest steamship for forty years. She never worked well as a passenger vessel, but garnered her greatest fame in laying the first successful transatlanticcable. Brunel, unfortunately, did not live to see the