Isambard Kingdom Brunel
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Re-issued by Penguin Books in 1989
Originally published by Longmans in 1957
Engineering genius, technical innovator and one of the greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution, Isambard Kingdom Brunel changed the face of the British landscape with his groundbreaking designs and ingenious constructions. LTC Rolt’s Isambard Kingdom Brunel is the definitive biography of that great British engineer and visionary, who helped to build modern Britain.
"Rolt has the rare gift of making the technical problems of engineering interesting and comprehensible to the layman. He combines with this an appreciation of Brunel’s forthright, vigorous and humorous character."
John Betjeman in the Daily Telegraph
"Tom Rolt’s biography of I.K.Brunel deserves to remain as he left it, as the outstanding work of engineering biography of the twentieth century, providing a definitive insight into the greatest hero of the heroic age of British engineering, and arguably the greatest engineer of all time."
Professor R A Buchanan, University of Bath
Read the review by John Betjeman in the Daily Telegraph 1957 (PDF file, 100K)
See also the article, Key Reads: Books That Mattered (Gillian Darley in Cornerstone, Spring 2010 - PDF file, 250K)
Rolt also wrote a biography of Brunel for younger readers called The Story of Brunel which was published by Methuen in 1965, re-issued by Sutton Publishing in 2006, and re-issued in 2009 by The History Press.
