LITMIR.BIZ

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obliged ‘to smell her nosegay all the time’. For while Brunel was building his masterpiece, the city was in crisis. London was drowning in a sea of excrement.

      There were some 200,000 cesspits across the capital but as the population escalated in the first half of the nineteenth century, so did the smell. In poor districts these cesspits were seldom emptied, leaving the sewage to overflow, seeping through cracks in floorboards or even running down walls, spreading everywhere with its creeping tentacles of disease. Three epidemics of cholera had swept through London by 1854 leaving over 30,000 dead. The desperation of the poor of the East End even reached The Times in a famous protest: ‘Sur, – May we beg and beseech your proteckshion and power … We live in muck and filthe. We aint got no privies, no dust bins, no drains, no water splies, and no drain or suer in the hole place … The Stenche of a Gully-hole is disgustin. We all of us suffur, and numbers are ill, and if the Colera comes Lord help us …’

      In the summer of 1858, while the Great Eastern was being fitted out for her maiden voyage, the ‘great stink’ finally became unbearable. Joseph Bazalgette, Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, proposed a grand scheme to build 82 miles of intercepting sewers, a sewage superhighway that linked with over 1,000 miles of street sewers to provide an underground network beneath the city streets. He drove himself to the limits of endurance struggling underneath London’s dense housing to create the world’s first modern sewage system. The task was made even more difficult since he was in competition with the new underground railway, a network of roads and the emerging overland railway systems. But his ambitious design transformed the city into the first modern metropolis, setting a standard that was quickly copied the world over.

      While an endless supply of cheap labour was the human capital for many projects such as the London sewers and the Great Ship, this workforce needed new materials to build for a new age. The iron industry was booming and formed the basis of the Industrial Revolution. During the eighteenth century, output had been modest with the indigenous ore in England of such low grade that it took nearly seven tons of coal to refine one ton of iron, but by the mid-nineteenth century, improvements, particularly in the use of steam power for blast furnaces, enabled a better quality product to be made more economically. The search for coal and iron ore was ceaseless; by the 1850s a new blast furnace was opened every two weeks.

      The railways were the first of the big adventures in iron. With the invention of the steam engine and the laying of track came untold wealth as the countryside was opened up and cities were linked, the new roaring engines shrinking space. Suddenly the country was mobile. Only 500 miles of track had been laid in 1838. Less than fifteen years later, by the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, over 6,000 miles of track criss-crossed the country.

      The golden age of railways in Britain was overtaken by the phenomenal growth of railways in America. In the early part of the nineteenth century the vast continent lay as it had for centuries, marked only by Indian and buffalo trails and the worn wagon tracks of those making the journey west. The eastern and western states of America were still separated by a harsh wilderness that took around six months to cross by wagon. Many preferred to make the journey to California by sea, braving a voyage around South America’s Cape Horn rather than risking the dangerous overland crossing. In 1830, when the first American-built locomotive, Tom Thumb, came into service, there were only 30 miles of working track in the United States. Growth was so fast that by 1850 there were over 9,000 miles of track and, by 1860, a staggering 30,600.

      The Transcontinental Railroad was built with government help during and after the Civil War in the 1860s, and opened up the continent more quickly than a prairie fire, allowing the virgin acres to be settled. President Lincoln was determined on a railway line across the continent, which ‘was imperatively demanded in the interests of the whole country’. There were two teams, one began building from the east and the other from California in the west. Of the large numbers who drove the railways across America, the Chinese fared particularly badly, perishing in their thousands in the difficult terrain of the Sierras, their nameless bones gathered and shipped back to China by the crate load. In 1869, after seven years, the tracks joined, shrinking the whole continent as the journey from New York to San Francisco could now be done in a matter of days. In a record-breaking run, in 1876, tracks were cleared for the Lightning Train, which raced from coast to coast in just 83 hours. As President Lincoln had envisaged, the Transcontinental Railroad became a catalyst for the vast expansion that would help to make America the industrial giant of the world.

      With the growth in cities and improvements in transport, the demand for goods grew. Commerce prospered, trade increased and more goods were exported. The relentless quest for profit created new wealth and capital, which in turn sought outlets and opportunities for further gain. There was a need to import more raw materials and export the growing surplus of manufactured goods. Since the medieval period wool had traditionally been the major trading commodity with Europe, but this had fallen away. In its wake there came a demand for more exotic goods to trade in Europe for iron ore and timber. The more adventurous among the merchant traders were landing sugar and cotton, spices and tobacco from the West Indies and America.

      With the boom in world trade, by the late nineteenth century shipping was big business. In Egypt the Suez Canal had shortened the journey to India, Australia and the Far East, making trade easier and cheaper, and the world itself a smaller place. Having completed the Suez Canal in 1869, French entrepreneur Vicomte Ferdinand de Lesseps dreamed of an even bolder scheme. He would cut a path across the Isthmus of Panama and unite the great oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific ‘from sea to shining sea’. The long and dangerous journey around South America and Cape Horn would become a thing of the past. Ferdinand de Lesseps’s dream became a symbol of French national pride in the 1880s and thousands flocked to help with construction. But once out in the tropical heat of Panama, they found themselves facing impenetrable jungle, deep swamps and deathly tropical diseases as it proved to be an undertaking of nightmare proportions. With over 20,000 dead and the investors bankrupted, the canal company failed in 1889 and de Lesseps died a defeated man, soon after. Twenty-five years later, the Americans under Colonel George Goethals finally completed the project, opening up new regions for the ever-increasing world trade.

      By the 1880s, in spite of the enormous wealth created by the Industrial Revolution in Europe, there were still large numbers in poverty who had not benefited at all. The American economy, however, was growing rapidly, exporting grain and manufactured goods to Europe. And there were plenty in Europe who dreamed of returning on these ships to reach the promised land of America. They had heard of the Statue of Liberty with the words etched on it: ‘Bring me your poor …’ They came from Ireland to escape the potato famine, from England looking for a better life, from Russia escaping the pogroms. Growth in America was so rapid that the population increased tenfold, from 4 million in 1790 to over 40 million by the time of the Centennial Exhibition of 1876.

      One such immigrant was John Augustus Roebling, from Mühlhausen, Germany, a brilliant engineer who won the contract to build the biggest bridge in the world across the wide and turbulent East River, which separates New York from Brooklyn. Roebling’s Brooklyn Bridge would be a suspension bridge of great strength and exquisite symmetry: the crowning achievement of his career. The foundations alone would reach more than 70 feet below the river, its two mighty towers, at 276 feet, would dwarf much of New York. The total length of almost 6,000 feet seemed a miracle, and all to be built out of a new material: steel.

      But this ambitious dream was to cost him the extreme price of life itself, and, unknowingly, he condemned his son to a shadow life. Determined to continue with his father’s vision, Washington Roebling had to face a mysterious new disease, ‘caisson disease’, or, as it is now known, the bends. As he and his team laboured deep beneath the East River in the hot, humid underground world of the caissons, no one knew who might be struck down next with the terrifying symptoms, paralysis or even death. Eventually Washington Roebling succumbed to the mysterious new disease. He was too weak to leave his room and could only continue his work on the bridge by dictating his instructions to his wife, Emily. As the great network of cables was spun across the great East River he watched through a telescope from his window.

      ‘During all these years of trial and false report,’ declared one leading official in his praise at the opening ceremony

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