THE STORY OF BRUNEL

In his lifetime he had to fight for approval of his foresighted engineering plans. Today Isambard Kingdom Brunel is remembered as the designer of the first transatlantic steamer (the Great Western) and the man behind numerous controversial engineering ""firsts"": bridges with spans longer than contemporary Telford's; the compressed air caisson for bridge, support; the broad gauge railway track; and a prefab hospital shipped from England to the Crimea in 1855. Son of the Thames tunnel builder, he had boundless energy and devotion to his work; he marries and honeymoons in one paragraph and has fathered three children in another several chapters later--that's almost all there is about his personal life here. As biography this is no match for his imagination but it does represent the engineer's work.