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Comment by abainbridge | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of parallels between Elon and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's careers.

Brunel was an excellent marketeer who consistently over-promised and under delivered. He also drove technology forward more than anyone else of his generation.

When Brunel was making the Great Western Railway, he decided to survey the route himself because he felt the existing surveyors were slow, expensive and crap. He did this on horseback. During the process he concluded that the horses he was hiring were slow, expensive and crap, so he started his own horse hire company. Somehow, despite this insanity, we got a railway, and it was good.

Disclaimer: it's twenty years since I read a Brunel biography. I might have some of the details a bit wrong.

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...then again, his Atmospheric Railway was a glorious expensive failure. An evacuated tube carried a piston pushed by the atmospheric pressure behind it (hence the name). The piston had a connecting rod to attach a carriage. Quiet, clean, lovely.

Pumping houses along the route made vacuum for each leg. It was a great idea, but materials science wasn't up to it: the seals kept cracking in the sea air and rats ate the leather skirt that kept vacuum round the piston rod. It was out of service a lot, and was soon abandoned for traditional railway.

I don't want Musk's implementation of a spitball idea that's been going round for ages to be like that, but I can't help wondering...

From Wikipedia.. "It is often asserted among enthusiasts' groups that the primary cause of the failure of the leather flap was rats, attracted to the tallow, gnawing at it. Although rats are said to have been drawn into the traction pipe in the early days, there was no reference to this at the crisis meeting described above."

Also on that project, he designed a brick arch bridge that everyone thought was too low profile to stay up. It's still there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidenhead_Railway_Bridge

> When Brunel was making the Great Western Railway, he decided to survey the route himself because he felt the existing surveyors were slow, expensive and crap. He did this on horseback. During the process he concluded that the horses he was hiring were slow, expensive and crap, so he started his own horse hire company. Somehow, despite this insanity...

Was he wrong on those counts?

I think it is hard to tell. I guess he just had more drive and energy than everyone he depended on, so replacing them with himself was often a win. I like to imagine the metal struggle he went through we he decided the animal feed he was getting was sub-standard and thought about designing a steam powered tractor and buying a field: too much latency, gotta survey this god-damn route today.

*Brunel

Oh dear. Very sorry. Now fixed. Thanks.

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