You'd be crazy to build that out of iron…….

I've recently had the great joy of being on AZoM duties in the wonderful city of Bristol in the South West of England.

A famous old port city with a less than salubrious past in relation to slave trading, the locals do their best to remove this from their conscience by the consumption of bizarre blends of cider such as "Old Bristolian". An interesting brew served on a suitably named boat, "The Apple", which in the interests of research I can confirm is an all time classic brew for the connoisseur of jack hammer thumping headaches.

As an ex pat Brit who enjoys these occasional returns to the shores of Blighty and in a cutthroat commercial world, it is always heartening to see displays of those typically idiosyncratic, eccentric qualities for which we Brits are so famous.

Of late, this has been roundly demonstrated on all sides in the Mother of all Parliaments by the quirkily innovative nature and scale of the great MPs' expenses fiddle.

The desire of British MP's to misappropriate public funds is driven by obvious pecuniary motivations, but in the pantheon of great fiddles, you can't help but feel quaintly nostalgic about this one with its echoes of a bygone age.

Our American cousins will no doubt find this swindle amusing as it's several orders of magnitude down from the recent tale of "The Wolf of Wall Street", and the misdirection of his broking business to fund a bacchanalian orgy of dancing girls, mind bending substances, crashed yachts, helicopters and a $700,000 hotel bill.

No, the great British MP scandal includes heinous transgressions such as claims for "moat cleaning" a "duck island", "the refit of a WC", "stable repairs" and "piano tuning".

It is however, this quirkily innovative nature of the Brits that led our Victorian forefathers to dream of grand schemes of industrial innovation and nation building, none more so than those of a favourite son of Bristol and a great British engineering materials innovator, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

Although he designed the docks at Bristol, the Great Western Railway line to London and the magnificent Clifton Suspension Bridge, for me it is the SS Great Britain which signifies the high point of his career and possibly the epoch of the Victorian engineering era.

At the time of her launch in 1845, the Great Britain was the largest and fastest ship in the world and was the first screw driven iron hulled ship to cross the Atlantic.

The scale of his vision and willingness to go out on a limb and push the envelope of materials technologies at a time when CAD based finite element analysis was in short supply is simply breathtaking.

Just examine some of the build statistics, the engine of the SS Great Britain weighed in at 340 tons and produced 1000 horse power (745 kW) from 4 huge 88 inch diameter cylinders.

At the time of construction, the crankshaft was the largest forged object on the planet. The hull of the ship was constructed from over 3 million iron rivets and 30,000 wrought iron plates.

In these dark economic hours, should we not consider more of these quirkily eccentric, seemingly impossible Brunelesque nation building projects?

Anyhow, gotta sign off, heading out to the airport and just about to complete my expenses claim for the trip, - I wonder, if our bean counter will pass a claim for "Collar Starching and the purchase of snuff……"

Editors Note:

For those of you who are gluttons for punishment and who send in kind words about Materials Thoughts, after seven years of blood sweat and horrendous topical gags with a materials slant the author has finally cast off his mask of secrecy and his collected dribblings can now be found at Social Materials or be followed on Twitter, with a wonderful archive of past Materials Thoughts on the AZoNetwork Blog Page - he says he'd love to hear from you.