The Heroic Age

© Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland

As the nineteenth century moved into its last quarter, major engineering projects were becoming more complex. New materials such as steel and concrete enabled ever more ambitious structures to be designed, but understanding how these materials performed demanded higher levels of specialism from larger numbers of staff. A single creative individual could no longer directly supervise every aspect of the construction of a railway or an ocean liner, but had to rely instead on teams of draughtsmen and subcontractors. Britain’s canals and railways were built largely by muscle-power until the 1870s, but thereafter mechanical equipment such as the ‘steam navvy’ (a large steam-powered excavator) began to replace human and animal labour. In the public mind, George Stephenson had ’built’ the Liverpool and Manchester Railway; Isambard Kingdom Brunel had ‘built’ the Great Western Railway or the liner Great Eastern. However, when Britain’s last new main-line railway of the nineteenth century, the Great Central, was projected south to London in the 1890s, it was doubtful if one in 1,000 of Britain’s population could name any of the engineers who had planned and overseen the work. The age of the heroic engineer was over.