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Brunel was a Frenchman, born in Hacqueville, Normandy, to a farming family. His father, a religious man, intended him to become a priest, but Marc had different ideas. He was interested in woodworking, and anything that had to do with tools and building. His father gave up on making him a priest, and instead Marc enlisted in Louis XVI's navy in 1785 and sailed to the West Indies.
Brunel returned to France in 1792, during the French Revolution. As he had served in the king's navy, he felt threatened by the prospect of living under a revolutionary government, and he decided to seek his fortune in New York. During his time in the U.S., he devised his ideas for block-making machinery and other inventions. He also worked on a canal to join the Hudson River to Lake Champlain, as well as engineering fortifications for Manhattan, Long Island and Staten Island. He won a design competition for the new Capital building in Washington, but his designed was deemed to costly, and the building was never constructed.
Brunel moved to England in 1799, and began developing several machines, including a duplicate writing and drawing machine, and machines for twisting thread and making borders for cloth. While working on a plan for manufacturing ships' blocks (pulleys), he met Samuel Bentham, who was working on a similar project for the British Admiralty. Bentham recognized that Brunel's designs were better than his, and got him hired on to work on the project. Brunel, who was better at design than at the actual running and maintenance of the equipment, commissioned a young engineer named Henry Maudslay to assist him, and eventually 44 machines were constructed for the block-making project. The machines, which could be operated by 10 unskilled labourers, did the work of 110 skilled craftsmen. Some of the machines were still being used as late as the 1940s.
Besides machine tools, Brunel is most famous for being the engineer of the Thames Tunnel, a passage underneath the Thames River that greatly reduced the traffic clogging the famous London Bridge and surrounding streets. Previous attempts to build a tunnel had been frustrated by quicksand. Brunel invented a sort of shield that supported the earth, allowing bricklayers to follow the diggers and build the tunnel as they went along. He was assisted on this project by his son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who also became a famous engineer.
Sources:
American Society of Civil Engineers. "Notable Engineers: Marc Isambard Brunel." http://www.asce.org/history/bio_brunel_m.html.American Society of Civil Engineers. "History and Heritage of Civil Engineering: Thames Tunnel." http://www.asce.org/history/tunn_thames.html.
Bradley, Ian. A History of Machine Tools. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Model and Allied Publications Ltd., 1972.
GSN Machine Tools Group. “Pioneers of the Machine Tool Industry: Samuel Bentham and Marc Isambard Brunel.” http://www.gsn.uk.com/benbru.html.
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