The Ship Built on a Vast Scale

In The World of Wonders, the Great Eastern is a ship of almost startling scale: 680 feet long, 83 feet broad and 58 feet deep, with a reported tonnage of 23,000 tons. Each paddle-wheel measured 58 feet across. The book says each of the four engine cylinders was cast in one piece, weighed 28 tons and had a 14-foot stroke; the condenser was another single casting of 36 tons^[1].

The book dates the start of Brunel’s work to 1854, describes the ship as constructed at Millwall in 1857, and says nearly a million pounds had been spent before she was tried. Financial difficulties brought a new company in 1858. She went to sea in autumn 1859, when a destructive accident occurred off Hastings^[2]. In the book’s account of the casualties that followed, she endured an Atlantic hurricane that damaged her paddles and disabled her rudder, then struck a rock at New York, breaking bottom-plates along 80 feet of her hull. Those plates, it says, were repaired while she remained afloat^[3].