Disagreements With Brunel
Lardner became involved in a number of ill-advised public disagreements with Isambard Kingdom Brunel regarding technical matters, in which he came off the worse.
While Brunel was building the broad-gauge Great Western Railway, Lardner carried out some experiments with the company’s flagship locomotive, North Star. He asserted that, whilst the engine was capable of hauling 82 tons at 33 m.p.h., it was only capable of hauling 16 tons at 41 m.p.h. He also recorded excessive fuel consumption at higher speeds. Lardner attributed this to the greater wind resistance of broad-gauge engines. Brunel and his assistant Daniel Gooch carried out their own experiments on the same locomotive and found that the only problem was that the blast pipe was too small. This was easily rectified and the North Star’s performance immediately improved. At the next meeting of the company’s directors, Brunel triumphantly dismissed Lardner’s evidence.
Lardner also criticised Brunel's design of the Box Tunnel on the Great Western Railway. The tunnel had a 1-in-100 gradient from the east end to the west end. Lardner asserted that if a train's brakes were to fail in the tunnel, it would accelerate to over 120 m.p.h., at which speed the passengers would suffocate. Brunel pointed out that Lardner’s calculations totally disregarded air-resistance and friction, a basic error.
When Brunel was proposing to build SS Great Western for the 3,500-mile transatlantic passage to New York, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Lardner stated that:
As the project of making the voyage directly from New York to Liverpool, it was perfectly chimerical, and they might as well talk of making the voyage from New York to the moon… 2,080 miles is the longest run that a steamer could encounter – at the end of that distance she would require a relay of coals.
Again, Brunel was able to show that Lardner’s calculations were too simplistic. The principle that Brunel understood, which Lardner did not, was that the carrying capacity of a ship increases as the cube of its dimensions, whilst the water-resistance only increases as the square of its dimensions. This meant that large ships were more fuel efficient, and could carry sufficient coal for the long voyage across the Atlantic. Brunel was proved right when the Great Western steamed into New York harbour with 200 tons of coal to spare.
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