SS Great Eastern

Seven Wonders of the Industrial World

The SS Great Eastern was the last and most ambitious ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, built with the shipbuilder John Scott Russell at Millwall on the Thames. Launched sideways in January 1858 after months of difficult attempts, she was about 211 metres long, more than six times the size of the ships of her day, and combined paddle wheels, a screw propeller and sails. She was meant to carry enough coal to sail to Australia without refuelling, but the company that commissioned her ran into financial trouble and her commercial passenger career was disappointing. Brunel died in 1859, days after a stroke aboard her on the eve of her first voyage. She found her true role in laying cables: in 1866 the Great Eastern laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable, and then recovered and completed the one lost the year before, a landmark in global communication. Later she served as a cable ship and, briefly, a floating advertisement, before being broken up in the late 1880s on the Mersey. The ship does not survive. What remains are the launch site at Millwall, where the slipway timbers can sometimes be seen at low tide, archives, models and photographs, including remarkable images taken during the launch. The Brunel Museum at Rotherhithe has an exhibition on her, and Brunel’s surviving ship, the SS Great Britain, can be visited in Bristol. The photograph shows the ship in New York harbour in 1860.