Excerpt from Reminiscences of an Old English Civil Engineer, 1858-1908 Half a century of active and continuous employment in the various fields of civil engineering in parts of the world-wide British Empire and in the United States of North America may contain matters of interest to my old and young friends wheresoever they be. The twentieth and thirty-first of January, 1908, were two fiftieth anniversaries in my professional career. The latter date recalled the launching of the Great Eastern steamship at Mill Wall, on the Thames. I believe I am the only living engineer who had been employed by Mr. I. K. Brunel, her designer and builder, in his oflice, and witnessed her construction during 1854-5. I was not a witness of the launching ceremony in 1858, as I was then in India, engaged in the survey and staking out of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, which was to connect Bombay with Calcutta and Madras. C'yrus Field told me in 1871, in New York, that if he had not had the fortunate opportunity to charter this gigantic vessel for the laying of his perfected cable on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean in 1865-6, he could not have made such a success of it. We should realize that the laying of this cable was the most important international link and economic event between England and North America since the first discovery of America by John and Sebastian Cabot in 1497-8. England on this fiftieth anniversary had the opportunity of recalling to mind the great name and master - genius of one of her most famous civil engineers, who had during the first half of the last century designed and built the largest steam vessels - the Great Britain and the Great Western - for international commerce across the Atlantic Ocean. He, too, had had the foresight to realize the fact that growing population and increase of commerce in the future would require a broader width of gauge for railways than the ordi nary old wagon gauge of England. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.