In the 1850s, Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed a ship roughly six times larger by volume than anything afloat: 692 feet long, over 32,000 tons, built to carry 4,000 passengers and enough coal for a round trip to Australia without refueling. The Great Eastern combined a screw propeller, paddle wheels and six masts because no single engine of the era could move that much iron. Its double cellular hull, riveted by hand from 30,000 plates, made it revolutionary and ruinously heavy.

This episode traces the ship’s catastrophic sideways launch on the Thames in 1857, Brunel’s fatal stroke days before sea trials, a maiden voyage with 35 paying passengers and a crew of over 400, a hurricane that sheared off both paddle wheels, and an 83-foot gash that the double hull survived. It then follows the vessel’s second life laying the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, its obsolescence after the Suez Canal opened in 1869, and its final years as a floating billboard before an 18-month scrapping.

• Why Brunel bet on the geometry of scale to monopolize trade with the East
• How static friction paralyzed a 12,000-ton hull on the launch rails for three months
• How passenger Hamilton Towle rigged anchor chains to steer the crippled ship
• Why cable tanks had to be cylindrical and the hull painted white for the Indian Ocean
• The debunked legend of a riveter sealed inside the double hull