In the late 1830s Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Western Steamship Company planned a safe wooden paddle steamer to follow their success with the Great Western. Then in 1838 two associates rode the iron-hulled Rainbow, and Brunel switched to iron, which avoided the hogging that limited wooden ships to about 300 feet. In 1840, after seeing the screw-driven SS Archimedes, he scrapped half-built paddle engines for a propeller, delaying the ship nine months and pushing her to 3,400 tons, over 1,000 tons larger than any ship afloat. At the 1843 Bristol launch the tug Avon pulled too early, Clarissa Miles’s champagne bottle fell 10 feet short, and Prince Albert, who arrived on a royal train Brunel drove himself, had to throw a second bottle. The widened, engine-laden hull then could not fit through the harbor locks, and she stayed trapped for over a year until workmen tore down coping stones in December 1844.

Her 1845 maiden voyage took nearly 15 days to New York, and the round-bottomed hull rolled so badly that passengers were sick and propeller blades snapped off, forcing 110-foot bilge keels and a four-bladed propeller. In September 1846 Captain James Hoskin mistook a new lighthouse for one on the Isle of Man and ran her aground in Dundrum Bay, Ireland, where she sat nearly a year behind a breakwater Brunel built. The 34,000 pound rescue bankrupted the company, and the 117,000 pound ship sold for 25,000 pounds. Gibbs, Bright and Company refitted her with 730 berths for the Australian gold rush, and she thrived for decades before ending as a coal bunker in the Falkland Islands, scuttled in 1937.

• A silent chain drive with inverted tooth chains replaced screeching gears, and a hollow shaft carried cooling seawater.
• An 1861 voyage carried 544 passengers, a cow, 36 sheep, 140 pigs, and England’s first cricket team to tour Australia.
• Captain John Gray, her commander for nearly 20 years, vanished from the deck in 1872.
• In 1970, funded by Sir Jack Hayward, she rode the pontoon Mulus III on a 47-day tow and passed under Brunel’s Clifton Suspension Bridge.
• A glass plate and dehumidifiers keep her lower hull at 20 percent humidity to halt chloride-driven rust.