The Half-Sovereign

Isambard Kingdom Brunel engineered the impossible. He laid the Great Western Railway to a gauge of his own invention, drove a tunnel under a river that had never been tunnelled, and built the Great Eastern, a ship five times the tonnage of anything then afloat. He did most of it in a stovepipe hat almost as tall as the man beneath it.

He was, in short, a person who solved problems by building a machine.

So when his own body became the problem, the family reached for the family solution.

In April 1843, performing a conjuring trick for his children, Brunel inhaled a half-sovereign gold coin into his right lung. Sir Benjamin Brodie, the finest surgeon in England, opened his throat and failed. The coin stayed put for weeks.

So his father built a device.

Marc Brunel, inventor of the tunnelling shield, designed a hinged wooden board with straps. Isambard was buckled to it, rotated head-downward, and struck repeatedly on the back by assistants while the greatest engineer of the age hung inverted.

On 13 May 1843, the coin dropped out of his mouth.

He would later call it the most exquisite moment of his life.