Isambard Kingdom Brunel

He was responsible for the fastest trains in history. He built innovative new hospitals for Florence Nightingale. His vessels shattered records for crossing the Atlantic and he enabled the laying of the first transatlantic cables. He is probably the greatest engineer in human history. But what toll did his greatness take on his health and personal life? To explore the life and times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Dan is joined by biographer and historian Steven Brindle, author of 'Brunel: The Man Who Built the World'. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:25Dan Snow?

  He was responsible for the fastest trains in history. He built innovative new hospitals for Florence Nightingale. His vessels shattered records for crossing the Atlantic. He built by far the largest movable object in human history. He enabled the laying of the first transatlantic cables. He constructed the first tunnel under a navigable river. He has a far more impressive CV, a greater list of achievements than Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci. The name of this man? Obviously. Eisenbart, Kingdom Brunel.

• 2:12Dan Snow?

  The son of a French refugee, born at the height of the Napoleonic War, who became not only one of the greatest Britons, but one of the greatest engineers of all time. A man who I think probably did more than any other single individual to usher in this modern, hyper-connected world that we recognise today. Talk to us about the man, the legend, Eisenberg King Brunel, who had no chairs in his office, so people couldn't linger. They could get their business done quick, allowing them to move on and move fast. To ask more about this man, we've got Stephen Brindle. He wrote Brunel, The Man Who Built The World, and that very much reflects the character of our conversation. So friends, enjoy this discussion

• 2:55Dan Snow?

  of one of the most remarkable builders in history.

• 3:18Dan Snow?

  Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Dan, thank you very much. Very nice to be here.

• 3:23Dan Snow?

  So Brunel is born in 1806, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. But let's not talk about those wars for a second. Let's talk about Britain, the world that he was born into in terms of engineering and science. What was happening?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Britain and France were the two leading nations in the Western world, where science and technology and engineering were concerned. But they'd always taken radically different approaches. In France, ever since the reign of Louis XIV, there was a top-down regime where the state had corps of engineers and schools of engineers and built roads and bridges. And it did everything for the power of the state. And that was still true under the Napoleonic Empire. But in Britain, the state did really, very little. And everything from building turnpike roads to inventing new kinds of steam engines, to digging deeper coal mines, which you needed steam engines to pump out, building on... Everything happened by private initiative and even the roads, the turnpike roads,

• 4:21Speaker 02

  everything grew out of the fertile soil of provincial England, top down in France, bottom up in England. So we had the Industrial Revolution, they had a political revolution. And Brunel's father, Marcusen Brad Brunel, he was an officer in the French Royal Navy and he was a man of science, but he deploried, he hated the current revolution was taking and so he left, he went into exile in seventeen ninety-three and he went to the United States. But his career there didn't really turn off. In seventeen ninety-nine, he came to Britain to our enormous good fortune. So he's a French emigre coming from this very different culture, but from a country which had a much more advanced culture of academic engineering,

• 5:04Speaker 02

  coming to Britain, which had a culture of industrial achievement made really by people working in workshops. So the Brunels, they were like academically trained scientific engineers, working in a culture of workmen and workshops.

• 5:21Dan Snow?

  Okay, so having said, but not going to mention the Napoleon Wars, I am actually very interested in the dad Brunel Senior's role in industrialising production for the Navy, because this just gets to the heart of everything that made Britain and the Navy great in this period. Tell me about that process.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  When Mark came to Britain in seventeen ninety-nine from the United States, Britain had already been at war with the French Republic for six years. The Republic declared war on England shortly after its proclamation and the Royal Navy had a big job in containing French fleet and preventing an invasion. And Mark Brunel came to England at a time when the Royal Dockyards were under unprecedented strain of keeping hundreds and hundreds of ships at sea. And he did a number of major things for the Royal Navy. The most dramatic between eighteen O two and eighteen O six was he invented and developed a production line to make rigging blocks, those, the wooden blocks that the rigging of sailing ships

• 6:22Speaker 02

  is fed through. A big ship's line might have as many as nine hun- And they wore out with a rope passing through them and they were made by carpenters of benches. And Mark developed a series of steam powered machines with an engineer called Henry Maudslay, which would mechanise this process whereby each machine would carry out a single kind of timber dressing or drilling. There were about eighteen machines, I think, in sequence, all run off a steam engine. And the whole thing could be run by about six men. It was the first, effectively the first factory production line in history. So that was the block mill in Portsmouth.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  And he built a steam powered sort of semi automated sawmill for the naval dockyard in Chatham. And he founded a sawmill in Battersea as a private individual. And he established another company in Battersea which made boots for the army, the original Wellington boot, in fact. So Mark, as an entrepreneur, did things both as a private individual and as a sort of a contracted engineer to the navy. But between eighteen O to eighteen O six, he was setting up this mill, the Portsmouth Block Mill. And that's why he was living in Portsmouth when Isambard was born in eighteen O six.

• 7:45Dan Snow?

  If more proof were needed that chasing away your best scientists to go and find jobs with your strategic rivals is a bad decision, but you know, we've seen that before and we may see it again. Okay, so after the war, after the French war, he actually sends his son Isambard back to France for education. He obviously thinks he's going to get a better technical education there.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yes, well, he was very probably correct there. I mean, English formal education was still very much trapped by the classics, by Greek and Latin. There were places where you could study mathematics and engineering, but they tended to be sort of in Scotland, really. Mark had contacts in Paris and he sent Isambard to be apprentice to an engineer and watchmaker, Louis Burgue, the famous man of watchmakers that still exists. And he had a technical and mathematical education in France as well. So Isambard's education was finished. With mathematical education in Paris, in the workshops of Louis Brugway. And when he came back to England in his late teens, there was another apprenticeship

• 8:46Speaker 02

  with the firm of Mortley Sun and Field, and they were probably the best mechanical engineers in Britain at the time. They were based in Southwark and it was that firm which had made machinery for the Blockham in Portsmouth. So Mark Isambard arranged for Isambard Kingdom for his son to have a mathematical and technical education, which was in Paris and then in London.

• 9:09Dan Snow?

  And then the young fellow comes back and works with his dad, side by side, very nice. And tell me about the famous, the infamous Thames Tunnel.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Well, Mark's career had a dramatic series of ups and downs because he was a very sort of trusting, some people thought almost naive man. He was absolutely brilliant man, but he wasn't really a born businessman. And his business partners weren't always reliable. And there was one very terrible episode in eighteen twenty one where Mark basically was bankrupted. And he and his wife spent about half a year in the King's Bench prison for debt. But he'd already proved his value to the British state in many ways. And the sort of the government loan and a group of friendly, rich individuals sprang from the King's Bench.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  And not long after that, he joined the project to build a tunnel under the Thames. And the point was to have a means of connection between the two sides, two banks of the river, below London Bridge that wouldn't interrupt the shipping. And so a company is founded to build a tunnel. Mark was appointed as its engineer and Mark invented a way of building a tunnel beneath a large body of water, which remember was tidal as well. And he invented something called the tunneling shield. And that is basically the the origin of modern tunneling technology. But whereas modern tunnel boring machines are enormous pieces of kit,

• 10:37Speaker 02

  his involved an iron framework within which two rows of five miners stood and the miners scraped away at the earth ahead of them. And then when they'd scraped away about a yards worth. The tunneling shield was jacked forward on screw jacks and they built the tunnel in sort of rings of brickwork behind them. So they need a hard surface against which to jack the shield forward. And so that was the principle and it did kind of work, but the problem was with the geology of the Thames bed, which was very soft. And in all, between 1823, when they started, and 1843 when it was finished, the tunnel flooded five times.

• 11:17Dan Snow?

  I've seen a comparison with that and a modern tunneling device and they're recognizably similar.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  Well, it's the same principle, except now, of course, the modern tunneling machine has this sort of giant rotating arm which scrapes away at what's ahead of it. Whereas the scraping in Mark's tunneling shield was done by Cornish miners actually standing within the shield. I mean, the principle is the same, that you have a hard surface, which is the lining of the tunnel you're building behind you, against which you jack the machine forward, or in his case, jack the tunneling shield forward. So it did in principle work and the tunnel did get built, but it was an appalling ordeal and several people died in the process and Isambard Jr. was very nearly one of them.

• 12:03Dan Snow?

  Yes, he almost drowned, didn't he? Tell me about that.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Well, Isambard became the resident engineer on the project at the grave age of 21, battling with the Thames always. And there was a first flood and he helped supervise piling bags of clay above where the water had come in. And he went down in the sort of diving bell to inspect it and all that kind of thing. And he spent huge amounts of time in these terrible circumstances in the cupboard, awful heated air, and miners went off sick. And then in 1828, there was a second flood, a really bad one, and Isambard was almost drowned. He was pulled out by the supervisor. And was quite badly injured and the Thames Tunnel was stalled, not quite bankrupted,

• 12:49Speaker 02

  but the company became insolvent, the tunnel was sealed up unfinished and Isambard, both of Brunel's careers seemed to be over. And Isambard Junior went to Bristol to recuperate in eighteen twenty eight and that was kind of the key to his future career.

• 13:07Dan Snow?

  Yes, what happened to him in Brunel?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Well, Bristol was an Atlantic port with a large stake in Britain's Atlantic economy, including the transatlantic slave trade, although the trade itself had been suppressed in eighteen oh seven. And it had large docks, but it was losing in the competition with Liverpool because its docks were about three or four miles up the River Avon, which is tidal. And it had carried out a grand project called Floating Harbour to make a much bigger harbour out of the natural bed of the Avon there. But this wasn't working perfectly. And so the first thing that young Brunel did for them was to carry out works to make the floating harbour, which had been designed by a canal engineer called William Jessop,

• 13:51Speaker 02

  work better, refining the wheels and the water supply and things like that. And while he was there, there was a competition for a suspension bridge above the Avon Gorge at Clifton. And really only doable practically with a suspension bridge. And Isambard Junior put in a first design for this unfeasible huge thing about a thousand feet long. Thomas Telford, the engineer who designed the one really big suspension bridge in existence, the Menai Bridge, said that all the entrants were unfeasible, especially young Mr Brunel's. And so he dismissed them all. And then there was a second competition in eighteen twenty

• 14:32Speaker 02

  nine and Isambard managed to produce a design for a shorter span. It's actually about six hundred and fifty feet across and he won. So he'd won this very high profile competition. And the Clifton Bridge then occupied the rest of his life because it was begun eventually, eventually in about eighteen forty one. The company went into liquidation and there were only the towers built when he died. So the Clifton Bridge, which started right at the beginning of his career, was his first big break, was winning that competition, wasn't actually finished till after his death. The company was resurrected and the bridge finished as a sort of memorial to him by several of his fellow engineers.

• 15:16Dan Snow?

  Give me some of the stats. I mean, it is a record breaking achievement, wasn't it?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  The biggest suspension bridge in existence then was the Menai Bridge by Telford, and that's about a 530 foot clear span. Well, Clifton is a 650 feet clear span, about 670 between the towers, I think. So it was significantly bigger. Thomas Telford sucked his teeth. He thought that Menai Bridge was the biggest there could possibly be.

• 15:40Dan Snow?

  Lots of people will associate Brunel with the railways. I mean, this is a period where engineers could do anything and everything. But is it fair to say he's a railway engineer? Or is that just one of his many hats?

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Yes. His great contributions to mankind are in railway design and in steamship design. He revolutionised steamship transport as well. But the core of his career was always railway building. He was appointed the engineer to what was then called the Bristol Railway in 1833. It turned itself into the Great Western Railway. And he became the engineer to all of its allied lines, which made up a sort of empire spanning the west of England and West Midlands and South Wales. And Brunel's career was centrally about building railways and all the things which go with them from then until his death in 1859.

• 16:35Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan's History. We're talking about Brunel. More coming up after this.

• 16:45Dan Snow?

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• 17:29Speaker 01

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• 19:44Dan Snow?

  So one geeky point here is broad gauge, because I think people need to understand about gauges, because the gauge that nearly all railways around the world, unless you're listening in Russia, are based on is this particular gauge that was just around when George Stephenson was looking to build railways, right?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Well, it's kind of like this. Railways were not a single invention, Dan. They arose out of lots of strands of Georgian provincial England. There was a whole transport network, which had been built over the previous centuries, 20,000 miles of turnpike roads, all the mail coach services running over them, 4,000 miles of canals built as a parallel bulk goods network. And in hundreds of collieries and tramways and ironworks, there were tramways. That is, systems with rails for horse-drawn wagons. And the point is that if you have to pull very heavy loads of coal or stone,

• 20:43Speaker 02

  a bulk good like that, and all you've got is a horse, it's much easier to do in flanged wheels running on rails than in a conventional cart with thick wheels. It's about reducing the resistance. But to make a tramway run with a poor old horse, you've got to keep it very, very level. Otherwise, the horse won't be able to pull it uphill, or if you're going downhill, the whales will thumb into the horse and kill it. So a lot of engineering skill went into designing tramways and keeping them very, very level. But mostly, they were one, two, three, four miles long, because that's all they needed to be. And they were more concerned with coal than anything else.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  So all over England, especially in coal and iron areas, there were tramways. And that is why the first steam locomotives were built in the early 1800s simultaneously in the North East and in South Wales at ironworks. Because they needed to pull around heavy stuff, they thought, hey, why don't we find a way of making an engine to do what the horse does? And that happened simultaneously in the North East and in South Wales, a place called Pennydarrin. And so the first locomotives were built at ironworks which had tramways. And in the North East of England, they built wagons.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  And the standard gauge for coal wagons in the North East of England was about four foot eight and a half inches. Don't ask me why the half inch. And that's what George Stephenson, the greatest locomotive engineer of his day, inherited when he became the apprentice at Killingsworth Colliery in County Durham. Naturally brilliant engineer, and he grew up working with steam locomotives, building steam locomotives, to run on tramways on rails which were set four foot eight and a half inches apart. And that is why the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in 1826 and Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened in 1830 both have galed that spacing.

• 22:51Dan Snow?

  So George Stephenson just takes the gauge that's in front of him and puts a locomotive on it. Brunel's got a much better idea, hasn't he?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Brunel thought this was a very unsatisfactory way of doing things. He thought if you were going to invent a whole new transport system, that you should work out from first principles how it should be constructed. And basically, he thought they needed to allow for bigger boilers on bigger chassis to allow for more powerful locomotives in the future. And he thought that having a low centre of gravity was important for stability. And at four foot eight, what that means is that the boiler has to be carried up high, well above the chassis. And he thought if you had a broader gauge, he said, seven foot wide between the

• 23:38Speaker 02

  rails, you could have the boiler set lower in relation to it, and you would have a lower overall centre of gravity, and that it would be more stable, and that you could cavi a heavy boiler more stably. The problem, of course, is that if you make your rail seven feet apart, not four foot eight inches, everything has to be wide, the track bed, all the bridges, all the bridges out of line, everything has to be bigger and thus more expensive. But Brunel, who had a very magnetic personality, sold this concept, the broad gauge, to the Great Western Railway around the time that they were getting their act

• 24:19Speaker 02

  through Parliament. And so they varied their act to say that the rails could be set a different distance apart. And so from the outset, the Great Western Railway was built according to this wider gauge, but that meant that rolling stock on the GWR could not be run over anyone else's rails. And so Brunel set a different standard for the Great Western Railway to the rest of the country.

• 24:49Dan Snow?

  And it would have been better for trains had that wider gauge become standard, would it?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  I mean, it is arguable that a bigger system allows for bigger rolling stock and would allow freight trains in particular to be larger. But in practice, modern railways have generally developed using smaller gauges than seven foot. And once people started building locomotives regularly, they found ways of overcoming problems in locomotive design of getting more power out of something which nevertheless runs on four foot eight inch gauge. And locomotives became vastly more powerful. So the industry found other ways around the problem. And the GWR was left sort of in the minority.

• 25:38Dan Snow?

  We shouldn't let that detract from the Great Western Railway, which there's this incredibly bold idea. One of the great strategic arteries of 19th century Britain, you've got London, the capital, you've got Bristol, this great port. And was that a commercial success? How did this revolutionise life? And presumably before then, it had taken days to get to Bristol.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Well, Brunel was a phenomenally hardworking man, and he was an extraordinary genius, really. Most people in thinking about transport in England thought about linking towns, about joining the dots, because that's how you did it with roads. But Brunel saw that where a completely new transport mode was concerned, that this was basically a mistake. What you had to do was to identify your major regional centres, London and Bristol, not worry about the small towns in between them particularly, but instead to find the straightest, most level, fastest route between them. And he saw that a network ought to consist of fast

• 26:41Speaker 02

  trunk routes, which should be as flat and level and straight as possible, and the branch lines which link up the smaller towns. Well, it didn't matter if they were slower. And he reasoned that if you planned your network like this, then everything would be faster and more efficient. Now, that might seem obvious to us nowadays, but it wasn't obvious in the early 19th century, where people were still thinking in terms of models based on horses and carriages and turnpike roads.

• 27:13Dan Snow?

  So it's impossible really to overstate his impact on the world because he also, he looked at that main line and he thought, what we need now is we need to take people beyond the land into the sea itself and across the oceans. So he goes into steamship design. Do you master building bridges and tunnels and railway tracks and engines and then turn your hand to ships?

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Brunel himself conceived the idea of an iron ship big enough to carry enough coal to sail to Australia and back in about 1851. And he, by the force of his personality, persuaded the backers of something called the Easton Steam Navigation Company to adopt his design instead of building a load of sort of conventional ships, conventional sailing ships or even smaller steamships, of building this monster, which was going to be about 22,000 tonnes and 660 feet long. And the Great Easton was really the most ambitious project to build any single movable object in all human history. It was so much bigger

• 28:21Speaker 02

  than anything else. It was six times the size of the Great Britain. That ship of about 4,500 tonnes, the first propeller-driven ship on a large scale in history, the first large all iron hull in history. But it ran aground in Ireland a year after its maiden voyage.

• 28:39Dan Snow?

  Yes, that's Great Britain, which people can still go and visit today. It's regarded as one of the wonders of the Industrial Revolution. Again, record-breaking trips across the Atlantic. So he builds the SS Great Britain, breaking more records.

• 28:54Dan Snow?

  And then he builds the Great Eastern. So he just, the ships are getting bigger and bigger now. Are they commercial successes? Or was he ahead of his time? Or were they white elephants?

• 29:03Speaker 02

  The Great Eastern bankrupted the first company, bankrupted the second company, which was founded, taken on. It bankrupted the shipbuilder, John Scott Russell. And when it eventually put to sea in 1859, there was an explosion on board, a simple sort of driver error kind of thing, which almost certainly hastened Brunel's death. It was so stressful. He died about a week after that. The Great Eastern was eventually a commercial success as a cable laying ship, laying the first Tron's Atlantic cables, which probably wouldn't have been possible without a ship with its gigantic hold capacity. So even that found

• 29:46Speaker 02

  a use. But it was an enormously controversial project, and it burnt its way through an awful lot of money, including Brunel's own.

• 29:53Dan Snow?

  He liked Leonardo da Vinci, all sorts of little side hustles as well. He designed on paper, massive artillery pieces for the navy. He designed a flat pack hospital to head out to the Crimean War, and which massively increased levels of hygiene and reduced the suffering and the mortality of the patients there. So he was always tinkering with other things as well.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  He did. For Brunel, his senior role was engineering the Great Western Railway. But he was like a consultant. He wasn't their employee. And so he could always take on other projects. So he could intervene when, for instance, British hospital provision during the Crimean War was a catastrophe. This great Turkish hospital at Skatari with appalling death rates. Yes, he designed a temporary flat pack, timbered hospital, which was built in workshops in London, sailed with a couple of Brunel's engineers out to Turkey and put up at a place called Rentia. And that was sort of just one thing he did at the time. He was a polyvinod restless genius. We know from the office diaries that

• 30:55Speaker 02

  his working day started at about 6am and ran till about 9 or 10pm every day, six days a week. He pretty much worked himself to death at the age of 53, I think. Although the proximate cause was kidney failure.

• 31:12Dan Snow?

  He kind of been an easy man to be married to or to be a lover of. What was his personal life like?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  He married a beautiful society figure, a woman called Mary Horstley in July 1836. She was the daughter of a professional musician who he knew through one of his Bristol contacts, a man called Benjamin Hors, who was a friend of his father's. His letters to her are love letters, there's no doubt that it was a love match. We know very little about Mary herself. She lived at home at Duke Street in Westminster, a building on site of what's now the Treasury, where he also had his head office. And they had three children, there was Isambard Junior, born in 1837, Henry Mark, born in 1842, Florence Mary, born in 1847.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  So he had a home life and his office was at home, so he did see his wife and children pretty much every day, but he did spend a lot of time travelling and there would have been long, long train journeys of inspecting and supervising things. So downstairs at Duke Street was a hive of activity, but upstairs was a serene Victorian family home.

• 32:20Dan Snow?

  But I guess the big question is, like father, like son, did any of his children follow in the footsteps?

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Isambard Junior became an ecclesiastical lawyer, but he did write the first biography of his father, and very good it is too. Henry Mark became an engineer and he had a considerable career, though nothing like at the scale of his father's. He went to work for an engineer called Sir John Wolfe Barry and the thing that he's best remembered for is Tower Bridge. Henry Mark probably designed the structural frame of Tower Bridge as assistant to Sir John Wolfe Barry. Now, neither of them married, neither of them had children, but Florence Mary did marry, and there were quite a lot of Brunel descendants.

• 33:04Dan Snow?

  So, final question, Stephen. We talk a lot, don't we, about the great sort of engineers and thinkers and practical scientists, like Archimedes of the ancient world, we think about them in the Renaissance. Where do you think Brunel rates in terms of history's greatest engineers?

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Well, he's right up there at the top. I would say he's the greatest engineer in history because he's the one with most primitive original thought. And if the ideas didn't always come off, well, great innovators' ideas don't always. I mean, I've had lots of arguments about friends in the engineering history fraternity. There's a big camp who say that Robert Stephenson is actually the greatest engineer because he was a much more reasonable man and he sort of adapted himself to circumstances and realities better than Brunel. But I'd say it's exactly this unreasonable quality in IKB which gives him the edge. As George Bernard Shaw put it, "The unreasonable man expects the world to adapt him. All progress,

• 34:04Speaker 02

  therefore, depends on the unreasonable man."

• 34:07Dan Snow?

  Thank you, Stephen. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Tell me about your book.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Dan, thank you very much. I published a book called Brunel, The Man Who Built the World.

• 34:18Dan Snow?

  Thank you for coming on, Stephen Brindle. That was great fun.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Dan, thank you very much.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up! Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for Watch or iPad required. Addition terms apply for all offers. Outdated technology isn't going to improve a disconnected healthcare system. Next. So what will? At Optum, we wake up every day and work for better. We call it healthy optimism. It's how we use insights and technology to help providers focus less

• 35:16Speaker 03

  on paperwork and more on patients. Will we fix it all overnight? No, but we'll wake up trying again and again until healthcare works as one for everyone. That's healthy optimism. Learn more at optum.com.

• 35:34Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.