Jeremy Bentham had revolutionized the prison system of England, and had introduced the system of labor in penitentiaries which has become an essential element in all modern penal systems. Woodworking was the most available field of work, but the greater part of the prisoners were of course unskilled, and Samuel Bentham was called upon to devise machines to meet the need. The two brothers established a factory and began making woodworking machinery for the prisons and dockyards. The work for the dockyards soon took definite form. Pulley blocks formed one of the important supplies of the navy. A single full-rigged frigate used about 1500 and the Admiralty were purchasing at that time about 100,000 yearly. This formed a large business in itself and one in which the interchangeability that Bentham was continually urging was especially desirable. On Bentham’s recommendation, a government factory organized on a manufacturing basis and utilizing machinery had been begun at Portsmouth and a few machines of his design already installed, when Brunel, who had been working independently on block machinery, was introduced to him. Marc Isambard Brunel, Fig. 10, was a Norman Frenchman, born in 1769, who was the despair of his father because he would not study to be a priest and would persist in drawing and in making things. As a family compromise he received a naval training and served as an officer for six years. In 1793, his ship being paid off, he was in Paris. His outspoken loyalty in one of the cafés on the very day when Louis XVI was sentenced to the guillotine brought down upon him the anger of the republicans present. He escaped in the confusion, spent the night in hiding, and leaving Paris early the next morning, made his way to Rouen. Here he hid for a time with M. Carpentier, the American consul, in whose home he met a young English girl whom he afterwards married. Six months later he sailed from Havre on a forged passport, under the nose of a frigate searching for suspects, and landed in New York only to find a French republican squadron lying in port. As he was personally known to many of the officers and in danger of being recognized, arrested and condemned as a deserter, he left the city at once and went to Albany in the vague hope of finding M. Pharoux, a friend who was undertaking the survey of a large tract of wild land in the Black River valley, east of Lake Ontario. Brunel found him by good chance, joined the party, and soon became its real leader. They showed the capacity, which the French have always had, of working in friendly relationship with the Indians, and their work was successfully accomplished. Fifty years later there were still traditions among Indians in the valley of a wonderful white man named “Bruné.” [Illustration: FIGURE 10. SIR MARC ISAMBARD BRUNEL FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY WALKER, LTD., OF THE PORTRAIT IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON]