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After the initial success of its first liner, the SS Great Western of 1838, the Great Western Steamship Company collected materials for a sister ship, tentatively named the City of New York. The same engineering team that had collaborated so successfully on Great Western—Isambard Brunel, Thomas Guppy, Christopher Claxton and William Patterson—were again assembled for the new project. This time however, Brunel, whose reputation was at its height, would come to assert almost total control over design of the ship—a decision that would have far-reaching consequences for the company.

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Two chance encounters were to profoundly affect the design of Great Britain. In autumn 1838, John Laird's 213-foot channel packet Rainbow—the largest iron-hulled ship then in service—made a stop at Bristol, where the Great Western Company was preparing to build its new ship. Brunel despatched his associates Christopher Claxton and William Patterson to make a return voyage to Antwerp on Rainbow in order to assess the ship's capabilities. Both men returned as converts to iron-hulled technology, and Brunel scrapped his plans to build a wooden sister ship for Great Western and adopted iron as his working material.

Iron hulls had a number of advantages over the traditional wooden hull. To begin with, wood in Britain was at the time becoming more expensive, while iron was getting cheaper. Iron hulls were not subject to dry rot or woodworm like their wooden counterparts, and they were also lighter in weight and less bulky. The chief advantage of the iron hull however, was its much greater strength. The practical limit on the length of a wooden-hulled ship is about 300 feet, after which the phenomenon of "hogging"—flexing of the hull as waves pass beneath it—becomes too great.

The company's chief engineer, Isambard Brunel convinced the directors to build an entirely different ship, an iron-hulled steamer of unusually large dimensions designed by Brunel, Thomas Guppy, Christopher Claxton and William Patterson. Construction proceeded in a specially adapted dry dock in Bristol, England.

1. Cite error: The named reference gibbs was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
2. "SS Great Britain". Brunel 200. Retrieved 2008-12-31.