In 1835, at the same time as work was beginning on the construction of the Great Western railway from London to Bristol, Brunel turned his attention to the sea. In his view, a regular steamship service from Bristol to New York was the logical extension to his railway across the breadth of England and the resulting ships ushered in a new era of transatlantic travel.

The first of them, Great Western, was laid down in Patterson's Yard, Bristol, in July 1836 and launched exctly a year later. Built of wood, she was 236 feet long, registered at 1,340 tons, and her luxurious appointments included 128 first-class berths. Her two- cylinder Maudslay side-lever engines provided 750 h.p. to her paddles and gave her a cruising speed of 9 knots in calm water. Leaving Bristol on 8 April 1838, she completed her maiden voyage to New York in fifteen days and thus began a highly successful career which was to last eighteen years. More profitable by far than either of Brunel's two other ships, Great Britain and Great Eastern, she was sold to the Royal Mail Steam Packet Co. in 1847 who ran her on their Southampton -West Indies route until 1855 when she was hired to transport troops during the Crimean War. Released in 1856, she was by then showing her age, deemed unfit for further service and broken up at Vauxhall on the Thames later that same year.