"Young Isambard began to display his talent for drawing when he was only four years old ... Such a precocious display of inherited talent obviously delighted Marc so that he determined to foster it to the limit ... He was first sent to Dr. Morell's boarding school at Hove where the boy amused himself in his spare time by making a survey of the town and sketching its buildings ... Marc always insisted that this drawing habit was as important to an engineer as a knowledge of the alphabet, and it was undoubtedly in this way that both father and son developed such extraordinarily acute powers of observation" (Rolt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 1970, p. 16)