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Measurement was vital to nineteenth-century engineering. Focusing on the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, this paper explores the processes by which engineers made their measurements credible and explains how measurement, as both a product and a practice, informed engineering decisions and supported claims to engineering authority. By examining attempts made to quantify, measure and map dynamic river spaces, the paper analyses the relationship between engineering experience and judgement and the generation of data that engineers considered to be 'tolerably correct'. While measurement created an abstract and simplified version of the river that accommodated prediction, this abstraction had to be connected to and made meaningful in real river space despite acknowledged limitations to measuring practice. In response, engineers drew on experience gained through the measuring process to support claims to authoritative knowledge. This combination of quantification and experience was then used to support interventions in debates over the proper use and management of rivers. This paper argues that measurement in nineteenth-century engineering served a dual function, producing both data and expertise, which were both significant in underpinning engineering authority and facilitating engineers' intervention in decision making for river management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the complex relationship between natural forces and human attempts to control them in the nineteenth century with reference to a failed harbour development project undertaken in Wick in Caithness, Scotland between 1863 and 1877 by the British Fishery Society and the engineering firm D. & T. Stevenson. The paper highlights how modernist ideas that engineering could and should control nature for human ends were challenged and reshaped by geographically and historically specific discourses, including public duty and responsibility; adversarial nature and the danger of the sea; notions of failure, its meanings and its role in engineering; and the contested epistemological, reputational and experiential nature of expertise. Rather than see an historical geography of marine engineering as about successfully directing nature for human ends – shaping a new geography through technical progress – the paper calls for attention to the implications of failure. This emphasis complicates geographical narratives of progress, technological dominance and human control of the sea. • Explores representations of the failure of Wick breakwater between 1868 and 1877. • Argues that engineers explained failure though the metaphor of conflict with nature. • Shows the importance of personal reputation in gaining support for engineering works. • Examines how local residents challenged claims to engineering expertise. • Argues for the importance of a geographical approach to the analysis of historical engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]