Towards a historical geography of marine engineering: D. & T. Stevenson, Wick harbour and the management of nature
Section snippets
Histories and geographies of engineering
Where it has been studied geographically, a spatial approach to engineering has often focused on the comparison of either institutions or practices between nations.12
Private finance, public duty and national government
Nineteenth-century Wick and Pulteneytown supported a thriving herring fishery, attracting boats from as far as Lewis in the Western Isles for the summer and often seeing ‘every place blocked up’ in the harbour.23 Fishing was important to the Scottish economy, and in the nineteenth century especially plans were made to maximise profitability and promote the financial integration of Highland and northern Scotland with the rest of Britain.24
The force of the waves
Departing from what Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun describe as the ‘cultural myth that the ocean is outside and beyond history’, recent works have addressed the seas as cultural symbol, a space for the circulation of goods and people, and an element fundamental in the lives of many people.39
The failure of the breakwater
Failure is more complex than things not working or breaking down. For Graeme Gooday, the failure of technologies depends on the criteria applied, which could range from the technological to the cultural or economic.74 The labelling of failure is contingent, temporally and spatially, as it is dependent on the culture of the society within which the
Enduring reputation and the geography of disaster
The Stevenson firm had a stellar reputation in the mid nineteenth century. The sons of highly successful lighthouse engineer, Robert Stevenson, both brothers trained at the family firm.88 Unusually for engineers of their generation, they studied mathematics, natural philosophy and chemistry at the University of Edinburgh while in training and maintained regular contact with its academic staff throughout their careers. Later in life, they became members of the
Conclusion
The association of Wick with extreme wave force was widely adopted in the aftermath of the breakwater project: Wick became a touchstone for failure and extreme nature. The project was used as a point of reference in discussion of the breakwater at Alderney in 1874 at the Institution of Civil Engineers.102 It was mentioned again in
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant number AH/R001588/1. I am grateful to Charles Withers, Chris Fleet and Alison Metcalfe for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also thank Gordon Reid and the archive staff at Nucleus: The Nuclear and Caithness Archive and the staff at the National Library of Scotland for their help and support.
References (0)
Cited by (1)
Plastics in Marine Engineering
2022, Encyclopedia of Materials: Plastics and Polymers