All Outputs (4)

‘Piling up a treasury of knowledge’: Archiving as knowledge production and professional practice in the Stevenson engineering firm (2025)
Journal Article
Dishington, R. (2025). ‘Piling up a treasury of knowledge’: Archiving as knowledge production and professional practice in the Stevenson engineering firm. Journal of Historical Geography, 88, 157-167. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2025.05.001

Archives were a significant site of engineering work in the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the case study of the Stevenson family engineering firm, this article argues that engineers consciously and intentionally collected documents to... Read More about ‘Piling up a treasury of knowledge’: Archiving as knowledge production and professional practice in the Stevenson engineering firm.

Historical geographies of engineering: knowledges, practices, identities (2024)
Journal Article
Dishington, R. (2024). Historical geographies of engineering: knowledges, practices, identities. Geography Compass, 18(11), Article e70011. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.70011

Drawing on established scholarship in the historical geography of science, the history of technology, and science and technology studies, this paper argues for the significance of an historical geography of engineering. Large-scale and transformative... Read More about Historical geographies of engineering: knowledges, practices, identities.

Extreme Outrageous And (Un)reliable Navigating Uncertainty In The Development Of Sound-based Fog Signals In Scotland 1860 -1900 (2024)
Journal Article
Dishington, R. (in press). Extreme Outrageous And (Un)reliable Navigating Uncertainty In The Development Of Sound-based Fog Signals In Scotland 1860 -1900. Technology and Culture,

In the late nineteenth century, engineers at Scotland’s Northern Lighthouse Board developed and managed an increasingly complex network of sound-based fog signals. From only five bell signals in 1873, the Scottish network grew to thirty-seven sound s... Read More about Extreme Outrageous And (Un)reliable Navigating Uncertainty In The Development Of Sound-based Fog Signals In Scotland 1860 -1900.

‘The very term mensuration sounds engineer-like’: measurement and engineering authority in nineteenth-century river management (2024)
Journal Article
Dishington, R. (2024). ‘The very term mensuration sounds engineer-like’: measurement and engineering authority in nineteenth-century river management. British Journal for the History of Science, 57(1), 21-41. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0007087423000948

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... Read More about ‘The very term mensuration sounds engineer-like’: measurement and engineering authority in nineteenth-century river management.