Visual representations in engineering in the nineteenth century do not sit easily with accounts of visual knowledge in nineteenth-century science. While engineering was promoted as a rational public enterprise through techniques of spectacular display, engineers who aimed to be taken seriously in the intellectual hierarchies of science had to negotiate the danger that they were possibly too visible. These difficulties can be examined in the visual practices that mark the career of engineer David Kirkaldy. Beginning as a bravura naval draughtsman, Kirkaldy later negotiated his status as a serious experimenter in material testing science, changing his style of visual representation. Although at this point Kirkaldy appeared to adopt the ‘objective’ strategy of getting nature to represent herself in fact Kirkaldy maintained a range of visual styles to communicate with different audiences, making rhetorical use of several technologies of inscription, from hand drawing to photography. This might seem merely pragmatic in comparison to the ethical weight given to the discourse of objective representation in science. Nevertheless, in the messy world of collapsing bridges and legal suits, virtuous engineers had to develop visual knowledge as practical science.