Many commentators agree that artistic and scientific approaches to visual knowledge suffered a split in the latter half of the nineteenth century along an axis that has been loosely characterised as subjective—objective (Daston and Galison 2007: Kemp 1990: Crary 1991). But other practices of non-observational drawing for design for example in engineering also sought to produce knowledge through visual means. At the same time, however, engineering was often promoted as a rational public enterprise through techniques of spectacular display, and although engineers had been recruited as allies of the BAAS in order to proclaim an attachment to the ‘idea of progress’ (Morrell and Thackray 1981: 266) they were often kept in a subordinate position. In the intellectual hierarchy of science, elite engineers had to negotiate the danger that they were possibly too visible. These dilemmas can be examined in the two separate visual practices that mark the career of the engineer David Kirkaldy.

Kirkaldy began his career as a bravura naval draughtsman in the firm of Robert Napier & Sons, but later negotiated his status as a serious experimenter in material testing science by making a stylistic break in his practice whereby he rejected the impressive drawing skills he had developed earlier in his life. Instead he contrived methods by which nature could be made to represent herself graphically in his laboratory of material testing. Although the notion of nature representing herself was most often applied to the adoption of photographic data in science in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Kirkaldy used the same concept in the medium of massive real-world materials such as rolled steel plate. My interest in engineers such as Kirkaldy is in his ability to select from and use a range of visual styles to communicate with different audiences, and in his rhetorical use of technologies of inscription, from hand drawing, to the use of mechanical drawing aids, print techniques, and photography.