‘Piling up a treasury of knowledge’: Archiving as knowledge production and professional practice in the Stevenson engineering firm

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 produce credible knowledge and authority and considered archival creation and maintenance an obligation for the emerging engineering profession. By analysing historical geographies of document collection, management and use, this article expands understanding of how, where and by whom engineering knowledge was created, legitimised and deployed to reimagine and remake environments and to create and defend a nascent professional identity. In this way, the article extends understanding of the historical geographies of engineering and of the significance of archives as spaces of scientific and professional worldmaking. • Early engineers such as the Stevenson family saw archives as fundamental to professional and scientific worldmaking • Engineers combined archival data with scientific observations to generate knowledge • Women contributed to engineering through managing family business archives • Archives were used to support personal and professional engineering reputations