ABSTRACT
As Robert Stephenson's career as a consulting engineer developed from the early 1840s, he became involved with schemes for water supply to towns, main drainage, improvement and control of river regimes, fen drainage, docks, harbours and coastal works. Having arrived in the port of La Guayra on the Caribbean Sea coast of Venezuela he was asked to consider schemes for the harbour, including the relative merits of a breakwater or a pier. In 1845 Stephenson teamed up with James Rendel to consider a greatly-enlarged harbour for Margate. They submitted a Plan and Report to the Commission on the State of Tidal Harbours and requesting the 'favourable consideration of Her Majesty's Government'. The ingenuity required to capture water, to make it potable and to distribute it to communities over increasing areas has engaged some of the greatest military and civil engineers through the centuries.
