The engineering magazine ENR used to be called the Engineering News-Record. It was created in 1917 by the merger of two long-time rivals, the Engineering News and the Engineering Record. The Engineering Record went through a series of names early in its history, as it absorbed some other small magazines and searched for an audience. The earliest version of the Engineering Record, starting in 1878, had the words “Sanitary Engineer” in its title because it focused not on the structural sub-field of civil engineering, but on the water supply and sewerage subfield of civil engineering.
The image above is the masthead of the magazine as printed in volume 5, in 1882. (Click on it to enlarge.) All of the letters in “SANITARY ENGINEER” except for the S are represented as flanged pipe; the S is a stylized trap and cleanout, representing the invention that made interior toilets safe by protecting buildings from an inflow of “sewer gas,” which is largely methane.
I cannot describe how great this is. In an era before digital publishing and image manipulation, it took a real artist to do something as goofy as making words out of plumbing fixtures in such a way that both the language and the plumbing are legible. We think of the victorians as being straight-laced and we think of engineering journals as being straight-laced. Yet somehow, in 1882, an artist, an editor, and a publisher thought this was a good idea. Maybe people don’t always live up to our stereotypes; maybe the past is more complicated than we tend to think.
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