The American civil engineer Arthur M. Wellington wrote a book on how to lay out railroads, The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways. In its introduction he wrote that engineering is “rather the art of not constructing.” Then he defined it “rudely but not inaptly.” It is “the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.”
Wellington was editor and part owner of Engineering News. He died in 1895. His idea is still repeated in a shorter form: “An engineer can do for a dollar what any fool can do for two.”