I thought I was supposed to look as if I'd spent the night sleeping under a bridge in order for people to take me seriously.

To the untrained eye, it might have looked like a very complex pier.

Do you see those piers?

Then, in the Middle Ages, engineers discovered that such supports would last even longer if their downstream side was also shaped to offer little resistance to the current.

But then later on we started installing sea level gauges all around the Pacific Ocean. Pretty much every port and harbor in the world has one or two of these.