Arthur Mellen Wellington (December 20, 1847 – May 17, 1895)[1] was an American civil engineer who wrote the 1877 book The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways.

[5] Wellington left the South Carolina road and went on to practice location engineering for the Dutchess & Columbia railroad in New York state.

[1][5] He left that road in 1870 to work on the Buffalo, New York & Philadelphia railroad as a division engineer for the next three years.

[5] He continued in this position until the financial panic of 1873 put a sudden stop to railway construction.

[6] The famous quotation, 'An engineer can do for a dollar what any fool can do for two," is a shortened version of this statement below, which appears in the introduction to his magnum opus, "The Economic Theory of the Location of Railways," published in 1877: "It would be well if engineering were less generally thought of, and even defined, as the art of constructing.