He was born at 2 Baxters Place[2] in Edinburgh, on 22 July 1818, the youngest son of engineer Robert Stevenson, and his wife (and step-sister) Jean Smith.

Thomas Stevenson was a devout and regular attendee at St. Stephen's Church in Stockbridge, at the north end of St Vincent Street, Edinburgh.

The book was based on an article he had originally written for the Encyclopædia Britannica, and covered the principles and practices involved in harbour design and construction.

The work discussed the geological and physical features affecting harbour design, the generation and impact of waves, along with construction materials and masonry types for quay walls.

In the course of his work as a lighthouse and harbour engineer, Stevenson had made observations of wave heights at various locations in Scotland over a number of years.

In 1852, he published a paper in which he suggested that waves increased in height by a ratio approximate to the square root of their distance from the windward shore.

Modern analysis of Stevenson's formula indicates that it appears to conservatively estimate wave heights for wind speeds up to around 30 miles per hour, being based on his observations which most likely were taken for fetch lengths under 100 kilometres, without fully developed seas.

The breakwater at Wick was exposed to a fetch length of approximately 500 kilometres, and wind speeds far in excess of 30 miles per hour, prior to its eventual destruction.

[17] Under conditions were the wind blows for a sufficiently long time, for example during a prolonged storm, the wave height and period can be calculated as follows: In these formulae, g denotes the acceleration due to gravity, which is approximately 9.807 m/s2.

For conditions approximate to those for the Wick breakwater during a storm (fetch length of 500km, wind speed of around 75mph), the graph below shows that Wilson's method predicts a significant wave height (H1/3) of around 1.5 times that of Stevenson's.

Stevenson's design featured a rubble mound extending to 5.5 metres above the low water mark, following the Crane Rocks.

[15][22][24] Stevenson noted, in correspondence with the Institution of Civil Engineers, that a single storm had at one stage removed 1,350 tonnes of material from the breakwater, but he was unable to provide the height of the waves during the event.

Their son was the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who initially caused him much disappointment by failing to follow the engineering interests of his family.