James Watt

“ Soho itself has perished, scarcely a relic remains, but James Watt’s house at Heathfield still exists with relics which will ever be an honour to his genius, and will keep his memory green. All admirers of the genius of Watt will hope and desire that these remains of an industrial hero, a genius of the useful arts, may become a public trust, to show posterity how so illustrious a man of science was valued in his life, and is honoured by those who rejoice in the fruits of his genius and skill. ”

“ James Watt, one of the few men who have united in themselves knowledge of abstract science, great inventive faculties, and rare mechanical skill, changed the steam-engine from a worthless rattletrap into the most useful machine ever invented by man. To do this he first discovered the science of thermodynamics, then invented the necessary appliances, and finally constructed them with his own hands. He was a very exceptional man. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were few engineers who had received any scientific education. ”

“ Those who consider James Watt only as a Pg. 225great practical mechanic form a very erroneous idea of his character; he was equally distinguished as a natural philosopher and a chemist, and his inventions demonstrate his profound knowledge of those sciences, and that peculiar characteristic of genius, the union of them for practical application. The steam engine before his time was a rude machine, the result of simple experiments on the compression of the atmosphere, and the condensation of steam. ”

“ James Watt, the noted mechanician, engineer and scientist, famous as the improver, and almost the inventor of the steam engine, established the horse-power unit, and the figures were fixed in the following curious manner: He found that the average horse of his district could raise 22,000 pounds one foot a minute, and that this was the actual horse-power. ”

“ Of Watt, the genius, possessed of abilities far beyond those of other men, a scientist and philosopher, a mechanician and a craftsman, one who gravitated without effort to the top of every society, and who, even when a young workman, made his workshop the meeting-place of the leaders of Glasgow University for the interchange of views upon the highest and most abstruse subjects—with all this we have already dealt, but it is only part, and not the nobler part. ”

“ Born at Greenock, 1736; died at Heathfield, in Staffordshire, 1819."
One of James Watt's sons, Gregory, who devoted himself to science and literature, died in 1804, at the early age of 27. James, born Feb. 5, 1769, resided for a number of years at Aston Hall, where he died in 1848. In 1817 he voyaged to Holland in the first steam vessel that left an English port, the engines having been manufaictured at Soho. He. was of a very retiring disposition, and not particularly popular with the public, though valued and appreciated by those admitted to closer intimacy. ”

“ The people of Greenock may well indeed feel proud of being citizens of a town that produced such a man; for though many places have given birth to great and valuable men, and persons who rendered the world vast and lasting service, yet, I may safely say, no one has surpassed James Watt in the benefits he has bestowed on the world, on its trade, its commerce, and its means of communication for both body and mind, as the producer of the steam-engine. ”

“ Watt in some sort resembled the greatest and most celebrated of his own inventions; of which we are at a loss whether most to wonder at the power of grappling with the mightiest objects, or of handling the most minute; so that while nothing seems too large for its grasp, nothing seems too small for the delicacy of its touch; which can cleave rocks and pour forth rivers from the bowels of the earth, and with perfect exactness, though not with greater ease, fashion the head of a pin, or strike the impress of some curious die. ”

“ He was not an originator, but a plodding worker, with a rich man’s laboratory, in some of the many paths that had been struck out by others.
At the central table opposite to Dalton sits James Watt, worthily representing Chemistry and Mechanism. Midway is Matthew Boulton, a veritable gentleman of the old English stamp, a man of clear perception, without whom Watt would perchance have been doomed to blossom unseen. It is no light thing to conceive a mechanical idea, and to bring that idea forth and cultivate it, and to cause it to grow up into healthy existence. ”

“ Precisely that single-acting, high-pressure, syringe-engine, made and experimented on by James Watt one hundred and forty years ago in his Glasgow College workshop, now in 1901, with the addition of a surface-condenser cooled by air to receive the waste steam, Pg. 229and a pump to return the water thence to the boiler, constitutes the common-road motor, which, in the opinion of many good judges, is the most successful of all the different motors which have been made and tried within the last few years. ”

“ Watt's invention and all it has led to is only a step on the way to harnessing the forces of nature to the service of man. Do you doubt that other inventions will work changes even more sweeping than those which the steam engine has brought?
Consider a moment. The problem of which Watt solved a part is not the problem of inventing a machine, but the problem of using and storing the forces of nature which now go to waste. Now to us who live on the earth there is only one source of power—the sun. ”

“ He recognised in Watt at their first interview, not only the original inventive genius, but the indefatigable, earnest, plodding and thorough mechanic of tenacious grip, and withal a fine, modest, true man, who hated bargaining and all business affairs, who cared nothing for wealth beyond a very modest provision for old age, and who was only happy if so situated that without anxiety for money to supply frugal wants, he could devote his life to the development of the steam engine. ”

“ During most of the century after James Watt had produced his parallel motion, the problem of devising a linkage, one point of which would describe a straight line, was one that tickled the fancies of mathematicians, of ingenious mechanics, and of gentlemanly dabblers in ideas. The quest for a straight-line mechanism more accurate than that of Watt far outlasted the pressing practical need for such a device. Large metal planing machines were well known by 1830, and by midcentury crossheads and crosshead guides were used on both sides of the Atlantic in engines with and without working beams. ”

“ James Watt was then taking his first elementary lessons in that science, his practical application of which in after life was to revolutionize the whole system of mechanical movement, and place an almost unlimited power at the disposal of the industrial classes. ”

“ A new world had sprung forth in Watt's brain, for nothing less has the steam engine given to man. One reads with a smile the dear modest man's deprecatory remarks about the condenser in after years, when he was overcome by the glowing tributes paid him upon one occasion and hailed as having conquered hitherto uncontrollable steam. ”

“ Skilled workmen do not have to fashion the parts. They only stand looking on at machinery—itself made by automatic tools—performing work of unerring accuracy. Had Watt had at his call only a small part of the inventory resources of our day, his model steam engine might have been named the Minerva, for Minerva-like, it would have sprung forth complete, the creature of automatic machinery, the workmen meanwhile smilingly looking on at these slaves of the mechanic which had been brought forth and harnessed to do his bidding by the exercise of godlike reason. ”

“ All this stupendous force is evolved, concentrated and regulated by science from the most unpromising of substances, cold water. Nothing man has discovered or imagined is to be named with the steam engine. It has no fellow. Franklin capturing the lightning, Morse annihilating space with the telegraph, Bell transmitting speech through the air by the telephone, are not less mysterious—being more ethereal, perhaps in one sense they are even more so—still, the labor of the world performed by heating cold water places Watt and his steam engine in a class apart by itself. ”

“ James P. Muirhead, The Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt, London, 1854, vol. 1, pp. 56, 64. This work, in three volumes, contains letters, other documents, and plates of patent specification drawings.
The contributions of Boulton and Watt to practical mechanics "in great" cannot be overestimated. There were in the 18th century instrument makers and makers of timekeepers who had produced astonishingly accurate work, but such work comprised relatively small items, all being within the scope of a bench lathe, hand tools, and superb handwork. ”

“ We confess [says the author of the work quoted] that such an eulogium is rather exaggerated, especially in a country that has produced a Newton; for we can speak from personal experience that, in society, James Watt was a most repellent character, and appeared to treat every man with contempt and indifference who could not converse on pistons, cylinders and boilers. [subnote 6] In other respects, the speech of Lord Liverpool was such as might have been expected from so great and enlightened a mind ”

“ It was an English blacksmith, Newcomen, with no opportunities, who in the seventeenth century conceived the idea of moving a piston by the elastic force of steam; but his engine consumed thirty pounds of coal in producing one horse power. The perfection of the modern engine is largely due to James Watt, a poor, uneducated Scotch boy, who at fifteen walked the streets of London in a vain search for work. ”

“ Captain Keir, an excellent practical chemist, a wit and a man of learning; Dr. Small, the accomplished physician, chemist and mechanist; Josiah Wedgwood, the practical philosopher and manufacturer, founder of a new and important branch of skilled industry; Thomas Day, the ingenious author of "Sandford and Merton"; Dr. Darwin, the poet-physician; Dr. Withering, the botanist; besides others who afterward joined the Soho circle, not the least distinguished of whom were Joseph Priestley and James Watt. ”

“ Watt retired from the firm of Boulton & Watt in 1800, Matthew Boulton going out at the same time, leaving the business to their sons, James Watt, junior, and Matthew Robison Boulton. After his retirement from Soho James Watt pursued at his residence, Heathfield Hall, near Birmingham, various inventions in the workshop which he had fitted up there. He also continued his interest in Greenock, and gave to this town a library in 1816. In 1819, on 25 Aug., Watt died at Heathfield, in his eighty-fourth year, and was buried in St. ”

“ Dr. Black, the discoverer of latent heat, upon his death-bed, hears that the Watt patent has been sustained, and is for the time restored again to interest in life. He whispers that he "could not help rejoicing at anything that benefited Jamie Watt."
The Earl of Liverpool, prime minister, stated that Watt was remarkable for
the simplicity of his character, the modesty of his nature, the absence of anything like presumption and ostentation, the unwillingness to obtrude himself, not only upon the great and powerful, but even on those of the scientific world to which he belonged. ”

“ Watt went to Berwick-on-Tweed to make the required declaration before a Master in Chancery. In August, 1768, we find him in London about the patent, where he became so utterly wearied with the delays, and so provoked with the enormous fees required to protect the invention, that he wrote his wife in a most despairing mood. She administered the right medicine in reply, "I beg you will not make yourself uneasy though things do not succeed as you wish. If the engine will not do, something else will; never despair." Happy man whose wife is his best doctor. ”

“ But his virtues and charms as our fellow-man still shine steadily upon our paths and will shine upon those of our successors for ages to come, we trust not without leading us and them to tread some part of the way toward Pg. 241the acquisition of such qualities as enabled the friend of James Watt to declare his belief that "a more excellent and amiable man in all the relations of life never existed." A nobler tribute was never paid by man to man, yet was it not undeserved. ”

“ We meet one stranger, and stranger he remains to the end of the chapter. We meet another, and ere we part he is a kindred soul. Magnetic attraction is sudden. So with these two, who, by a kind of free-masonry, knew that each had met his affinity. The Watt engine was exhaustively canvassed and its inventor was delighted that the great, sagacious, prudent and practical manufacturer should predict its success as he did. ”

“ Black's fame rests upon his theory of latent heat; Watt's fame as the discoverer of the total heat of steam should be equally great, and would be no doubt had his rôle of inventor not overshadowed all his work. ”

“ There can be no question that we have for our example, in the man Watt, a nature cast in the finest mold, seemingly composed of every creature's best. Transcendent as were his abilities as inventor and discoverer, we are persuaded that our readers will feel that his qualities as a man in all the relations of life were not less so, nor less worthy of record. ”