James Watt

by Ben Russell

  JAMES WATT

  JAMES WATT

  Making the World Anew

  BEN RUSSELL

  REAKTION BOOKS

  Published in association with the Science Museum, London

  For Lisa and Eli

  Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

  33 Great Sutton Street

  London EC1V 0DX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  In association with

  Science Museum

  Exhibition Road

  London SW7 2DD, UK

  www.sciencemuseum.org.uk

  First published 2014

  Copyright © SCMG Enterprises Ltd 2014

  Science Museum ® SCMG

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgments and

  Index match the printed edition of this book.

  Printed and bound in Great Britain

  by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall

  A catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  eISBN: 9781780234021

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION: Do We Want the Dust?

  ONE: Sensible, Ingenious and Enterprising Men, 1736–56

  TWO: Artists of High Reputation, 1757–64

  THREE: Looking for a Living, 1764–74

  FOUR: Gentlemen of Merit and Ingenuity, 1765–81

  FIVE: Steam Mill Mad? 1781–95

  SIX: Inventive, Creative Genius, 1795–1819

  SEVEN: Life after Death, 1800–1924

  James Watt: A Chronology

  References

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  James Watt’s workshop at his Birmingham home, 1924, just before it was dismantled and moved to the Science Museum, London.

  INTRODUCTION

  Do We Want the Dust?

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF 29 December 1924, Edward Collins stood alone, in a large, empty room at the top of a house on the edge of Birmingham. Outside the window, slates on the roofs of an adjoining wash house and dairy were beginning to slip, chimney pots leaned at odd angles, the trees were without leaves and a line of old lamp standards leaned against a wall from which the paint was flaking. The house had been uninhabited for four years and was about to be demolished.1 Edward Collins was middle-aged, an architect by training, a ‘most careful & painstaking man’, fastidious about detail, just like his father, who had been his predecessor in the same post.2 He also described himself as a ‘one-man job’, with no colleagues, and he had not had a holiday since 1914, ten years earlier.3 But despite this, he sat down on 29 December and wrote to Sir Henry Lyons, Director of the Science Museum in London. The letter asked: ‘The whole of the dust on the floor of the Room was swept up and put in a box for me to sort over at my leisure . . . Am I to understand that there is no possible chance of you requiring the dust?’4

  Answering the question of why Collins felt obliged to collect the dust from the room and send it to the Science Museum in London requires some elaboration. The room in question was the workshop of the late engineer James Watt. It was on the top floor of Heathfield, the house he had built for his family in 1790, and Collins was the man responsible for looking after the property. Born in 1736 in Greenock, Scotland, and dying in 1819 in Birmingham, Watt is best known for his work on the steam engine, which became a symbol of Britain’s nineteenth-century industrial prowess, and he was the first engineer to be elevated into the pantheon of national heroes alongside soldiers and statesmen. He spent much of his time in the workshop after retiring from a long and fruitful career in 1800, and it contains a comprehensive physical record of the projects he undertook during that career. Upon his death in 1819, the workshop was locked up and preserved for 105 years. In 1924, Watt’s associations with steam power, and his by then long-standing position as a revered historical figure, saw the workshop acquired by the Science Museum in London and re-erected for public display. It was during the preparations for the latter that Collins wrote to the museum about the dust.

  As it happens, the Science Museum decided against acquiring the dust. In February 1925, Collins again wrote to Henry Lyons, ‘I also am sending . . . a parcel containing . . . all the small articles found by me in the dust swept up from floor of Room, nails out of walls, also 1/2 dozen of the nails used to fasten down floor boards, these are rather interesting.’5 This is a little disappointing because, if the reader will forgive the slight stretching of a scientific point, the dust would have represented the DNA, not just of the steam engine, but of the many other projects that Watt worked on as well: plaster of Paris for copying sculptures, chemical substances of different types, iron filings and turnings, maybe bits of brass and glass from scientific instruments. The dust represented the multifaceted nature of Watt’s career.

  The profusion of projects that Watt undertook is also reflected in the nature of the workshop’s larger objects. They don’t only represent the man Thomas Carlyle described as ‘Watt of the Steam engine . . . this man with blackened fingers, with grim brow . . . searching out, in his Workshop, the Fire-secret’.6 The fragments associated with the engine, hidden in the drawers and boxes, could be counted on the fingers of two hands. Rather, the workshop is filled with hand tools and materials of all sorts for wood- and metalwork and making scientific and musical instruments, chemicals, ceramics, sculpture, personal items, pottery, fragments of projects partly completed or gone awry and things set aside because of their personal associations or in case they might come in handy sometime. In one sense, the workshop was a personal museum for Watt as well as an active workspace. But above all, it is a shrine to making things.

  This is a book about making things during Britain’s Industrial Revolution, covering the period roughly from 1760 until 1820. Broadly, it will look at the making of goods associated with Britain’s booming eighteenth-century industries, from scientific instruments and decorative metalware to cotton and pottery. Within those parameters, it will concentrate more particularly on the machine that became emblematic of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: the steam engine. The book will explore the extent to which the engine developed alongside, and depended upon, a range of handicraft practices honed in those other industries, and in other trades besides, from chemistry to blacksmithing and foundry work. The engine was as much a cultural machine as a scientific one, and the culture it emerged from was in large part one of making (and possessing) things, not just thinking about them. The major point to be made is that, over the period in question, the transition from making by hand to making by machine was slow, piecemeal and not a done deal: manufacture by machine remained a promise to be fulfilled long into the nineteenth century, not during the eighteenth. For this reason we might call this book a craft history of the Industrial Revolution, or a prehistory of engineering.

  Recent surveys of the Industrial Revolution have emphasized the creation in Britain of a ‘knowledge economy’, which succeeded because it could generate ‘useful knowledge’ and disseminate it to those who might exploit it commercially. In doing so, historians have created detailed theories of knowledge covering categories such as ‘propositional’ and ‘prescriptive’ know-how – the former concerning phenomena identified in the natural world, and the latter concerning how things work. And the processes by which the former crossed over into the latter have also been analysed in detail: the historian Joel Mokyr has described them as the centrepiece of an ‘Industrial Enlightenment’.7

  Having the infrastructure to support the widest possible flow
of ideas was no doubt important to Britain’s economy as it industrialized during the later eighteenth century. However, it seems counter-intuitive to place such a large emphasis on a single factor: the relationship between theoretical knowledge and its shop-floor applications is difficult to define precisely. J. D. Cassini, director of the Paris Observatory, wrote that the inferiority of French scientific-instrument makers compared with the English ‘comes from their profound theoretical ignorance; the Ramsdens, the Dollonds are geometers and physicists, our best makers are but workmen.’8 It may also be possible to trace links between scientific discovery and technological practice for men like James Watt, his business partner Matthew Boulton and the potter Josiah Wedgwood. The historian Peter Jones has claimed for them the status of savant-fabricants, individuals bestriding both the scientific and practical communities, and their exploits are well documented.9 But many other practical people, while they undoubtedly worked ‘in a milieu in which the effects of the Enlightenment were pervasive’, had little if any direct interest in science; or, at least, there is relatively little information to confirm that they did.10 Watt, speaking of those he employed to erect steam engines in 1794, wrote how ‘most of our Engineers who have not been regularly bred to the theoretical or practical part of the business, have been bred to analogous ones, such as millwrights, architects, surveyors etc. from which having almost all the previous learning it is easy to step to the other otherwise it must be uphill work’.11 ‘On-the-job’ training produced skilled and knowledgeable men just as effectively as a more scholarly approach.

  This is not to deny that scientific knowledge influenced how things were made. ‘Science’ remained a potent force in making and manufacturing artefacts: the instruments that measured with increasing precision, the detailed understanding of chemistry that underpinned pottery and the evolving understanding of the internal workings of the steam engine, for example. However, we will attempt to move beyond abstract, theoretical science towards science that depended on physically carrying out experiments – manipulating heat and materials, for example – often in ways that were distinctly ‘industrial’ in character. And we will also explore how science was just one of a number of factors that influenced how and why things were made.

  First, however, we have to manoeuvre into a position from which we can see what those other factors could have been. The major issue to be addressed in moving beyond a purely scientific analysis is that, while new scientific facts and concepts were expressed in eminently portable form, written about and discussed in coffee houses, transmitted by lecturers and newspapers, so making things relied far more on the diametric opposite: tacit knowledge – what Joseph Moxon described in his Mechanick Exercises as ‘cunning, or sleight, of Craft of the Hand, which cannot be taught by words, but is only gained by practice and exercise’.12 This knowledge, encompassing ‘dexterity . . . technical savoir-faire . . . experience, skills, and practical knowledge of energy and materials’, could be conveyed only by lengthy hands-on training, and stored, not in written form, but in the minds of thousands of workers, craftsmen and artisans.13 The question arises: can we get inside their minds to establish what they knew about the processes of making?

  The answer is not quite as indecipherable as it might appear. Recent research by Celina Fox on the people and processes of eighteenth-century manufacturing has shown that model-making, drawing, societies and publications were basic tools of experimentation and invention in industrial processes.14 One of Fox’s main objectives has been to show that these ‘scientific’ ways of working owed a lot to ‘the pragmatic methods of artisan culture’, and it is implicit in this that artisans could be claimed as practical men with just as much validity as with which they could be appropriated as men of science.15 This approach helps us begin to unpick the inner workings of the minds of those who made things. But concentrating on how artisans communicated ideas and knowledge to each other is, in a sense, still one step removed from establishing what people actually did and why, and it places the analytical emphasis after a project has progressed and has news to report to the wider world.

  We can go further than this: as well as the sources that Fox draws upon, there exists a huge range of three-dimensional tools, materials and finished artefacts that craftsmen and artisans used and generated in their everyday working lives. These objects survive in abundance in museum collections and comprise almost the entire contents of Watt’s workshop. The sheer profusion of tools and materials there and elsewhere illustrates both the huge range of artisanal experience in Britain’s Industrial Revolution and the character of the Industrial Revolution as being as much about simple tools, small machines and skilled labour as it was about steam engines and automatic processes.16 As well as three-dimensional artefacts, there is also more information available about the processes of making than initially meets the eye. It is available in accounts across a range of subject areas: James Keir or Joseph Black in chemistry, Robert Campbell or Joseph Moxon in the handicraft trades and William Creighton, John Farey, Thomas Tredgold or Abraham Rees in machine making, for example. Sometimes it is contained in formidable multi-volume works of literature like Charles Holtzapffel’s Turning and Mechanical Manipulation, published from 1843, and at other times it is scattered in all manner of technical proceedings, accounts, catalogues and trade literature. But it exists and has been drawn on for this book.

  We can use these myriad sources on tools and techniques to delve into the world of making things during the eighteenth century. As Maurice Daumas has written regarding the construction of scientific instruments, it ‘demands that the work of both scholars and constructors [my italics] be taken into account, for although the instrument itself might be based on theoretical knowledge its invention was only achieved when a craftsman succeeded in giving it material form.’17 This neatly encapsulates the importance and power of those people in Britain who made things. It was in their work – on the bench, in the foundry or fitting shop and at industrial sites across Britain – that the abstract ideas, cultures and mentalities of science collided with the need to make and sell a tangible product. Watt’s ‘perfect’ engine is a great example of this: it was an astonishing concept, a feat of experimental science, conceptual understanding and precision engineering, but that didn’t stop the men erecting it on a windy cliff top in Cornwall, unloading it from a wagon by the simple expedient of just tipping the entire wagon onto its side.18

  Exploring the world of making has two key questions, then. First, how were things made? In answering this, a number of interconnected strands recur throughout the book, and they are briefly summarized here. Artisans had to develop products which could be sold. In doing so they took into account both new knowledge and ideas, and also the needs of the markets they served. The range of products made was enormous, encompassing what we now class as industrial goods such as production machines, and consumer goods such as clocks or ceramic wares. The interplay between them turns up some interesting contrasts: how Matthew Boulton aimed to make steam engines in the same way as he previously produced buttons, or the relationship between clockmakers and factory-builders, for instance.

  Artisans worked extensively to identify, acquire and find uses for new materials. Britain possessed an abundance of materials that could potentially be exploited: timber was supplemented and frequently superseded by cast and wrought iron and other metals, such as brass. Processes of making were often associated with the places where raw materials could most easily be accessed. In the Staffordshire Potteries, inhabitants had the right to extract clay wherever it could be found on common land – most often where the passage of vehicles had made deep ruts in the roads, which were immediately exploited, leaving dangerous ‘potholes’ behind.

  Artisans organized production to work materials into finished products. Many trades developed a considerable division of labour, with each worker specializing in a particular job. This made them very fleet of foot, able to turn out established product lines quickly or switch to new produc
ts if necessary. The range of organizational possibilities was huge: from large concerns like Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory, which employed upwards of 500 people, to tiny one-man businesses operating from a garret at home. Although the long-term trend was towards the former, the latter proved extremely resilient, which is a tribute to the staying power of skilled practical people who survived on their wits.

  Artisans innovated in the techniques used in their manufacturing processes, devising many new ones but often amplifying and reinventing those that were well-established and applying them under new circumstances to new materials and products. Although histories of industrialization have often emphasized the increasing use of machines to make machines, considerable capabilities remained in the hands of individual craftsmen using relatively simple tools. At several points, we will explore the role of the senses in fields as diverse as metalworking, chemistry and pottery; no doubt others could be added to this brief list. And across a similar range of trades, one of the most valuable abilities was being able to accurately judge temperature by eye. Heat was not just a subject for scientific experimentation but comprised a practical workaday tool, too. Finally, where possible, the means by which techniques could be scaled up, from making scientific instruments to steam engines, for example, will be explored, as will the ways in which techniques could be transferred from one trade or industrial sector to another.

  Lastly, artisans had to find a way to market their finished product. They might rely most on trade networks and word of mouth for work that was ‘put out’ or subcontracted from other makers. Alternatively, direct contact with customers could be best achieved by running a more high-profile retail operation. The importance of marketing was reflected in a profusion of trade cards, advertisements and directories, which were often illustrated and gave details of a producer’s products and capabilities.