by Ben Russell
By June 1756 Watt was preparing to return to Scotland. He had been in London for one year, less than the full seven-year apprenticeship usual at the time, but he had the makings of a ‘sensible, ingenious and enterprizing Man, who plans and executes with equal Expedition’ – a later description of Birmingham industrialist Matthew Boulton, but one which seems apt for Watt, too.107 In short he had that blend of entrepreneurial skills – how to negotiate the social networks and structures governing everyday life and how to wield the tools of polite commerce – which characterized so many of Britain’s artisans and craftsmen. To exploit what he had learned to its fullest extent, he needed now to be fully exposed to the great ideas and issues that were being hotly discussed – and this is what awaited him as he was appointed instrument maker to Glasgow College.
TWO
Artists of High Reputation, 1757–64
AN INVITATION TO JAMES Watt’s workshop at Glasgow College was highly prized among the college’s students. The college faced onto Glasgow’s High Street, and in John Slezer’s Theatrum Scottiae (1693), John Sibbald wrote that the ‘fore-part of it towards the City is of an excellent Structure being of hewen Stone’.1 Behind this impressive frontage, more than 300 feet long, were two courtyards, entered through a gate ‘elegantly ornamented with rustic work’, later described as having ‘not much regularity in their design, each part seeming to stand towards the other parts, in a state of independent crookedness and irregularity’.2 And at the northwest corner of the inner yard, on the first floor, was Watt’s instrument-making workshop, reached by a spiral stone staircase. Once inside the workshop, students found a room about 20 feet square, lit by three windows, filled with Watt’s tools and scientific apparatus. It became a favoured meeting place: John Robison wrote how
all the young Lads of our little place that were any way remarkable for scientific predilection were acquaintances of Mr Watt; and his parlour was a rendezvous for all of this description – Whenever any puzzle came in the way of any of us, we went to Mr Watt.3
For Robison and his ‘young lads’, Watt was someone to look up to both for his practical expertise and for other reasons: here was a man who had travelled to London and there dodged naval press gangs, witnessed the declaration of war against France and experienced the excitement of the mob. As early as July 1757 Watt was writing to his father requesting ‘1/2 a Doz afternoon China tea cups a stone tea pot not too small a sugar box & slop bowl as soon as possible’ so that he could suitably provide for his guests.4
James Scott after J. E. Lauder, James Watt and the Steam Engine, 1860. A dramatic reimagining of Watt at work in Glasgow.
Working at Glasgow College, Watt found that his interests were widely shared. The college was a centre of the great and unprecedented intellectual turmoil that took place in Scotland during the eighteenth century, and which has become known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen had their respective universities and a range of other intellectual organizations as well: Glasgow College was founded in 1451, and it was joined by a Political Economy Club from 1743 and a Literary Society from 1752. Like Watt’s college workshop these institutions became centres of debate and bred a uniquely impressive array of thinkers. Foremost among them were Adam Smith, founder of the modern science of economics; David Hume, one of the most influential Western philosophers; Joseph Black, the chemist who discovered carbon dioxide (see page 49); James Hutton, who founded the discipline of geology; and Adam Ferguson, the founder of sociology. Such was the concentration of intellect that a Mr Amyat, living in Edinburgh, described how that city more than any other in Europe offered ‘such a singular and such a noble privilege’, of being able to stand at a point in the city centre and, ‘in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand’.5
Having learned his trade as an instrument maker, Watt found himself immersed in the Scottish Enlightenment and a new popular culture that was fascinated by science. Here we will examine how his workshop at Glasgow College became a focus for discussions, arguments and theorizing not just with Robison and his ‘young Lads’, but with other, more prominent figures as well, including Black and Smith. The diverse range of customers who became acquainted with Watt reflects the multifaceted nature of the demand for scientific instruments. Meeting his customers’ needs led Watt both to pursue new ways of making instruments and to branch out into their retail. Although this kept the business afloat, making instruments would not sustain Watt in a long-term career, but it did provide the springboard for his next big project: working on the steam engine.
As Watt began his career making scientific instruments, he was launching himself into a culture where a vigorous ‘taste for science, over all classes of men, in every nation of Europe . . . seems to be the characteristic feature . . . In no former age, was ever the light of knowledge so extended, and so generally diffused.’6 In these circumstances a demand for instruments ‘permeated the educated classes whether noble, gentle or merely respectable, in much the same way as a taste for music, cards, coaches or beverages’.7 Watt was joining a trade that trebled in size during the course of the Industrial Revolution.8
The market for scientific instruments was multifaceted. Research by Alison Morrison-Low has identified six types of customer: dilettantes, practitioners, teachers, domestic users, scientific experimenters and the State.9 The demands of each group varied, and their relative importance waxed and waned over time. Take the dilettantes, for example. Rich, and with leisure time to spare, they sought the very best instruments, specially commissioned to show off social standing and ‘virtuosity’ – the owner’s knowledge of, and taste for, science, superb workmanship and life’s finer things. Sometimes this interest appears to have been superficial: one writer recalled seeing ‘how a noble lord, taking a piece of string from his pocket, had measured off a row of books . . . and bargained for them by the yard or ell, without glancing at their titles or contents’.10 But having the very best symbolized status, with a contemporary commentator noting ‘the great number of persons whose wealth enables them to appreciate and to pay well for the best-constructed instruments’.11 Instruments purchased included ‘equatorial’ telescopes whose advanced design allowed them to follow the rotation of the sky above, sold in some numbers by London’s Jesse Ramsden, and the orrery, a working model of the solar system named after the Earl of Orrery, the proud purchaser of the first one.12 The king, George III, was a well-known instrument collector and his collection remains displayed at the Science Museum. This market was dominated by London-based makers who established enviable reputations for high quality and accuracy, but its relative importance declined as the eighteenth century progressed to be usurped by other groups – lecturers and practical users.
Joseph Black, chemist, lecturing. Black would enjoy a close relationship with Watt as he worked on the steam engine. Etching by John Kay, Edinburgh, 1787.
Lecturers occupied a strategic position in promoting science in the wider economy. Caleb Rotheram sold the subject in 1743 as ‘one of the most usefull and entertaining branches of Learning, a high and refined part of Speculative knowledge, and of great importance in the common affairs of human life’.13 In the early eighteenth century lecturers were itinerant. Three hundred pounds would purchase the kit required and, with luck, the proceeds from a single lecture course in coffee houses or instrument shops could recover the initial outlay.14 Some delivered lectures alongside work as practical instrument makers: Benjamin Martin travelled from his London workshop to lecture across the West Country and Adam Walker combined wide-ranging work as an inventor with lecturing across the North of England.15 They could be well equipped: Walker employed an orrery measuring 20 feet across. A lecturer visiting Birmingham in 1784 brought equipment weighing 30 hundredweight, comprising an orrery, globes, telescopes, air pumps for vacuum experiments, condensers, microscopes, barometers, prisms and magnets, and even an electrical machine.16 Later more permanent institutions evolved: London’s Spitalfields Mathematical
Society ran lecture series seen by up to 500 attendees, and Mechanics’ Institutes and Philosophical Societies were established in many provincial towns. Some sneered at them – Edmund Burke described their gatherings as ‘dens of bravoes and banditti [assuming] the garb and tone of an academy of philosophers’.17 But others, like the engineer John Smeaton, defended ‘the common Herd of conjuring Philosophers about Town’ for their efforts reaching out to an audience hungry for science – and it was the instrument makers who provided them with the tools for the job.18
Alongside teachers and lecturers, there were others for whom instruments were very much a workaday tool: practitioners like navigators, surveyors and civil engineers. At sea navigators had to establish their precise whereabouts. On terra firma land had to be accurately mapped so that it could be enclosed for farming, improved, rented or sold. And as trade grew the best routes for roads and canals had to be determined prior to construction. Practitioners’ demand for instruments could be considerable. By 1788 there were 12,464 ships registered in the UK, a number which would more than double by 1851. Each would need two octants or sextants, compasses and a chronometer.19 On land new telescopes, quadrants, levels and compasses, and theodolites were developed for surveyors and civil engineers, and the number of new surveyors entering the profession every year doubled after the mid-1780s.20 Practitioners at sea and on land offered a booming market for instrument makers.
Instrument makers stood at the intersection between practitioners’ demands and new scientific discoveries. One of the best examples of this can be seen in sea navigation. On the one hand navigation errors of hundreds of miles were not unusual, and the cost of inaccuracy could be high: the Royal Navy warship HMS Ramillies found herself trapped against the Devon coast by faulty navigation in 1760, and only 27 men out of 800 survived the wreck.21 On the other, the sheer size of the solar system was becoming apparent. Experiments in the 1760s established the sun as being 153,000,000 kilometres from the earth, and we now know that the moon, our nearest interplanetary partner, is 384,400 kilometres away. Creating the instruments able to take precise measurements from distant planets and stars presented a huge technical challenge. They had to be light, compact enough to be used on the heaving deck of a vessel at sea and able to measure an angle to within 30 seconds of arc – or 1/120th of a degree.22 At sea, and on land, these practical and theoretical challenges were met with a series of new instruments.
It is against this background that Watt took his first steps, not learning his trade, but as a professional instrument maker. Of the potential markets open to him, that supplying teachers, professors and lecturers offered an early opportunity which Watt eagerly grasped: he was engaged to clean some instruments that had been bequeathed to Glasgow College by a trader in Jamaica. Following this project, in July 1757, he was appointed the college’s instrument maker. Moving into his workshop on campus, he developed close links with the professors: he provided and repaired lecture equipment for John Anderson – ‘Jolly Jack Phosphorus’ to his students because of the demonstrations he undertook.23 Joseph Black also became a customer, for whose chemical furnaces Watt manufactured doors, and who also purchased a digester (a pressure cooker which could be used as a basic steam boiler), moulds, pistons and even an alarm clock.24 Watt was held in some esteem – Black was later to recall Watt as ‘a young man possessing most uncommon talents for mechanical knowledge and practice, with an originality, readiness, and conspicuousness of invention, which often surprised and delighted me in our frequent conversations together’.25 Both Anderson and Black were to play key roles in Watt’s later career.
Watt developed a reputation within Glasgow College, then, as the ‘go to’ man for anything that needed making. Despite this, however, the business was a difficult one: making a broad range of products almost single-handedly made Watt a jack of all trades but master of none. In September 1758 he had a moment of appraisal. He wrote to his father:
I have now had a year’s trial here I am able to form a judgement of what may be made of this business & find that . . . there is little to be got by it as at most other jobs. I am obliged to do the most of them myself & as its impossible for one person to be Expert at every thing they very often cost me more time than they should do.
He ended gloomily, noting that if his venture failed he would have to ‘fall into some other way of business as this will not do in the present situation’.26 Watt adopted a two-pronged strategy. He would use his inventive abilities to make instruments in bulk at minimum cost, not for professors at the college but for bigger markets beyond its walls. To achieve this target he would establish a shop that would sell his own products and those purchased wholesale from others as well.
Mass-producing instruments meant that Watt aimed for the biggest market he could, and in Glasgow that meant the practitioners. One of his principal products was the Hadley’s quadrant. Developed by John Hadley in 1730, and further improved by him in 1734, it was intended for use at sea to determine longitude, measuring the distance between particular stars and the changing position of the moon as it moved across the sky. This ‘lunar distance’ could be used to establish the difference between local time and time at the Greenwich meridian, and hence the geographical position of the observation. This process required complex calculations but had the advantage of needing only a quadrant, which might cost a twentieth of the price of a chronometer, to establish the longitude.27 Here was the big market that Watt sought: one of his early outlays was for 300 instruction pamphlets explaining how to use the quadrant. He expected to be able to make ‘14 dozen’ every year or about three every week, and he was confident ‘of selling more than I can get made’.28
Another of Watt’s major products was a machine for drawing in perspective which he developed and sold from 1765. It ingeniously comprised a board to which paper could be secured, on three legs, so the whole stood up like an artist’s easel. Looking through a peep-sight at the subject, and tracing a pointer around its outline, a complex jointed wood and brass frame transferred the image onto the paper with a pencil, complete with perspective. The machine’s mechanism was delicate, and might not have survived outdoor use for long, but it employed some cunning features to make it compact and lightweight. The board holding the paper was formed by opening up a mahogany box, conveniently sized to fit into a gentleman’s pocket, and the tinplate legs could be strapped together to make a staff to lean on.
Watt had set his sights on supplying a bigger market with a focused range of standardized products. As he developed these, he would have been acutely aware that instruments capable of reaching out any distance – a few hundred yards, say, for a perspective drawing machine, but across tens of thousands of miles for a quadrant – would only be as good as the tools, materials, and techniques used to make them. Watt wrestled with these challenges against the backdrop of great change in precision manufacture. Here we will explore whether he was up to the job.
For a long time, instruments were made of wood, but it could be a temperamental material. Charles Peale used a wooden ‘polygraph’ letter-copying machine during the dry American summer in 1803, but complained that when it rained, the mechanism ‘swelled and tightened’ so much that he could finish his letters only by unscrewing and loosening all the parts.29 Hadley’s quadrants could be big, measuring up to 18 inches in radius, and to reduce their weight, examples were built of mahogany, ebony and ivory. However, the flexing, expansion and contraction of the wood limited the instrument’s accuracy.30 Efforts were made to shrink it so it could be made of more durable metal without becoming too heavy.31 Brass became preferred for its versatility: flat sheets could be bent, hammered, cut with shears and filed to shape. It could be formed into tubes to make telescopes, or joined by using a flame, molten metal solder and a blowpipe, for which the instrument maker needed a cyclical breathing technique, breathing in the nose and out of the mouth simultaneously to obtain a constant high-temperature heat.32 It could also be cast in moulds to make into individual comp
onents or even complete single-piece instrument frames, releasing clouds of toxic fumes in the process. Finally, it could be highly polished, engraved and stamped, and given a coat of lacquer to protect the surface.
Watt’s perspective drawing apparatus, set up to produce an image of a house.
The quest for high-quality instrument mirrors and lenses similarly tested opticians’ ingenuity. Obtaining pieces of glass that were free of imperfections was difficult, so reflecting telescopes used mirrors made of highly polished speculum metal. The refracting telescopes made from the 1760s used glass lenses instead, but these still needed to be accurately ground by hand, using progressively finer abrasive powders in a concave brass dish to shape the surface of each lens. It was difficult, laborious work, and the optician John Yarwell wrote to the astronomer Abraham Sharp complaining about his difficulties making the lenses: ‘I must confess I have had more complaint from you than from all the rest of mankind, with the least profit, for the last you had.’33 Watt’s workshop contains boxes of semi-finished lenses, which he purchased from others with the aim of carrying out the fine finishing work himself.