by Ben Russell
There survive objects from Watt’s Glasgow workshop that embody this revolutionary approach – the theory that would underpin the rise of the factory system in Britain. And they are associated with one of Watt’s more surprising business ventures: making musical instruments. This might seem peculiar given that he had ‘an absolute deficiency of any musical ear’, and he was later wary of employing a colleague because he enjoyed playing the violin, which he thought ‘the source of idleness’.74 But commercially they were in much demand, and the tools and techniques needed to make them differed little from those needed to make scientific instruments. Watt could add another string to his bow, so to speak, with relative ease.
The range of tools in Watt’s workshop matches closely those needed for flute making as described in Louis Bergeron’s Manuel du Tourneur of 1816.75 There is a complete set of long reamers for making the hole down the centre of each flute, a mandrel for the sections of each instrument to be held on a lathe so that its outside surface can be smoothly finished, and a pair of boring collars to hold the flute parts so that the joints between each can be fitted together tightly. Watt’s other innovations suggest attempts to speed up and simplify each part of the flute making process in line with Smith’s doctrine of the division of labour: the box containing many of the tools already described also contains short lengths of wood with pins driven through at a 90 degree angle. These were used to mark the positions of the finger holes on each flute more quickly than marking each individually. Having been drilled, the finger holes were finished with a ‘fraise’ tool, a rotary cutter with teeth that looks like strawberry (in French, a fraise). And to ‘undercut’ each finger hole – that is, to make the place where it met the bore running inside the length of the flute a little wider – Watt developed a special tool with three spherical cutters positioned along a single spindle which could be put inside the bore to undercut three holes at once. Using these tools it would have been possible to pass each flute from one workman to the next, each able to quickly undertake his part of the overall process. Watt was also applying these ideas to manufacture of his perspective drawing apparatus: in one corner of his workshop sits a wooden box packed with the incomplete remains of a number of these, as well as many components awaiting assembly. Comparing them suggests that different parts were supplied by different workmen in batches that could be passed from one to another. Specialization was taking off rapidly in instrument making, so Watt was not unique in this respect, but the survival of such artefacts given Watt’s association with Adam Smith makes them significant.
Watt’s flute tools laid out on the bench in his workshop.
Some of Watt’s pin gauges for marking the positions of finger holes on flutes.
Watt’s special tool for undercutting three finger holes on a flute at once.
Significant in another way is one final artefact illustrating Watt’s business practices. It is a stamp for marking figures on wood, consisting of four letters: ‘T LOT’. Lot was a renowned Parisian flute maker, raising the question of whether Watt was marking his own flutes as those of Lot and charging more for them.76 The surviving pieces of Watt’s flutes are not of the best quality – he pressed one unfinished piece into service in the workshop as a handle to hold glass lenses while polishing them – so the ruse, if that is what is was, would not have fooled the discerning flautist. But perhaps the fashionable young gents who would be Watt’s potential market in Glasgow were not too discerning.
Watt wasn’t just making flutes. He was connected to Charles Clagget in Dublin. Clagget became a major customer, purchasing instruments and tools to the sum of £164, including guitars, violas da gamba and even ‘a set of wheels for wiring strings’.77 He proposed a business partnership with Watt that would involve Watt relocating to Dublin, ultimately to no avail. In 1776 Clagget patented a number of improvements to the violin. His plan was to divide the fingerboard into two interlocking parts. One could be lowered to enable the other, shaped like a miniature ladder, to form raised frets that guided the trainee violinist’s fingers. When not needed any more, the moveable piece could be raised to create a normal, smooth fingerboard. It seems a complicated way to do things: tying gut strings around the fingerboard in the right places would have the same effect.78 But from the heap of unfinished fingerboards in Watt’s workshop, it would appear that Watt saw some promise in the idea and may have been commissioned to make them by Clagget before he obtained his patent.79 But of greater significance are marks on the surviving fingerboard pieces that suggest that they were cut using a circular saw; small round saws survive in the workshop. This is the earliest known evidence for the use of what remains a widely used woodworking tool.80 Watt’s musical instruments may not have won prizes, but making them helped him show off a canny talent for invention that a London instrument maker would have been proud of. And in being a branch into a new business for Watt, they point to something that Watt and his London counterparts did have in common: not just making instruments but having a shop to sell them, too.
The ‘T LOT’ stamp from Watt’s workshop.
Watt’s shop strategy reflects the scale of the market for instruments that could be used at home. Many people loved to observe and record the weather, that great British preoccupation, and they purchased good-quality thermometers and barometers to help them. The naturalist Gilbert White recorded thermometer, barometer and even wind readings in a ready-printed diary by Benjamin White of Fleet Street, London, and his observations contributed to his Natural History of Selborne, a pioneering holistic study of the environment he lived in.81 Thomas Turner, a Sussex grocer, purchased scientific toys for his family: ‘I entertained my sister Sally, and my brother’s wife, with the sight of the Modern Microcosm, which I think is a very pretty curious sight, for we see the whole solar system move by clockwork, in the same manner as they do in the heavens.’82 It wasn’t just Turner who liked scientific devices. Later in his diary he records, ‘There being at Jones’s a person with an electrical machine, my niece and I went to see it, and though I had seen it several years ago, I think there is something in it agreeable and instructing, but yet at the same time very surprising.’83 Domestic users were encouraged by publications that introduced the subject to them, like Henry Baker’s best-seller ‘The Microscope Made Easy’ of 1742, which was intended ‘for the instruction of such . . . as desire to search into the WONDERS of the Minute Creation, tho’ they are not acquainted with Optics’. Not all instrument users had earnest scientific discovery in their sights, however. Attending a sermon at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, Samuel Pepys entertained himself with a ‘perspective glass up and down the church by which I had the pleasure of seeing and gazing a great many fine women’.84
Robert Sayer, Astronomy, c. 1790, engraving. In depicting some wealthy buyers of scientific instruments, it suggests the affluent market that instrument makers could tap into.
To launch himself fully into the world of instrument retailing, Watt entered business partnership in October 1759 with John Craig, a Glasgow-based merchant and architect. Watt and Craig complemented each other well: Craig injected more than £700 into the business, roughly £50,000 in today’s money, and looked after the finances.85 Watt provided contacts and expertise, visiting London to buy stock wholesale and securing space below his first-floor workshop to sell it in. The new shop must have been quite a sight, as Watt moved beyond instruments to retail everything from chess boards, necklaces and earrings to thimbles, watch chains, coffee mills and buckles.86 In December 1763 the venture’s success led Craig and Watt to relocate to bigger premises on Glasgow’s Trongate, a long, broad street lined with colonnaded buildings that comprised the main, fashionable shopping centre. Watt could proudly write to his father, ‘my shop does very well.’87
Watt was following a retail trend already established elsewhere. Many manufacturers would often keep a large stock ready for sale, some made by themselves, but more purchased wholesale from others. This reflected the fact that customers did not want
to wait weeks for an instrument to be built but wanted it straight away. Gradually the divisions between mathematical and optical instruments disappeared – both types sat side by side on the shelves, awaiting customers. In 1768 Jean Bernoulli wrote of George Adams’s London shop that as well as the globes Adams was well-known for, it was ‘provided with a prodigious number of instruments for physics, mathematics, dialling, astronomy, &c.’88 The appearance of the shops must have been amazing, as Bernoulli recalled:
You have certainly heard of the richness and brilliance of London shops, but I doubt that you have realised how much Astronomy contributes to the beauty of the spectacle: London has a great number of opticians, their shops are full of reflecting and refracting telescopes, octants, &c. All these instruments, properly displayed and arranged, please the eye as much as they impress by the reflections to which they give rise.89
Shops were places where an astute instrument maker would unashamedly show off his wares: to demonstrate his telescopes, John Marshall had his name painted in white on the roof of a house twenty houses away from the shop, and prospective telescope purchasers were encouraged to spot it.90 Shops, then, were places to meet like-minded company, browse, and exchange news and ideas.
But Watt’s expanding business empire also shows us how vulnerable an artisan-entrepreneur could be to financial problems and competition. The famed London telescope maker Benjamin Martin overcommitted himself and plunged into bankruptcy.91 When the microscope maker John Cuff gave up his London shop because he worked too slowly to sustain the business, he found that even in Norwich there were ‘several persons who sell Optical Instruments of an inferior sort and of late, Riders are imployed . . . who comes to seek out Customers & get orders’.92 And John Gardener of Glasgow, who started out as an apprentice with Watt, began a family business making scientific instruments that went bankrupt four times in 75 years.93 Instrument making was not a trade without risks, and this was certainly the case for Watt.
Looking through the accounts of Watt and Craig’s partnership suggests that the business was not sustainable.94 In the first year of the partnership Watt’s expenditure was about £261 (about £20,000 in today’s money), but he brought in only around £73. This might be expected as he got things up and running. The following year, 1760–61, income rose to over £170 and Watt made a profit of £83 – but he borrowed £133 from Craig. In the third year, the income was £290 but outgoings totalled £481 – a loss of £194 and, again, £135 was borrowed from Craig. The business costed more to run than it brought in, and all the time the debt to Craig mounted steadily. How it was to be repaid is unclear.
Watt also had competition in Glasgow. George Jarden was another blacksmith and mathematical instrument maker active at the same time as Watt, but in 1757 Watt commissioned him to divide the scales on some instruments for the surveyor John Gray, suggesting the two had an amicable relationship.95 A more serious rival was John Carlile, an established general merchant with an enormous product range that comprised over 120 different product lines listed in a 1755 advertisement, with a promise of more ‘particularly mentioned in his printed catalogue’.96 Carlile must have been a daunting competitor to relative newcomer Watt, who seems only slowly to have appreciated the value of catalogues, trade cards and instruction books to boost sales. He did have some catalogues printed for his shop in 1766, but by then it would seem more of a last-ditch attempt to bolster flagging sales than a proactive attempt to build business.97 In 1765 Watt faced a new threat: John Craig died, and the money he had lent to the business needed to be repaid.
Watt’s foray into the world of instrument making brought mixed results. He had links to makers in London and aspired to the levels of precision they attained. However, although many aspects of his work were highly ingenious, and he must have received a thorough grounding in running a business, Glasgow was a limited marketplace, which brought financial difficulties and meant that Watt’s ambitions outran what he could achieve there. That Watt was himself aware of things going awry is reflected in a letter to his father of 1766 in which he wrote of acquiring ‘a stock of Experience that will soon pay me for the trouble it has cost me’.98 It was fortunate for Watt that, even as his business ran into trouble, he was able to draw on his contacts in Glasgow College. Rather than diffusing Watt’s efforts, as they had done previously, the college community was to help him focus on his biggest project ever: steam.
In the winter of 1763–4 a model engine was brought to Watt by John Anderson. Anderson found that the model would only work for a short time before coming to a halt. Watt was ideally placed to effect a repair, and this came at a propitious moment for the engine. As Watt dismantled Anderson’s model, the engines used in Britain were ‘atmospheric’, a type first developed by the Dartmouth ironmonger Thomas Newcomen in or before 1712. Newcomen’s engine had a large, open-topped metal cylinder, inside which a piston could slide up and down. The piston was connected by chains to a heavy wooden beam, which pivoted at its mid-point, and the opposite end of which could be connected by long rods to water pumps deep underground. To make the engine work, the cylinder was filled with steam. When it was full, the steam supply was cut off and cold water was sprayed in. This condensed the steam, creating a partial vacuum beneath the piston. Because the top of the cylinder was open, atmospheric pressure pushed the piston down into the vacuum beneath it, rocking the beam and operating the pumps attached to its other end, lifting water from deep underground. Then, the weight of all the pumps and rods hanging on the end of the beam returned it to its starting point and the cycle began again.
The model engine belonging to John Anderson that Watt repaired in the winter of 1763–4.
Newcomen’s atmospheric engine was simple, robust and reliable. But it had a single, big drawback: it consumed an enormous amount of coal fuel. This didn’t matter so much if the engine worked at a coal mine, burning unsaleable ‘slack’ coal, small pieces and dust. But the engine was uneconomic to use anywhere that coal was not cheap and plentiful, like Cornwall, where the metal mines employing the engine had to ship coal from South Wales at great cost. Watt’s upbringing as a Scottish Presbyterian had engrained in him an austere view of waste and economy. It offended his sensibilities that Newcomen’s atmospheric engine wasted so much fuel. For him it was as much a moral project as a scientific one to make it less wasteful. After more than a year’s work Watt had a solution which would not just cure Anderson’s model, but had the potential to transform the steam engine.
This story was narrated by John Robison, a student at Glasgow College who had a curious ability to find himself present at some of the eighteenth century’s defining moments. He accompanied General Wolfe to the battle of Quebec in September 1759 which secured Canada for Britain, and travelled with John Harrison’s marine chronometer on its trial voyage to Jamaica in 1761–2, verifying its phenomenal accuracy. He can even take the credit for introducing Watt to the steam engine, having had a plan for an atmospheric engine published in the Universal Magazine in November 1757. Robison and Watt struck up a close friendship: Robison ransacked the library in search of textbooks on steam to help Watt, and together they studied the latest findings from authors like Belidor and Desaguliers. Expecting to find Watt just a workman, Robison instead discovered ‘a Philosopher, as young as myself, and always ready to instruct me. I had the vanity to think myself a pretty good proficient in my favourite study, and was rather mortified at finding Mr Watt so much my superior.’99 As Watt’s instrument-making work was underpinned by a great deal of reading and study, so his insights into his workbench projects went beyond what a more ordinary mechanic or instrument maker might have diagnosed. As Robison claimed for Watt, ’everything became science in his hands’. This approach was applied to Anderson’s model engine in the winter of 1763–4.
Watt eventually returned the model to Anderson; he had already sawn its pump casing in half, for example, and even more radical measures than Anderson would have countenanced were needed to make it work to Watt�
�s satisfaction.100 But it had started him on a new research trajectory which would bear fruit in a way encapsulated during an encounter in the summer of 1765. John Robison walked without ceremony into Watt’s parlour to find him seated before the fire with ‘a little tin cistern’ resting upon his knee. He was recollecting a previous conversation they had had about steam when Watt abruptly put the tin cistern on the floor at the foot of his chair. He replied to Robison, ‘You need not fash yourself any more about that Man, I have now made an Engine that shall not waste a particle of Steam.’ While doing so he looked complacently at the cistern, half-hidden by his foot. But seeing Robison try to ascertain what it was, he briskly hid it away beneath the table, and met Robison’s questions with ‘rather dry answers’.101 The tin cistern represented a major leap of imagination by Watt: it was his first model of what he called the ‘separate condenser’, the use of which made the engine as sparing as possible in its use of heat and fuel: its efficiency compared to the old atmospheric engine rose threefold.102