James Watt

by Ben Russell

  The separate condenser was possibly the greatest single improvement ever made to the steam engine. But now, the death of his Glasgow business partner John Craig meant the loss of a key supporter just as Watt had to scale up his discovery into a full-size industrial machine. It was in large part Watt’s gifts as an instrument maker – the ‘go to’ man of Glasgow College – that presented him with the opportunity to make this major breakthrough. Instrument makers were at the heart of a new and expanding scientific culture that was as much commercial and practical as it was philosophical, and the technicalities of instrument making were solid foundations for the business of building steam engines.

  Instrument makers were early on resolving the problems of making artefacts in metal that were as robust as they were accurately made. Their designs incorporated useful attributes like bracing and careful proportioning that prevented the instruments being deformed by use, and which could be applied on a larger scale with industrial machines. They took the first evolutionary steps in refining those ‘tools to make tools’ that would be invaluable in the new industries: lathes, metal-cutting machines and precision machine tools. The processes of manufacturing instruments could be expanded onto an industrial scale. Making brass tubes for telescopes already took serious effort: a brass sheet would be formed into a rough cylinder and this was then squeezed between a steel mandrel and a die (the former forming the inner and the latter the outer surfaces) using a force of several tons, to give it a precise diameter.103 The old way of making a screw, cutting the thread by hand, was later used (albeit with some modifications) by one of Matthew Boulton’s smiths to make a huge wrought-iron screw for a press 6 inches in diameter and 7 feet long.104

  Trade advertisement for the instrument makers Chadburn Brothers of Sheffield, 1851. Among the instruments can be seen a number of model steam engines.

  Watt was also early in what became a longstanding relationship between instrument makers and steam engines. Anderson’s model, repaired by Watt, had been built by Jonathan Sisson in London, better known for surveying instruments and his ‘great Skill, Accuracy and Fidelity’.105 As late as 1851 a picture of Chadburn Brothers of Sheffield’s instrument shop includes, among the barometers, telescopes and globes, fine models of stationary and locomotive engines, and instrument makers were being commissioned to make fine-quality models into the 1860s.106 Instrument making offered valuable insights into building larger industrial machines. Now, for Watt, the challenge of scaling up his engine meant he had to master the dynamics of the steam and heat contained inside it.

  THREE

  Looking for a Living, 1764–74

  THE BROOMIELAW QUAY WAS the trading heart of the city of Glasgow. On the north bank of the river Clyde, its quarter-mile length was a hive of activity: ships were prepared to sail for the Baltic, Mediterranean and Caribbean oceans laden with goods ranging from almonds to yarn.1 Still more departed for North America carrying bales of linen, returning up to eighteen months later, laden with tobacco from Virginia, Carolina and Maryland.2 Often the ships were also involved in the transportation of slaves between the west coast of Africa and the Americas. As the ships and lighters moored alongside the quay presented a forest of masts and sails to observers, so the quayside itself was a mass of cranes and hoists, barrels and stacks of goods: oatmeal and strong ale, glass, Muscovado sugar, linen textiles and tobacco. The last of those was a particularly lucrative trade – in 1775, more than 13,000 cubic metres were imported through Glasgow and Greenock, around half of the total amount entering Britain.3 The tobacco lords became a wealthy elite and their influence and commercial power was expressed in the shape of new buildings that subdivided the older medieval city with well-planned new streets, both broad and handsome. For Daniel Defoe, Glasgow was

  the emporium of the west of Scotland . . . It is a large, stately, and well-built city, standing on a plain, in a manner foursquare; and the four principal streets are the fairest for breadth, and the finest built, that I have ever seen in one city together . . . it is one of the cleanliest, most beautiful, and best-built cities in Great Britain.4

  ‘A First View of Practical Chymistry’, published in the Universal Magazine (December 1747). Chemical workplaces like this were important for Scotland’s industrialization, and Watt’s future career.

  Glasgow became, then, a prosperous reflection of Scotland’s growing industrial and commercial power.

  We have already explored Watt’s instrument making business, and his introduction to the steam engine, within the context of a burgeoning scientific culture. Now we can look in more detail at the interconnections of that scientific culture with the wider world of industry and commerce as represented by the Broomielaw Quay – a relationship that was particularly strong during the Scottish Enlightenment.5 A distinct emphasis was placed on building links between chemistry and its applications, which proved to be a major stimulus to the Scottish economy, was closely associated with growing prosperity and new trends in consumption, and also formed the immediate background to Watt’s work developing the steam engine. The engine evolved alongside other projects founded upon Watt’s interest in chemistry, which had its most prominent output in his work for Glasgow’s Delftfield Pottery. And as chemistry depended in large part upon the manipulation of heat, so it was also fundamental to Watt’s understanding of how the engine worked, underpinning its evolution into a machine on an industrial scale.

  The Scottish Enlightenment saw close bonds forged between the universities in cities such as Glasgow or Edinburgh, and partners in industry. This union can be summed up with a single word: improvement. Rather than concentrating on attaining abstract knowledge about humankind and the natural world within a purely academic setting, improvement was a motivation for tangibly bettering humankind’s situation and, as the earlier philosopher Francis Bacon had described it, helping in ‘the relief of man’s estate’.6 In Glasgow, for example, John Anderson founded a series of informal lectures, intended for a broad public audience, and as Watt’s workshop at Glasgow college had become a favourite meeting place for students and staff, so Anderson regularly visited the workplaces of the city’s artisans, ‘giving them such information as was likely to benefit them in their respective arts, receiving in return a knowledge of those which he could not otherwise have obtained’.7

  Anderson’s lectures were in demand because, after 1750, Scotland was home to a broad and strengthening range of industries. The output of her coal mines more than quadrupled over the course of the eighteenth century.8 Linen production stretched across central Scotland and much of the output was sold in English markets, reflecting the importance of the Act of Union of 1707 in bringing political and economic integration with England. Profits from lucrative trades such as the import of tobacco were invested in other sectors, including marine stores for shipping, glass, bleaching and metals. And even when the tobacco trade collapsed after the American War of Independence, merchants quickly strengthened links with the Caribbean to import sugar and took advantage of an extant and highly skilled workforce to establish cotton mills alongside those already weaving linen.

  This resilient industrial base provided particularly fertile ground for the application of new philosophical research in chemistry.9 William Cullen, distinguished professor at Glasgow and then Edinburgh until 1789, had declared,

  Does the joiner want a particular glew [sic]? Does the mason want a cement? Does the dyer want a means of tinging a cloth of a particular colour? Or does the bleacher want the means of discharging all colours? It is the chemical philosopher who must supply these.10

  But it was Cullen’s student and assistant Joseph Black who most fully devoted himself to building bridges between research and its industrial applications. Black was rigorous, preferring to stick strictly to the facts and considering ‘every hypothetical explanation as a mere waste of time and ingenuity’.11 He was also a lover of quiet contemplation, described by Watt as ‘a Gentleman of great modesty’, and another acquaintance recorded how ‘Dispu
tes he shunn’d, nor car’d for noisy fame; And peace forever was his darling aim’.12 It may have been his reticence that made him reluctant to write much down: he would not publish his important research on heat, for example, and it only became public when a pirated version of his College lectures appeared, unauthorized, in 1770.13 But for all his reluctance to publish, Black acquired an enviable reputation as consultant to industrialists working on a very wide range of projects including ‘sugar refining, alkali production, bleaching, ceramic glazing, dyeing, brewing, metal corrosion, salt extraction, glass making, mineral composition, water analysis and vinegar manufacture’.14

  Black’s consultancy illustrates the fruitful flow of ideas established in Scotland between philosophical science and its industrial applications. The civil engineer Thomas Telford wrote of being ‘very deep in chemistry’, having obtained a ‘copy of Dr Black’s lectures . . . I am determined to study with unwearied attention until I attain some general knowledge of Chemistry as it is of Universal use in the [practical] arts.’15 From 1798 the metallurgist David Mushet was inspired to narrow the gap between practical iron founders and ‘metallurgical philosophers’ by publishing a long series of papers exploring how chemistry could be applied to iron production. He developed a detailed knowledge of the characteristics of iron ores, identifying a huge reserve of high-quality ore in Scotland to supply the foundries there.16 If these examples suggest that the flow of ideas was only in one direction, this was not quite the case: Alexander Wilson, later professor of astronomy at Glasgow, started out as a type founder.17 And James Hutton’s interest in geology, which led him to describe the earth’s geological processes as having ‘no vestige of a beginning – no prospect of an end’, stemmed from his industrial and agricultural interests: he had a chemical works making sal ammoniac (which was used as a flux by tinplate makers, dyers and brass workers), and inherited two farms, which focused his attention from chemistry, quarrying and land drainage schemes, to the composition of the earth beneath his feet.18

  John Anderson, c. 1775. Anderson forged strong links between university teaching and industry, and the institution founded after his death survives today as Strathclyde University.

  Philosophical chemistry and its industrial applications were, then, two sides of the same coin, and Black was at the forefront of a community which encompassed both. One of the major examples of their research interests in Scotland was in manufacturing alkalis, chemicals with caustic properties that had a wide variety of uses, from bleaching textiles to making glass. In the 1780s Scottish weavers produced over 7,000 miles of cloth every year.19 Before it could be dyed or printed, it had to be bleached white, which was a major production bottleneck. The woven cloth was cleaned with an alkaline mixture of water and ashes from burned kelp seaweed or barilla before any traces of this ‘lye’ were removed by soaking in a dilute acid, most often soured milk. It was then laid out on one of 250 huge bleachfields to whiten by the oxidizing action of the sunlight over a period of months.20 Making this process more reliable and faster received the attention of chemists including William Cullen and Joseph Black. They devised ways of making synthetic alkalis from salt to replace alkali derived from seaweed, and stronger acids and, later, chlorine as substitutes for bleaching by the sun. In doing so they reduced bleaching from a process taking weeks or months to one that could be completed in hours or days.21 And they also forged links with others like John Roebuck, who had established an industrial plant for making sulphuric acid near Edinburgh in 1749, and James Keir, raised in Scotland but working in England, who turned synthetic alkali manufacture into a commercial process for the first time.22 Together this coalition of theoretical and practical talents refined the chemistry of manufacturing textiles, but also of soap, glass, acids, brewing and dyestuffs. Scotland developed a prospering chemical industry that stands as a counterbalance to concepts of the Industrial Revolution as traditionally dominated by textiles manufacture and the application of steam power, for example.23

  This new industry had two key characteristics. First, it stimulated economic growth, as remarked upon by Justus von Liebig in 1843, when he noted, ‘We may fairly judge of the commercial prosperity of a country from the amount of sulphuric acid it consumes.’24 This prosperity was reflected in the expansion of Glasgow: the city grew from 23,000 to 42,000 inhabitants between 1755 and 1780, and the population’s character changed, too. The historian James Gibson recorded how ‘hitherto an attentive industry, and a frugality bordering on parsimony, had been the general characteristic of the inhabitants of Glasgow’.25 But increasingly

  ‘The Bleacher’, working on one of the enormous fields where cloth was bleached white by the sun; from The Book of Trades (1824).

  the ideas of the people were enlarged, and schemes of trade and improvement were adopted, and put into practice, the undertakers of which, in former times, would have been denounced madmen; a new stile [sic] was introduced in building, in living, in dress, and in furniture; the conveniences, the elegances of life began to be studied [and] luxury advanced with hasty strides every day . . . every person is employed, not a beggar is to be seen in the streets, the very children are busy.26

  Second, this newfound economic stimulus found physical form in a new culture of consumption. Contemporary historian James Denholm described a

  great change . . . in the manners, dress, &c. of the inhabitants of Glasgow, more especially since the rapid rise of the manufactures, which have diffused wealth more generally among the people than before, has occasioned a consequent alteration in their dress, furniture, education, and amusements.27

  New consumer goods, as demanded by the denizens of Glasgow and across Britain, were not simply material possessions but signified membership of a new, refined social class defined by prosperity and an awareness of the latest tastes. This consumer culture was expressed in a profusion of shops, shopping and new products. The German writer Sophie von La Roche, visiting London in 1786, was amazed by the city’s profusion of ‘watchmakers, silversmiths, china-shops, confectioners without equal, and the goods so elegantly displayed behind those fine glass windows’.28 Professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, visiting from Germany in 1770, found himself distracted by ‘silversmiths, shops of Indian wares, instruments, and the like’.29 Britain stood on the brink of possessing a prosperous market for consumer goods that was national, and even global; as one historian describes it, ‘Birmingham buckles on French shoes, Sheffield forks and knives in Connecticut and Barbados, Staffordshire tableware on Anglo-Indian tables’.30

  It was against this background that James Watt met his wife. Margaret Miller, or Peggy, as Watt called her, was one of his cousins, and they were married in July 1764. Peggy brought to the fore Watt’s ‘gentle virtues, his native benevolence, and warm affections’, helped run his shop and managed the household.31 It is uncertain how much they could partake of the fruits of consumption available around them. Although it is traditionally stated that they lived in a house on Delftfield Lane, just to the west of Glasgow’s city centre, Watt and Peggy seem to have moved or ‘flitted’ several times around Glasgow.32 Those possessions that do survive from Watt’s early life – such as a silver George II ‘skittle ball’ teapot, named after its shape, silver spoons, a sauce boat and mugs – appear mostly to have been inherited from his father, who died much later, in 1782.33 Watt’s biographer notes, then, that the Watts ‘practiced housekeeping, from necessity as well as choice, on a very humble scale’.34 And while Watt’s marriage was affectionate, if short of money, it was also fraught with loss. A first son was born in July 1765, but died aged only four months. In the summer of 1767, a daughter, Margaret, was born, who lived until September 1799. And on Christmas Eve 1770 a second daughter arrived, named Agnes, who died in February 1772. Only James, born in February 1769, outlived his father. Such levels of child mortality were not unusually high, but constituted a tragic background to Watt’s career.

  The shop frontage of A. Mackenzie, mathematical and philosophical instrument
maker, taken from his trade card, c. 1816. Shops like this were part of a retail industry selling all kinds of consumer goods.

  The world around Watt and his family was shaped by increasing prosperity and the rise of a consumer culture which prized material possessions. It was a world that Watt himself did not partake of immediately, but it provided the context within which philosophical chemistry and its industrial applications could evolve. As Clow and Clow suggested in their book The Chemical Revolution, chemistry was in large part a ‘social technology’, and had effects far beyond the purely technical: the clothes that people wore, the beer that they drank, the soap they washed with, were the products of chemical processes. But equally, broader social and economic forces like consumption and prosperity mediated the relationship between philosophical chemistry and its industrial outcomes. One example of this is the interaction between consumer demand for pottery and the development of new ceramic wares. Another, of more immediate import here, is in John Roebuck’s pressing need for an engine to work at his coal mines.

  Roebuck had attended the lectures given in Glasgow by Joseph Black and was a speculative investor in interests that included acid manufacture, the iron foundry at Carron and coal mining. With his mines beset by underground floodwater, he needed a sure way to keep the deep workings pumped dry and profitable. Watt, it seemed, was his man. Joseph Black introduced the two men and, from 1767, Watt and Roebuck were in partnership. Roebuck paid off Watt’s debts to the estate of John Craig, who had financially supported his shop in Glasgow, and offered the use of the Carron works and his home at Kinneil as a place to get the engine working away from prying eyes.