by Ben Russell
With progress made in his understanding of the engine, the way forward for Watt lay in refining it as a truly practical industrial machine. But now a range of other factors determined where, and when, this would happen. Industry in Scotland, although expanding, rested on uncertain financial foundations: capital to invest had been in short supply and, in 1769, the Bank of Ayr was established to provide funds for industrial expansion. But it proved over-liberal in its allocation of money, and Scotland’s industrial economy over-heated. A brief surge in production and speculation was followed by realization that new markets for extra output were not emerging as quickly as hoped, a glut of unsold goods, falling prices and the collapse of economic confidence. In a single fortnight during June 1772 ten banks failed across Britain.110 The Ayr Bank, which had lent so much in so short a time, was the subject of particular attention from customers seeking to exchange banknotes for gold. By 25 June it had collapsed with liabilities of more than £1 million (£1.3 billion at today’s prices), triggering two years of trade depression in Scotland and the evaporation of funding sources for Watt’s work on the engine.
With the finances of the engine project uncertain, Watt also faced changes in his personal life. His friends and supporters Joseph Black and John Robison had moved on, Black to a new teaching post in Edinburgh and Robison to pursue his career, albeit temporarily, in Russia. And there was one further, tragic matter to deal with. Travelling on business in Scotland’s Great Glen during September 1773, Watt received a desperate letter: his wife was expecting a child and was dangerously ill. He set off for Glasgow as fast as possible, but, having stopped overnight at Dumbarton, he was intercepted by his brother-in-law, Gilbert Hamilton. As Watt later recalled, ‘by his black coat & his countenance I saw I had nothing to hope.’111 The child had been delivered stillborn, and Peggy, his wife, had died afterwards. The black figure of Hamilton stepping down from the coach heralded the end of Watt’s dreams of a career in Scotland. Already a new start was being promised in Birmingham. Little did Watt know that the partnership he would form there would become one of the greatest of Britain’s Industrial Revolution.
FOUR
Gentlemen of Merit and Ingenuity, 1765–81
ON MONDAY 11 MARCH 1776, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette carried an account of how ‘a Steam Engine constructed upon Mr Watt’s new Principles’ was set to work at Bloomfield Colliery, near Dudley in the Midlands. The engine began work in the presence of its proprietors, who were accompanied by ‘a Number of Scientific Gentlemen whose Curiosity was excited to see the first movements of so singular and so powerful a Machine: and whose Expectations were fully gratified by the Excellence of its performance’. The Bloomfield engine was the first full-size engine built to Watt’s design for a customer, and this was the first time mention was made of it in the press.1 Compared to the model Watt began his steam career with, it was immense, standing almost 30 feet tall, with the steam cylinder alone measuring 50 inches in diameter. Its physical size was matched by its cost – £2,000 in total,2 or over £125,000 in today’s money – and by the impressiveness of its operation. It was certainly an exemplary piece of mechanism: its workmanship was widely commented on as being ‘unparalleled for truth’, the engine made fifteen working strokes every minute, driving a pump 300 feet underground via an elaborate system of strong wooden rods, but using only one-quarter of the fuel that an atmospheric engine would have required to do the same job. Gone was the older engine wheezing steam from every joint, or even teams of patient donkeys arduously driving round an endless chain pump to lift the water. With each end of the great working beam scribing a 7-foot arc through the air during each stroke, the metronomic action of the lever and rod gear controlling the flow of steam into the cylinder, and the periodical gush of water lifted from the mine, pouring into a wooden launder to flow away, here was a new order of machine which aroused the acclamations of the scientific gentlemen as well as the ‘number of joyous and ingenious Workmen’ who accompanied them.
Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory, by Francis Eginton, 1773. This centrepiece of Birmingham’s manufactures played a prominent role in the history of the steam engine.
The engine built by Watt as business partner to Matthew Boulton of Birmingham was a landmark machine in the history of the Industrial Revolution and, in the aspirations for how it would be constructed, was unlike anything that had gone before. But the way that it was actually built remained rooted in the manufacture of metalwares for consumers and in well-established craft metal-working skills: the engine did not bring into being radically new ways of making machines – or not immediately, anyway. Here we will explore how the engine’s development played out within the context of the city of Birmingham, its environment and culture, Matthew Boulton and his Soho Manufactory, and the manufacture of one of Birmingham and Boulton’s most important product lines: buttons.
First and foremost, the engine was a product of the metalworking capabilities of the city of Birmingham. In the eighteenth century Birmingham had the largest concentration anywhere of expertise in metal manufacturing. Arthur Young called it ‘the first manufacturing town in the world’ in 1791, and what historian J. R. Harris has called today’s ‘global metal-bashing industries’ are all to some extent its descendants.3 This primacy was based on plentiful supplies of coal and iron ore, which could be transported on an efficient canal network linking Birmingham to the Black Country, the seaport at Bristol, and even Hull and Liverpool via the Trent and Mersey navigation. By 1780 six coaches every day made the journey to London, and mail coaches also travelled to Bristol, Shrewsbury, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham.4 The town also had few of the restrictions on trade which could be found elsewhere. One author wrote, ‘No trades unions, no trade gilds, no companies existed, and every man was free to come and go, to found or to follow or to leave a trade just as he chose.’5 With growth unrestricted, good infrastructure and the materials to produce metal goods close at hand, Birmingham became the third largest town in England.6
As a metalworking centre Birmingham was home to over 50 distinct trades, and this unprecedented concentration of industry attracted visitors anxious to see the sights. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg visited in 1774, describing the ‘very large and thickly populated town, where almost everyone is busy hammering, pounding, rubbing, and chiselling’.7 This relentless industry had a considerable effect on the atmosphere of the town and its people. François de La Rochefoucauld wrote in his travel diary:
The town of Birmingham is vast, handsome and well-peopled, its roads broad and straight . . . But the great smoke created by the steel and plate manufacturers makes the whole town sombre. It’s impossible to keep the windows clean for a single week.8
And Robert Southey was ‘dizzied with the hammering of presses, the clatter of engines, and the whirling of wheels . . . the devil has certainly fixed upon this spot for his own nursery-garden and hot-house’.9
These conditions, so vividly imprinted on the memory of those who witnessed them, were the product of an industrial culture that emphasized the transformation of ideas into practical schemes. While nearby cathedral towns like Worcester or Lichfield wanted ‘polite’ science, Birmingham people demanded instruction in subjects applicable to the town’s day-to-day manufacturing economy: physics and mechanics, hydraulics, pneumatics and hydrostatics. The lecturer John Warltire ran courses in metallurgy and mineralogy, as well as providing tuition in the scientific method.10 The drive to innovate was also reflected in the number of patents acquired by those based in Birmingham, which was ahead of all other towns in Britain except London – until 1819, Birmingham men took out three patents for every one acquired in that other great manufacturing town, Manchester.11 William Hutton could with some justification write of Birmingham that he ‘was surprised at the place, but more so at the people. They were a species I had never seen . . . I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake.’12
William Sharp after William Beechey, Matthew Boulton, 1801.
At the forefront of Birmingham’s industries stood Matthew Boulton. Born in 1728, he took over and expanded the family business working in the ‘toy’ trade. Toys were not playthings for children but a wide range of decorative metal products: gold and silver toy-makers produced items such as trinkets, tweezer and toothpick cases, smelling bottles and snuff boxes. Steel makers created corkscrews and buckles, sugar nippers, watchchains and snuff boxes. The trade was immensely valuable: John Taylor and Samuel Garbett, two of the other leading toymakers, claimed in 1759 that their output was worth £600,000 every year – about £45 million in today’s money – and Edmund Burke christened Birmingham the ‘Toyshop of Europe’.
By 1768 Boulton’s business was prominent enough for him to be described as the ‘most complete manufacturer in England, in metal’.13 His success was based on the construction of the Soho Manufactory, a little more than a mile northeast of the city centre, which he claimed upon completion as ‘the largest Hardware Manufactory in the world’, a wonder of the new industrial age employing more than 400 people: ‘SOHO! – where Genius and the Arts preside, Europa’s wonder and Britannia’s pride’, as it was described by James Bisset.14 The output of the Soho workshops was huge. A single pattern book from 1775–90 catalogues over 1,400 different product designs being made.15 With this manufacturing capability, Boulton realized that the Manufactory itself was a potent marketing tool. He capitalized on visitors drawn to this breathtaking scene, building them a tea house to refresh themselves and a shop in which to make purchases. Even the shop was an experience, like a ‘Cabinet of Curiosities, splendid magnificent and gaudy; more like the costly pageantry of some Eastern Court than the Toys of a Birmingham Shop’.16
Boulton’s success was also based on an astonishing ability to network and exploit the connections of the world of polite commerce. He showed visitors around Soho himself, and Samuel Johnson recalled ‘Tuesday Sept. 20th [1774] . . . went to Boulton’s who with great civility, led us through his shops . . . Twelve dozen of buttons for three shillings! Spoons struck at once!’17 In his diary for another day, Boulton recalled:
We had Prince Poniatowski, the nephew of the King of Poland, the French, the Danish, the Sardinian, and ye Dutch Ambassadors . . . and only yesterday I had the Viceroy of Ireland. Not a day passes but we have some Nobleman or other.18
Boulton’s friend William Small jested with him about his networking prowess: ‘I hope the King and Royal Family, the nobility and the Ministry and your other friends are well.’19
With his manufacturing capabilities, and the networks of contacts at his disposal, Boulton was ‘an iron chieftain, and . . . a father to his tribe’.20 He and Watt first met in September 1768, when Watt was returning from London while securing his patent on the separate condenser. He was enthralled both by Boulton and the Soho Manufactory. Reciprocally, Boulton was drawn to Watt by friendship but also, tellingly, by ‘love of a money-getting ingenious project’. Even as he consolidated his reputation, and moved in increasingly exalted circles, Boulton’s business finances staggered from one crisis to another. By 1777 the Soho Manufactory was surviving thanks only to a series of bank loans, and it continued to run a huge deficit until at least 1777.21
To stabilize his finances, Boulton needed a new, successful business opportunity. Watt’s engine offered the best chance he had of obtaining one. However, Watt remained under obligation to John Roebuck in Scotland who, having invested heavily in the engine and desperate for progress, kept Boulton at arm’s length. He offered Boulton a licence to make engines for the Midlands, but Boulton turned him down, commenting, ‘It would not be worth my while to make for three counties only, but I find it very worth while to make for all the world.’ Boulton was content to play a long game and in 1773 made his move: work on the engine had been stalled for three years, and it lay cold and rusting at Kinneil. Roebuck could no longer meet his financial commitments and was heading for bankruptcy. Boulton acquired Roebuck’s two-thirds’ share of the partnership and, in May 1773, Watt quickly dismantled the engine and shipped it to Birmingham. With four years of Watt’s original fourteen-year patent on the separate condenser already passed, Boulton sought an extension to enable him to make a return on his initial investment. Watt was dispatched to London and in May 1775, despite determined opposition, secured an extension of the patent until 1800. The way was clear for Boulton and Watt to press ahead with their partnership building engines.
With his boldness and connections, Boulton was the perfect partner for the more retiring Watt. James Keir reflected that ‘his successes and his failures were all on a grand scale’, and he certainly strove to ensure the engine was successful, engaging in detail with how it would be made.22 In an early letter he explained to Watt how, by having an engine manufactory filled with ‘excellent workmen’, with ‘more excellent tools than would be worth any man’s while to procure for one single engine’, he could build engines 20 per cent cheaper, and with ‘as great a difference of accuracy as there is between the blacksmith and the mathematical instrument maker’.23 This was a direct appeal to Watt’s practical abilities and sensibilities about the engine. But in another, later, letter Boulton went further, explaining, ‘We are systematising the business of engine making as we have done before in the button manufactory.’24 As Watt had his leap of the imagination in devising the separate condenser, here was Boulton’s equivalent: to precisely make engines en masse, just like making buttons. So how actually were buttons made? And how did the firm of Boulton & Watt build engines?
The manufacture of buttons was, like many of Birmingham’s other products, driven by the demands of fashion. The design of shoe buckles, for instance, underwent
every figure, size and shape of geometrical invention: it has passed through every form in the whole zodiac of Euclid . . . The ladies also, have adopted the reigning taste: it is difficult to discover their beautiful little feet, covered with an enormous shield of buckle; and we wonder to see the active motion under the massive load.25
From reaching the height of their popularity in the 1780s, the vagaries of taste meant that, by 1791, 20,000 people working in the buckle trade were petitioning the Prince of Wales claiming distress.26 In support of their claims, the Birmingham Gazette in May 1790 contrasted the ‘Manly buckle’ and ‘that most ridiculous of all ridiculous fashions, the effeminate shoestring’.27 Buttons matched buckles in fashionable circles; one cartoon of 1777 shows a young gentleman effecting a ‘coup de bouton’ on a well-dressed young lady who shields her eyes from the dazzling light reflected off his cut-steel buttons.28 Another has a stylish young man proclaiming ‘I am the thing!’, with a mass of steel buttons effacing his coat, and one even incongruously taped to the top of his hat.29
To satiate the heavy demand for buttons, their manufacture very quickly developed into a carefully organized and efficient process, which became one of the highlights of Soho. Abraham Rees wrote that there was ‘no manufacture which includes such an infinite variety of operations as that of the button-maker’; it employed ‘a little Army of all ages’, and the scene of them hard at work was, for Jabez Maud Fisher, ‘too great for Description. Tis wonderful, astonishing, amazing.’30 In 1770 buttons were being made in a range of materials, from silver and glass to horn, ivory and pearl.31 But out of these the most popular was steel – so popular, in fact, that often cheaper glass was polished up to imitate it. Boulton ordered steel from Benjamin Huntsman in Sheffield but also carefully recycled ‘cuttings and scraps’, melting them down into cast steel for new uses. There was also a trade in old sword blades and even horseshoe nails, which would be used for the tiny studs in steel buttons.32
Turning this steel into the finished product took a whole range of techniques, which were perfect candidates for the application of simple machine tools like presses, stamps and lathes. An Italian traveller wrote in 1787 how these helped workers in ‘binding, twisting, shaping, pointing, cutting, marking, and turning the metals with wonderful quickness’.33 First, a ‘blank’ for ea
ch button was cut out of a sheet of metal using the fly-press. The press was ‘composed of a smooth cylindrical punch of steel, which is pressed by the screw into a hole, corresponding in size to the stamp. In this way a small circular disc is pressed out.’34 Press workers were in almost perpetual motion, swinging the flys (the large, weighted levers that gave the press its working impetus) from 14,000 to 20,000 strokes a day.35 Usually the blanks were formed as shallow cups, with ‘cramps’ around the outside which could be turned over with the use of pliers to hold other, decorative material in position. Next, a drop stamp was used to apply decorative shapes or patterns to the button. The stamps had two dies: a lower one, which was concave and engraved with the pattern, and the upper, which was convex and attached to a large iron weight. The upper die was hoisted up by a rope and block between two vertical posts. When it dropped, guided by the posts, it formed the blank into the desired shape. Metals could be inlaid into each other using stamps, which was a particular Soho specialism. Alternatively, tiny individual pieces of polished steel could be set into a blank by hand. This required a steady hand and a good eye, often making it a child’s job. Then an edging lathe would smooth the circumference of each button, removing the rough surplus material or ‘burr’ left around the edge. Sometimes a special engine-turning lathe could be used to produce elaborate geometric patterns on the front of buttons, the lathe mechanism turning in a way reminiscent of a modern child’s spirograph.
‘Button Maker’, from The Book of Trades (1824). He is working a drop-stamp and is about to raise the upper die ready for striking.
With the button’s shape and decoration finished, it would need mounting on a ‘shank’, a shallow hook, so it could be fixed to clothing. Even in the 1820s Abraham Rees was describing a shank making machine as ‘a very curious engine’, suggesting the technical wizardry that went into making even this simple component. But all the equipment of button making was capable of high precision: drop stamps had a catch which secured the upper die after it had fallen, to avoid it bouncing and damaging the button, and the lower die was accurately positioned by four screw adjusters.36 And engine-turning lathes, already being used by Josiah Wedgwood to create complex designs on ceramics at Etruria, would be refined to produce the unforgeable geometric patterns on banknotes. Wedgwood employed a mathematical instrument maker to construct and maintain equipment in his Etruria factory, but the job of making the lathes fell to an ‘ingenious & indefatigable smith’.37 That an instrument maker could make an industrial machine, and a blacksmith a high-precision one, is testament to the practical skills held within these respective trades.