James Watt

by Ben Russell

  Further, as measuring heat depended on the visual acuity of the smith, the potter or chemist, and the latter two employed their senses of smell and taste in pursuing experiments with chemical substances, so the sense of touch was essential to accurate metalworking. Many of the tools used by smiths to work metal were manipulated not using long pieces of iron, the better to resist heavy usage, but with rods of hazel wood, carefully softened and bent to the desired shape, because a rigid iron handle would ‘jar in the hand’ of the blacksmith.94 The accuracy of a metalworker’s output depended on being able to maintain exact angles, and not accidentally rounding off corners. The smith had to be certain of the feel of the work when it was resting completely flat on the anvil, and ensure that the hammer fell perfectly flat when it struck to avoid making an uneven surface. He had to be able to turn the work through exactly 90 degrees, and make sure that the hammer would fall exactly centrally upon it – if a blow landed to one side, it would reduce the parallelism of the finished piece. All this depended upon ‘that same degree of feeling, or intuition, which teaches the exact distances required upon the finger-board of a violin; which is defined by habit alone’.95

  An Iron Foundery, Coalbrook Dale, 1799, print, Ackermann & Company, London. The dramatic scene is lit by the molten iron flowing from the blast furnace into moulds.

  Second, making early engines depended on exercising craft skills, which in turn depended on simple hand tools made of steel as the principal available means of shaping metal. The steel tools – files and chisels, for example – may seem mundane, but without them, or with poor-quality steel, metalwork would have been slower, of lower quality and more costly. Britain would not have gained her early supremacy in making machines.96 The humble file would prove to be mightier than the sword.

  Third, just as Watt’s work on the engine was driven by his moral dislike of wasting steam, so the engine’s design and construction was driven by minimizing the effort used in making its component parts. Metalworking was reduced to a bare minimum: nuts for bolts had only four sides rather than six, unless they were in hard-to-get-at places. Later Watt developed his ‘parallel motion’ to connect the piston rod to the end of the beam, even though the former went up and down perpendicularly while the latter scribed an arc in the air. The motion was a parallelogram of metal rods, and may have appealed to Watt because it was a clever piece of geometry which he had already used on his perspective drawing machine. But, complex as it was, it required less work than the alternative of supporting the piston-rod with big vertical metal slides, which would have involved a huge amount of costly hand-chipping and filing to make. This solution only became viable in the nineteenth century with the introduction of the mechanical metal-planing machine, which reduced the cost of making a flat metal surface from twelve shillings per square foot to less than one penny.97 And if metal wasn’t essential, wood was substituted instead for lightness and ease of working; most of the engine framing and the great beam were of wood, and the sounds of hammers ringing on anvils, and files cutting away metal, were matched by those of adzes, chisels and saws applied to components made from oak or deal.

  Lastly, the presence of so much woodwork is a reminder that, although the engine became the emblematic machine of the new industrial age, it was being built in advance of many of the other industrial machines which would have assisted in its production. This made its construction dependent on craft skills from an earlier age: carpentry, blacksmithing and plumbing. And it also had the effect of making the engine very functional in appearance. There was, initially at least, no decoration or ornamentation; the engine was an expression of engineering in austere terms. In a way that is Watt’s character coming across in the technology he helped create.

  As for steam, we leave it at an important crossroads: in time engines would be made in the same way as buttons, but that was a little way in the future. In the meantime Watt’s engine had captured people’s imagination. Watt wrote of his first Cornish engine at Wheal Bussy, Chacewater, that ‘all the world is Agog to see its performance.’98 Within six years Boulton & Watt’s machine had almost entirely displaced the old atmospheric engine in Cornwall. The resources available to make engines were sparse and the machinery was imperfect compared with later models, but in Cornwall, with its dense network of mines and workings, 52 engines had been built by 1800, along with 30 constructed by other engineers.99 By the middle of the nineteenth century more than 300 engines were at work. Here were entire landscapes overtaken and transformed by steam power, dotted with engine houses and mine workings, and busy with miners and trains of packhorses carrying the valuable metal ores away to be refined. It was a portent of things to come.

  FIVE

  Steam Mill Mad? 1781–95

  THE CITY OF MANCHESTER divided opinion. Travelling from Stockport into the city in March 1785, a distance of about 7 miles, François de La Rochefoucauld saw ‘nothing but houses. It is all one town, one continuous factory.’ But he was pleased by what he saw at street level, writing that ‘after the capital, Manchester is the handsomest town we’ve seen in England. It is well laid out; at least most of the streets are straight and the houses admirably built, of brick; the pavements are comfortably broad, the street-lighting good.’1 Robert Southey took a contrasting view in 1807. ‘In size and population’ he wrote,

  it is the second city of the kingdom . . . imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness; where you hear from within, as you pass along, the everlasting din of machinery; and where when the bell rings it is to call wretches to their work instead of their prayers . . . Imagine this, and you have the materials for a picture of Manchester.2

  The differing experiences of these two visitors were occasioned by Manchester’s explosive growth. In 1774, 24,386 people lived there; by 1788 the population had risen to 42,821, and then to 70,409 in 1801 – and it would double again by 1831.3 Under population pressure the local infrastructure buckled and nearly broke. But the town buzzed with life. John Byng complained that ‘Every rural sound is sunk in the clamour of cotton works . . . and the simple peasant is changed into the impudent mechanic.’4 Richard Colt Hoare noted that there was ‘less attention, less urbanity of manners; self-interest and business occupy the minds of the inhabitants and prevent that polish which the inhabitants of other towns . . . more frequently have in their manners’.5 But others admired this; Jabez Maud Fisher was impressed that ‘the Value of an enterprizing and Oeconomical Spirit seems to pervade all its inhabitants. The voice of industry is heard on every hand. Idleness is disgraceful, and a Man without Business, or some occupation, Manchester does not own.’6

  Manchester was the city that set the benchmark for Britain’s new industrial towns, and the material that formed its primary product has also become an emblem of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: cotton.7 Here we will place Boulton & Watt’s engine within the context of the cotton industry, its places of manufacture and its output. This is a relationship that has long fascinated historians, who have emphasized the role of entrepreneurs and businessmen, the relative costs of steam and water power and the risks of expansion as prime factors in keeping cotton manufacturing on a small scale. As a consequence Boulton & Watt’s engine, rather than being the most important power source available, was but one of a number of possibilities to drive production. Be that as it may, less attention has been paid to the input of the craftsmen commissioned to construct the mills and the machinery systems that production depended on, and which steam might drive. With their backgrounds in constructing water mills and clocks, these craftsmen also played a part in keeping industry small, but perfectly formed.

  Peel & Williams Foundry, Manchester, 1814. The foundry yard is full of cast iron engine components, awaiting dispatch to customers.

  Manchester was well placed to capitalize on the cotton trade. Situated in
a giant natural arena surrounded by hills, the city and its environs had plentiful streams and rivers to drive waterwheels for industry. The town also commanded the trade routes between the Pennines and the sea at Liverpool, and had grown as a marketplace where goods produced in the surrounding towns, such as woollens, linens and felts, were traded. Cotton was a new trade which became, ‘in the short period of thirty years, one of the most flourishing and important branches of our national industry’.8 Josiah Tucker wrote in 1782 that ‘silks, cottons and linens, combined in a thousand forms, and diversified by names without number, are now almost the universal wear.’9 During the eighteenth century raw cotton consumption grew from 1,000,000 lb to 56,000,000 lb every year.10 British production of printed cloth grew from 20,000,000 yards in 1796 to nearly 350,000,000 in 1830 – enough to wrap around the equator seven times.11 Everyone, it seemed, was in thrall to Manchester’s cotton.

  Part of cotton’s attraction was its versatility. It could be made tough enough for labourers’ corduroy trousers and even the belting later used to drive machinery, or fine enough for a ball gown, shirts and desirable clothing.12 It could be dyed and printed with bright colours and patterns, replacing the sombre ‘drabs’ and ‘sads’ of woollen cloth. This versatility made cotton a sought-after, fashionable material. Fashion had always existed, but what characterized the fashion for cotton was the breadth and depth – one might say the intensity – of the demand for it. People bought cotton clothing, altered it, made their own or purchased it second-hand. They could buy new cotton clothes more frequently because they were cheaper. By 1800 there were fourteen women’s magazines disseminating information on the latest fashions, and the demand for cotton goods led one wool merchant to complain that ‘ladies think no more of woollens . . . than of an old almanack’, and another to write that ‘cotton, cotton, cotton has become the almost universal material’.13

  Margaret Bryan, astronomer and physicist, and her daughters, as portrayed in Bryan’s book A Compendious System of Astronomy (1797). Fashionable cotton features strongly in their apparel.

  The name indelibly linked with cotton manufacture is that of Richard Arkwright. Described by Thomas Carlyle as a ‘plain, almost gross, bag-cheeked, pot-bellied Lancashire man’, he was trained as a barber in Preston, Lancashire, and most likely became acquainted with the developing cotton industry as he travelled collecting hair to make wigs.14 He worked in bursts of obsessive energy in days that sometimes began at 5 a.m. and finished at 9 p.m. Archibald Buchanan, who lived with him for a time, recalled that he was ‘so intent on his schemes’ that they ‘often sat for weeks together, on opposite sides of the fire without exchanging a syllable’.15

  Arkwright’s success was based on a new type of cotton-spinning machine. Spinning relies on two processes that had always been performed by hand, one thread at a time: drafting, to tease all the cotton fibres out parallel, and then twisting, to bind them together. In 1769, the same year that Watt patented his separate condenser, Arkwright patented a machine that mechanized both of these processes: a series of pairs of rollers, each pair rotating slightly faster than the previous, pulled the cotton fibres straight and parallel, before a ‘flyer’ rotating at high speed twisted them together into a single thread.16 But just as important as the technical achievement of the machine itself is the way in which Arkwright sought to exploit it. Having built his first mill in at Nottingham, he constructed others in Derbyshire, most notably at Cromford, and at New Lanark near Glasgow. He also licensed other spinners to use the machines as long as they did so in units capable of spinning 1,000 threads simultaneously. This measure was intended to allow Arkwright control over who used the machines, by restricting their use to only the relatively small number of people who could afford to build a mill on such a large scale. However, this had the contrary effect of stimulating piracy of his production methods by rivals, albeit by building mills on the same scale if they were to compete effectively. The cotton industry exploded ‘with a vigour and activity which has no parallel’.17 The number of Arkwright-type mills increased nine-fold to 182 – with around one-third of them in Lancashire – between them capable of spinning 1,900,000 cotton threads simultaneously.18 Arkwright provided the stimulus for a new factory system.

  Richard Arkwright’s prototype spinning machine, 1769. The drafting rollers are at the top of the machine, and the flyers at the bottom.

  Arkwright’s conceptualization of the factory certainly caught the imaginations of many of his contemporaries. Writing in 1790, John Byng was awestruck by the sight of Arkwright’s mills at Cromford, Derbyshire, working 24 hours per day, ‘seven stories high, and fill’d with inhabitants, [they] remind me of a first rate man of war; and when they are lighted up, on a dark night, look most luminously beautiful’.19 Jabez Maud Fisher had earlier written of Cromford that the way ‘the [water]wheel sets in motion many thousands of others; and the Sight of all this variety of motion is the most pleasing imaginable’, and that it was ‘the Greatest Curiosity in the Mechanical Work in Great Britain’.20 Arkwright’s scheme speaks to our traditional view of the Industrial Revolution as characterized by large-scale, powered production in a factory. However, it is telling that the power applied by Arkwright at Cromford came not from steam engines, but from a water wheel – and his cotton spinning machines were widely referred to as ‘water frames’ because of this. Lancashire became one of the most important markets for Boulton & Watt’s steam engine, but the partners did not corner the market in engines, and engines were not necessarily the power source of choice.21 How Boulton & Watt competed, and against whom, will be considered next.

  The early 1780s were busy for Boulton & Watt. They were building steam engines to pump water from mines, and customers in Cornwall demanded their full attention. They had built three engines there by 1778, eight more by 1780, no fewer than nine in a single year in 1782 and fifteen more by 1786.22 The engine had matured into a proven design and for Watt, the chance to consolidate this success must have been welcome. However, Boulton was already realizing what the engine’s potential would be if it could not only drive reciprocating pumps, but produce a turning or ‘rotative’ motion to power machines in mills and factories as well. He told Watt, ‘The people in London, Manchester, & Birmingham are Steam Mill Mad, & therefore let us be wise & take ye advantage.’23

  Watt’s interest in engines that would produce a turning motion – called rotary or rotative engines – was long-standing [illus. 43]. As far back as 1766 he had been working on what he called his ‘steam wheel’, a complex machine that used mercury as a ‘liquid piston’ for steam to press against.24 Watt had great hopes for the wheel, projecting one up to 24 feet in diameter, and Boulton confidently predicted, ‘If we had a hundred wheels ready made . . . we could readily dispose of them. Therefore let us make hay while the sun shines.’25 Boulton’s projections outran what was technically possible and ultimately the wheel was not marketed. However, Boulton did not forget the potential market for such a machine. With the demand for mine engines in Cornwall soon to be satisfied, he persuaded Watt that ‘there is no other Cornwall to be found’: the future lay in some other form of rotative engine.26

  Watt was initially reluctant. He cautioned that the engines needed by mills and workshops would be smaller and less powerful than those needed by mines, but would be no quicker to design and build. However, the work of competitors in the field provided impetus for revisiting his earlier proposals. In 1779 Matthew Wasborough, a Bristol engineer, patented several ways of connecting an engine to a large flywheel which would produce a rotative motion and ensure the engine would continue to move as the piston changed direction at each end of its working stroke. The possibilities for such an engine are reflected by the fact that Wasborough detailed no fewer than 29 different uses for it in his patent.27 In December 1779 Watt was exploring the use of a crank – already widely used to drive grindstones, potter’s wheels and foot lathes. A Soho pattern maker, Dick Cartwright, was asked to build a model, but Cartwright found
his tongue loosened by beer in a Soho public house, declared the idea ‘one of the best things Mr Watt had ever brought out’ and even went so far as to chalk a plan of it on a table.28 The plan quickly came to the attention of James Pickard, another Birmingham engineer, who patented it before Watt.

  Fragments of Watt’s rotary engine, 1782. These were found in a box in Watt’s workshop and are the oldest surviving relics of the quest to build an engine using a pure rotary motion.

  Boulton & Watt now found themselves having to find a way round the patents held by Pickard on the crank and Wasborough on the flywheel. They devised five alternative methods of creating a rotative motion. Of these the most successful of all was the brainchild of Watt’s assistant William Murdoch, the ‘sun and planet’ gear. It comprised two gear wheels, the ‘planet’ gear fixed on the end of a connecting rod suspended from the engine’s rocking beam, and the ‘sun’ gear fixed on the end of the shaft forming the axis of a flywheel. The teeth of both wheels were held together by a link, so that as the engine worked and the beam rocked up and down, the planet gear followed a circular path around the sun gear, making it rotate.

  The sun and planet gear offered a credible way for Boulton & Watt to build a rotative beam engine, and they patented it in 1781. But it was just one part of a whole package of improvements to the engine that they developed and attained patent protection for during the 1780s. Chief among them was the ‘expansive’ use of steam. Rather than steam pushing the engine’s piston through its entire stroke, Watt realized that as steam has a natural propensity to expand, it would continue to push the piston even if the supply to the cylinder was shut off early.29 The engine was also redesigned to make it ‘double-acting’; that is, steam not only pushed the piston down, but up as well, combining with the effect of the sun and planet gear to provide the smooth, constant power output essential if the engine was to be used by textile mills. The final major improvement was to find a new way of attaching the piston to the beam. The old atmospheric engines only required strong wrought-iron chains for the piston to pull down upon. But with double action the piston’s upward stroke would simply double up the chains. To get around this, Watt developed his ‘parallel motion’, a parallelogram of metal rods that provided a flexible but resisting connection between the piston rod and beam. Watt was particularly proud of its graceful motion, calling it ‘one of the most ingenious, simple pieces of mechanism I have ever contrived’.30