James Watt

by Ben Russell

The presence of the forge is a reminder of the need to heat materials so that they could be shaped. Much clocksmith’s work was carried out in brass, rolled into sheets or cast into columns, gear-wheels or plates. The plates would then be hammered flat using a round-faced planishing hammer to avoid leaving sharp indentations before hand-filing to a smooth finish: brass can be ‘work-hardened’ – that is, the more it is worked, with a hammer, file or in the lathe, the tougher it becomes. Wrought iron would be used to fabricate larger clock frames and movements, the pieces being heated and shaped using hammers and an anvil, and held together by nuts and bolts or wedges driven through holes.

  The clocksmith had to carefully consider the relationship between these different materials. Components bearing onto each other, like clock-wheels and the smaller pinion wheels which connected them, were usually of different materials, brass for the former and steel for the latter. This reduced the amount of friction generated and used the stronger material where the strains imposed by the clock mechanism were largest. Although it was less easily shaped than brass, steel was cheaper: in the early eighteenth century it might cost one penny per pound compared to ten pence for brass. So clocksmiths were prepared to use steel to save money on materials, even if it took longer to work, and it was sometimes employed for parts that were hidden away inside the mechanism, unseen.81

  Alongside tools like hammers and files, which might be found across a variety of trades, clocksmiths were early in adopting special-purpose tools. The latter were particularly useful in making the gear wheels, often referred to as ‘wheel-work’, that much of a clock movement consisted of. In a relatively small movement, these wheels were often stamped out of brass: material was removed to save weight, leaving spokes behind. Then teeth were cut into the circumference in two stages: a wheel-cutting engine would first produce an approximate form of the teeth, with a parallel-sided cut. Then the teeth were ‘rounded up’, the corners removed and a smoother profile made, using a shaped cutter, which laborious task would previously have been carried out by hand-filing. How the wheels meshed together would be carefully checked with the specialized clocksmith’s depthing tool to ensure that they engaged cleanly, and then they were held in place in the clock movement, most often between two vertical plates separated the required distance apart by brass pillars, with the wheelwork positioned between them.

  The complex processes of clockmaking produced, and attracted, self-sufficient and innovative craftsmen. James Watt was joined by Benjamin Huntsman, who pioneered the process of making high-quality ‘crucible’ steel in Sheffield in 1740 having started out as a clockmaker, his interest in steel emerging from the quest for a better material to make springs.82 In 1741 the clockmaker Henry Hindley of York showed the engineer John Smeaton a screw-cutting lathe and a wheel-cutting machine he had constructed – both of which were later to be widely adopted in industry.83 Later the advertisement placed in the Manchester Guardian newspaper by young engineer Richard Roberts in 1821, whose ‘self-acting’ spinning machine transformed Manchester’s cotton industry, was decorated with images of what look like clock and pinion wheels.84

  These examples show that there were extensive connections between clockmaking and larger-scale engineering, and this was widely commented upon by contemporaries. Thomas High’s cotton-spinning machine of 1738 was moved ‘by an aggregate of clock-maker’s work and machinery most wonderful to behold’.85 The Manchester Mercury newspaper in the 1780s and ’90s contains a series of advertisements for clockmakers to work in cotton mills and with machine makers to ‘fitt up the clock work for mules and water machines’.86 It is surely no coincidence that Abraham Rees found himself noting that ‘there are such immense numbers of each part of every machine to be made, it becomes, in the same manner as with the clock-maker, worth the machine-maker’s trouble to construct complicated tools and engines to expedite the manufacture of the parts.’ And in Sheffield George Gilpin was inventing a method of cutting wheels from solid cast iron ‘with as much accuracy and as good a finish as brass wheels have hitherto been cut, making a very great saving in the expence of brass for a large mill, and much more durable when done’.87 In fact, looking at machines like Arkwright’s prototype, the gears driving the drafting rollers are brass clockwork scaled up for industry; John Kay, who built the machine for Arkwright, was a clockmaker by training, and the cover story for that top-secret project was that he was building a navigation device to establish longitude.88

  So, between them, clocksmiths and millwrights were capable of building complete production systems, integrating power sources, transmission systems and production machinery. One innovation particularly encapsulates the precision that was now possible: many mills mounted a pair of clocks side by side, one turned by the mill gearing driving the machinery, the other independently regulated by a pendulum in the usual manner. Both were made with dials and hands exactly alike, but with the former having ‘a title on the dial, mill time, and the other, clock time’. The motion of the mill was so regular ‘that these two clocks will never vary more than two or three minutes’.89 Rather than just the power source or steam engine, contemporaries were amazed at the possibility of constructing entire factories – modern, often small, but perfectly formed – that could operate with the precision of a timepiece.

  This was achieved in large part using long-established materials. The adoption of iron was spreading but it by no means replaced wood entirely; the great working beams of Boulton & Watt’s engines only began to be made from cast iron in 1800, for example.90 Clocks might have been framed in metal, but scaling this up into production machinery able to withstand greater stresses and strains required better understanding of how to proportion iron parts to balance both lightness and strength. So the water frames at Arkwright’s Cromford mill, each capable of spinning 48 threads at once, were principally built from wood, as was Samuel Crompton’s ‘mule’, the waterframe’s successor. For this reason we might describe the early industrial machines as examples of ‘conservative modernity’, state-of-the-art new production machines, built using old-established materials and techniques by millwrights and clocksmiths.

  Jedediah Strutt’s ‘North Mill at Belper, Derbyshire’, from Abraham Rees, Cyclopedia (1819). The mill’s internal mechanisms suggest the scale and complexity of some cotton manufacturing enterprises.

  The traditional nature of the craft skills employed in devising new production machines did not reduce their imaginative influence over those who saw them. Quite the opposite: Louis Simond visited Barclay’s Brewery in London, writing how the engine working there stirred ‘to the very bottom the immense mass of malt in boilers 12 feet deep’ and drove ‘elevators which nobody touches, carry[ing] up to the summit of the building 2,500 bushels of malt [about 38 tonnes] a day’ – and all this while not making ‘the least noise – not more than a clock; you might have heard a pin drop all over the building.’91 And in Birmingham he saw ‘enormous hammers, wielded by a steam engine . . . crushing in an instant red hot iron bars, converted into thin ribbons. Bars of iron for different purposes, several inches in thickness, presented to the sharp jaws of gigantic scissars, moved also by the steam-engine . . . clipped like paper.’ Elsewhere, engines turned millstones for polishing metal ‘with so great a velocity as to come to pieces by the mere centrifugal force’, and copper ‘spread into sheets for sheathing vessels under rollers . . . like paste under the stick of the pastry-cook’.92

  Improved spinning machine by Sir Richard Arkwright, 1775. Capable of spinning 8 threads at once, its timber construction was scaled up into much larger machines.

  Boulton & Watt capitalized on the imaginative attraction of machines by establishing a series of showcase engine installations. The mine pumping engine at Ting Tang in Cornwall was joined by rotative engines at the Whitbread Brewery and Albion Mill in London, showing what was possible in brewing and corn milling respectively. A renowned visitor to the Whitbread engine, in May 1787, was George III. Watt met him, noting how he was ‘most gracious
ly received by the King, who expressed himself most highly pleased with everything he has seen’.93 The royal visitor would have been equally impressed by the Albion Mill, with a pair of sun and planet engines driving up to ten sets of millstones each. It was the largest corn mill built up to that time and the first establishment to use cast iron for all its machinery.94 Showcases like this helped consolidate the company’s reputation for the future.

  To fully secure the company’s future prosperity, one last, major matter remained to be resolved. In Cornwall mine owners depended on Boulton & Watt’s engine to keep their mines free of floodwater economically, but bitterly resented paying a royalty for the privilege. Watt wrote of their complaints, ‘They say it is inconvenient for the mining interest to be burdened with the payment of engine dues, just as it is inconvenient for the person who wishes to get at my purse that I should keep my breeches-pocket buttoned.’95 In the late 1780s, as Boulton and Watt turned their attention to the rotative engine, two competitors, Jonathan Hornblower and Edward Bull, designed and constructed pumping engines that could compete with theirs on an equal footing – and they had a ready market among the recalcitrant Cornish miners. Watt contended that both Bull and Hornblower infringed his patent on the separate condenser and in 1792 began a legal battle against them that took seven years to resolve.96 The initial proceedings were indecisive, raising hopes among Watt’s competitors – and, indeed, the many other pirates of his engine design who stood behind Bull and Hornblower – that his patent might be declared void. Pirates were at work closer to home than Boulton & Watt realized: without their permission, John Wilkinson, upon whom they depended for engine cylinders, built and sold no fewer than 34 engines based on their designs, and this indicates the high financial stakes for all concerned in the form of unpaid engine royalties.97 Hornblower held out to the very end: the validity of Watt’s patent was only finally upheld in 1799, upon which he and Boulton immediately sued for payment from all the engineers copying their separate condenser, and Cornish miners who had withheld payment for using the engine pending a legal decision. In total they stood to gain £162,000 (more than £10 million at today’s prices) – the amount they actually received was less, but still enough for Watt to retire from the business on a comfortable income.98 Thus was passed a major milestone in handing over to the company to Boulton & Watt’s successors – their sons.

  A Boulton & Watt engine at Fazeley Street Rolling Mills, Birmingham, 1790–1800, as illustrated in Tomlinson’s The Useful Arts and Manufactures of Great Britain (1861).

  The legacy of Boulton & Watt as their partnership ended in 1800 has proved controversial. They had established an ‘industry standard’ for the steam engine – a basic pattern of a useful, efficient, and reliable machine – and produced ten times more engines than their next biggest competitor.99 Even top-quality competitors like Matthew Murray in Leeds ‘attempted to improve the construction of Mr Watt’s engines’, but after some years were ‘obliged to follow the models of the engines made at Soho’.100 Some historians have argued that the authority Boulton & Watt wielded was ‘sufficient to clog engineering enterprise for a generation’.101 There is a broad consensus that the extension of Watt’s patent right up to 1800, matching the length of his intended partnership with Boulton, did act as a brake on the wider development of the engine. However, up to 1800 and even beyond, the small scale of industrial enterprise, even in textiles, where powered machines ‘achieved their most famous triumphs’, limited the demand for radical transformation in engineering technique.102 What was needed, as this chapter has explored, could be met by adapting and scaling up existing, long-established craft skills. Despite the patents on their engine, Boulton and Watt by no means monopolized those skills. And after 1800 the construction of machines by machines would remain exceptional for several decades. William Fairbairn wrote that, as late as 1817, ‘even Manchester did not boast of many lathes or tools, except small ones in the machine shops’, and that even when assembling complete cotton mills, ‘Our means were but small; we were without a steam-engine, or any other power, except Murphy [an Irish labourer] and three more assistants who turned the lathes.’103 The time when Sir George Head would see ‘the beam of an engine, weighing three tons’ being worked on in a lathe and ‘not withstanding its vast weight, revolving on a point which entered only three quarters of an inch, with as much ease as if it had been a peg top’ was some time in the future.104 So a range of new opportunities, including innovation in machine tools, remained open for machine making men to explore in the nineteenth century. Boulton & Watt’s engineering achievements were not the ne plus ultra of engineering but a symbol of what could be done. Next we will explore how the imaginative possibilities of the engine covered here were exploited by the new generation of engineers and expressed in the products that they built.

  SIX

  Inventive, Creative Genius, 1795–1819

  THE ROAD FROM THE CENTRE of Birmingham to Handsworth, on the city’s outskirts, was pleasant and much frequented by James Watt, his family and their visitors. The locality was becoming increasingly populous, and the ‘many respectable residences’ were commented on by local historian George Yates, who described ‘a barren heath . . . [now] covered with plenty and population’.1 And as travellers approached Boulton and Watt’s Soho Manufactory, Yates also noted how they passed ‘gardens, groves, and pleasure grounds’ that rendered Soho ‘a much-admired scene of picturesque beauty, where the sweets of solitude and retirement are to be enjoyed, as if far distant from the busy hum of men’.2 It was to this place that the Swiss steel-maker Johann Conrad Fischer came in August 1814 to explore, concealed amid the trees and gardens, an amazing new engine works.

  Fischer’s first port of call was the engine yard at the Soho Manufactory, and he was ‘dumbfounded’ at what he saw: ‘No description could do justice to the building in which these works are housed. I was amazed at both the great masses of iron and at the skill which the workmen had devoted to the construction of the building.’3 He then visited the turners’ and smiths’ workshops, where he ‘admired the wonderful craftsmanship of the smiths’ and a workshop containing ‘a large number of copying machines and here again I could not help admiring the characteristically high standard of craftsmanship of the workers’.4 The following day Fischer was admitted to the latest buildings where engines were constructed – a highly unusual event, since what happened within was usually kept carefully hidden from the outside world. He wrote that

  The works are completely enclosed by a high wall and consist of several separate buildings, each of which is many hundreds of feet in length. The most important are the foundry, the pattern shop, and the new workshop. Four furnaces produce enough molten iron to enable castings to be made up to a weight of 200 hundredweight.

  In all these buildings steam engines were at work, performing their tasks ‘quietly, regularly and efficiently – a tribute to all that human ingenuity has contributed to their construction’.5

  What is most notable about Fischer’s account is who was responsible for what he saw in the works. From the workshop making copying presses, to the design of the foundry, was not the work of James Watt and Matthew Boulton but of their sons, James Watt Junior and Matthew Robinson Boulton. We have seen how their fathers developed steam engines, first for pumping water and then, from the 1780s, for producing a rotative motion. We have also recounted briefly the legal measures taken to secure Watt’s patent of 1769 and underpin the prosperity of the company before 1800. This chapter will explore the means by which the business was continued in the hands of the next generation after 1800: how the men who drove the business forward were trained, the nature of the challenges that they faced and how they responded to them. There took place what we will call an ‘affective revolution’ in engineering, which turned the engine from just a machine into a product of which its creators’ antique forebears might have been proud.

  Two major technical issues affected the firm in the late 1790s. First, and most impo
rtantly, established suppliers could no longer be relied upon. The ironmaster John Wilkinson had made the majority of Boulton & Watt’s engine cylinders, but a bitter feud with his brother, and the revelation of his piracy of Boulton & Watt’s engine designs, brought the association to a close. The capacity for Boulton & Watt to accurately make cylinders – the heart of each engine – had to be acquired as a matter of some urgency. Second, work was being put in hand to standardize the design and manufacture of engines at Soho. Matthew Boulton had suggested a ‘pattern card’ of engines in standard sizes in 1782, and four years later, Watt proposed to ‘methodize the rotative engines so as to get on with them at a great pace’.6 Some aspects of the move towards standardization are still with us today: for example, Watt defined ‘horsepower’ as a unit of measurement for the first time, as a way to compare the power output of different engines, and to help establish how much machinery engines with different power outputs could drive. This new and enduring definition represents a major rethink of how the company worked. Whereas production had previously evolved in an organic way, a new scheme was now in prospect: the Soho Foundry, the secretive works visited by Fischer in 1814.

  The Soho Foundry was designed from the start along rational, pre-planned lines. Entirely separate from the old Soho Manufactory, the Foundry began work in the spring of 1796, and was intended to construct a standardized range of engines, from an 8-horsepower engine costing £525 (or about £20,000 at today’s prices), progressing in increments up to a 50 horsepower engine costing £2,109. To construct this range, particular care was taken in arranging how the Foundry operated. As one account has styled them, the senior Boulton and Watt were builders, but their sons were organizers.7 This new project brought the organizational talents of the junior Boulton and Watt to the fore. Of the two, James Junior was the foremost, with the younger Boulton concentrating more on the other output of the Soho Manufactory and new ventures in minting coinage.