James Watt

by Ben Russell

  The Foundry was built around nine workshops, each dedicated to a particular process: for example, cylinder boring, turning, fitting, smithing and pattern making. The shops were positioned so that the movement of heavy iron components was minimized, or made as easy as possible, and men were appointed to particular work specialisms. For example, ‘Wells and two assistant men, one lad’ were ‘employed constantly’ in fitting engine nozzles, controlling the flow of steam in and out of each engine’s cylinder. William Buxton and John Mincham were dedicated to ‘turning, draw filing and finishing piston and air pump rods’. ‘Foreman and three assistants, with lad to grind chisels’ were assigned to ‘sundry chipping’ of iron surfaces. And increasing use was being made, not just of hand skills, but of purpose-made machine tools: special lathes for pistons and shafts, vertical drills in the fitting shop and other lathes devoted to woodturning and making engines’ parallel motion, all with ‘connecting machinery’, the shafts and gears allowing them to be driven by steam. But what really stands out is how all these elements – workplace, workman, process, and tools – were carefully specified, one might even say choreographed, in sequence for each engine, from the first step of making the cylinder lid, to the final one of packing everything up ready for dispatch to the customer. Even the speed of the individual machine tools was defined. Not for nothing did Eric Roll, whose researches unearthed the details of production at Soho outlined here, claim that ‘neither [Frederick] Taylor, [Henry] Ford, nor other experts devise anything . . . that cannot be discovered at Soho before 1805.’8

  The Soho Foundry was vital to the continued success of Boulton & Watt, and it came alongside a business strategy that was markedly different from that previously adopted, and which contributed to the company’s success into the nineteenth century. This strategy was based on innovation both in products and in the markets where they were sold.

  As well as building beam engines, the company recognized the increasing demand for smaller, more compact and self-contained engine designs. One of the most prominent of these products was the ‘bellcrank’ engine, which replaced the rocking beam with a pair of triangular levers, or bellcranks, pivoting on the engine’s sides. The large, cast-iron bellcranks were liable to break after a time, but the design remained in production until 1814, when self-contained beam engines were introduced as an alternative.9 Equally important were marine engines to power ships at sea, and in this respect Boulton, Watt & Co. worked on a number of landmark projects: the engine used by the American engineer Robert Fulton in his ship the Clermont, which heralded the opening up of North America’s great rivers by steam; the first steamship used by the Royal Navy, HMS Comet; and finally the screw propeller engines for Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s mighty Great Eastern in 1854.10 Over the period from 1804 to 1847 the firm built 286 marine engines – as a rough guide, about one every two months.11

  As well as new products the company also more actively sought new markets. An office was opened in London, primarily to obtain orders for marine engines from prestigious customers like the Royal Navy and, later, the Post Office, which was developing a fleet of steam-powered mail ships. Caribbean sugar plantations demanded engines to drive cane-crushing mills, and the company found itself working in Demerara, Trinidad and the West Indies as well as Manchester or Oldham. A steady overseas engine trade was developed: Boulton & Watt built just twelve engines for foreign customers between 1786 and 1795. However, between 1795 and 1825, they built 102 – the majority after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 – and they proved to be highly profitable.12

  The Soho Foundry was a major landmark in the history of machine making: it was the first purpose-built factory dedicated to constructing machines. Such was the demand for its output that, even supplemented by the older engine workshops at the Soho Manufactory, there was still a waiting time of from eight to ten months between ordering an engine and taking delivery of it.13 Consequently, the Foundry received a series of extensions to provide additional workshop space in the first eight years of its existence.14 By 1804 the total construction cost amounted to more than £27,000, over £850,000 at today’s prices, but the whole debt had been repaid out of profits by 1812.15 If the Foundry’s success was as much a feat of organization as it was of engineering, what sort of education produced organizers like this?

  The young James had been intended to have a similar grounding to his father: conventional training in carpentry along with bookkeeping, mathematics and the rudiments of running a business, with a view to becoming an engineer or a manufacturer. Starting in May 1784, he was dispatched for a year to John Wilkinson’s ironworks. But then, just four months into his placement, he was uprooted again to be educated in Geneva in natural philosophy, mathematics and drawing. In the summer of 1786 he again moved on, to Eisenach and then Freiberg, to learn German, mathematics, chemistry and mining. By the middle of 1787 he was travelling the Continent, finally arriving home again in October.

  If Watt Junior had received a thorough and comprehensive education, however, his efforts very often were seen in a dim light by his father. Through his letters Watt Senior applied constant pressure to work harder and achieve more. He sent mathematical problems to test him, and exhorted him regularly to refrain from swearing, to be frugal and not to drink (or talk) too much, not to play cards, or indulge in theatre, music nor, it would appear, any other form of leisure. Indeed, he was to be awake early enough to begin his studies by six every morning.16 Watt Junior wrote to Matthew Boulton, complaining that his father did not understand him, ‘never having been a young man himself’.17 And his return to Britain saw little improvement in relations – in fact they deteriorated, and he finally quit his home, having discovered that his father did not consider him up to the job of running the engine business. Cast adrift, young Watt’s education took on a more rebellious nature.

  Model bellcrank engine, possibly by William Murdoch, c. 1799. The bellcrank engine was the first compact, self-contained engine available commercially.

  James Watt Junior portrayed by an unknown artist, c. 1800.

  In 1791 he relocated to Manchester as apprentice with Taylor & Maxwell, a company of cotton dyers and printers, and came under the influence of Thomas Walker, an ardent republican whose views must have appealed to his latent sense of rebellion, and Watt Junior found himself taking a leading role in the city’s Literary and Philosophical Society celebrating the Revolution in France.18 By the spring of 1792 he was travelling to France, even addressing the Jacobin Club of Paris – and his activities were soon denounced in the House of Commons in London. Yet even as the younger and elder Watt traded letters arguing furiously the case for and against the French revolutionary cause, Watt Junior realized that he was in a dangerous predicament. As the country descended further into political turmoil, he found himself a witness to bitter retribution and bloodshed; although the story that he only narrowly escaped arrest during the Terror is not quite true, he was lucky to escape when many others (including the scientist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier) lost their heads. In England the reactionary government was suppressing dissent, and young Watt potentially faced charges of sedition. But Watt now offered his son a lifeline: credit so that he could remain in France until circumstances were right to travel back, and gentle encouragement that he would not lose face by returning, in letters which exuded ‘a warmth of affection I never before experienced from him’, confided young James.19 By the autumn of 1792 he had quietly slipped back into Britain after a separation from his family and home of some five years.

  If James Watt Junior’s revolutionary education came to a premature end, he still benefited from a further education of an affective nature. Some historians have suggested that in the period after the French Revolution there can be detected among young people like James not just a desire to challenge authority in personal relationships and political life, but a heightened desire to experiment with ‘outrageous forms of expression or even with their own bodies’.20 This, it is argued, amounted to an ‘affective rev
olution’ in which people for the first time expected their emotions to have some kind of tangible expression. Letters from young Gregory Watt to William Creighton, one of Boulton & Watt’s engineers, went beyond references to ‘filth, farting and explosions’ to include erotic imagery that went far beyond the usual young men’s humour.21 Watt and his associates even sniffed nitrous oxide gas in Humphry Davy’s scientific laboratory. In December 1799 Davy sealed himself in an airtight box filled with 20 quarts of nitrous oxide, resulting in sensations ‘superior to any I ever experienced. Inconceivably pleasurable. Ideas were more vivid & associated together much more rapidly & so associated with words as to produce, perceptions perfectly novel. Theories passed rapidly thro the mind believed I may say intensely.’22 This wasn’t just a one-man project: Watt Senior designed and built the gas-making apparatus. The poets Samuel Coleridge and William Wordsworth were involved as well, mainly in an imbibing role.

  This is not to suggest that early engineers and machine makers were all nitrous oxide fiends and libertines, although Joshua Field recalled the 1820s ironmaster John Tickle as ‘an extraordinary character – a kind of excentric genious a Chymist & a Poet’, which sounds close.23 But those making machines in the decades around 1800 had an affective revolution of their own; it was not always catalysed by revolutionary politics, but was more likely to have its origins in the world of antiquity.

  Classical influences pervaded the education that a young man like Watt Junior might receive in the late eighteenth century. The historian Viccy Coltman writes that ‘education at public school amounted to a prolonged and thorough exposure in, first, the languages of the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks, and subsequently, to a selection of their literary works.’ A student at Eton, for example, would attend 27 hours of teaching every week. Of those, three hours were intended for mathematics and writing, three were taken up by religious study, and all of the remaining 21 hours – three-quarters of their time – were filled with antiquity, a diet that sustained them for six years.24

  The influence of the antique is suggested by the schoolbooks, notebooks and reading undertaken by James Junior’s half-brother, Gregory, totalling approximately 120 items, which are contained in a hair chest stored inside Watt’s workshop. Gregory died of tuberculosis in 1804, aged only 27, and it would appear that his father was greatly affected by his death, because he had his belongings placed in the workshop where his eye could on occasion rest upon them. Among the chest’s contents are a Compendious Treatise of Astronomy from 1762, chemistry notebooks, lists of books and tracts to be bound, notebooks and textbooks on maths, geography, navigation, astronomy and algebra. There are even 49 accomplished paintings and drawings, from anatomical sketches to images of Powis and Caernarfon castles in Wales and views of the Lake District and Clyde valley. But very prominent are no fewer than 23 books relating to the classics, including A New English–Latin Dictionary by John Entick and Thomas Ruddiman’s The Rudiments of the Latin Tongue; Or, a Plain and Easy Introduction to Latin Grammar of 1782. Here is a young man’s grounding in antiquity captured in paper form.

  So, in advance of the emergence of a formal curriculum for training young engineers, their education might be both wide-ranging and disparate. This broad education encouraged Watt Junior to take a different approach to building engines from his father. He was conscious not just of the technicalities of realizing new mechanical ideas, but of having to sell a product, a thing not just efficient and mechanically effective but packaged and marketed. The next big challenge, which he faced alongside the wider machine making industry, was to go from building the steam engine per se to the steam engine as status symbol. This meant it had to change from being a purely functional machine to one which was also in large part an aesthetic one. And in this respect the world of the antique that Watt Junior experienced as part of his education comes to the forefront of the discussion: antiquity had considerable influence over the making of many types of products.

  Boulton & Watt’s work on the engine happened in parallel with tremendous popular appetite for the antique – the culture, architecture and artefacts of ancient Greece and Rome.25 Discoveries made during archaeological excavations at Herculaneum in 1738, Pompeii in 1748 and at Paestum in Southern Italy were widely broadcast in a series of books. Isaac Ware translated the works of Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio into English in 1738 and followed it up with A Complete Body of Architecture in 1756, which was intended to ‘serve as a library . . . to the gentleman and the builder’ and to ‘instruct rather than amuse . . . nothing will be omitted that is elegant or great, but the principal regard will be shewn to what is necessary and useful.’26 Ware was followed by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, who published The Antiquities of Athens in 1762, and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, with his Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks in 1765. And between 1746 and 1778 Giovanni Piranesi produced over 100 large, immaculately detailed and popular views of Rome. Rather than appealing just to scholars and antiquaries, these books’ descriptions and illustrations also became widely used source material for architects and designers, too.

  Gregory Watt’s trunk, inside James Watt’s workshop.

  They also got into the hands of Watt’s associates. Matthew Boulton had all seven volumes of the French Comte de Caylus’ Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises, published in 1752–7.27 Josiah Wedgwood took inspiration from Sir William Hamilton’s Antiquités étrusques, grecques et romaines of 1766–7, which he referred to as ‘Hamilton’s Antiquitys’.28 The architect James Wyatt built the main building of the Soho Manufactory, with its imposing frontage, in 1765–7, described by historian Jennifer Tann as ‘a classic piece of English Palladianism’.29 He also designed Boulton & Watt’s huge Albion Mill in London and refashioned Matthew Boulton’s Soho House in the Palladian style.30 Antiquity permeated the environment in which they lived.

  There is a question over how far into the ranks of Britain’s machine makers antique influences pervaded. Not everyone had access to a classical education. But Wedgwood commented how many customers had a discerning eye for the antique, noting how some likened a particular vase design to ‘the things on the tops of Clock cases, or Beds heads. They are certainly not Antique, and that is fault enough to Damn them for with most of our customers.’31 And even without a formal introduction to the classical world, the workmen in a town like Birmingham would have had an eye for what looked right. Writing to Watt in 1775 regarding the design for a barometer, Gilbert Hamilton wished he could

  get some neat contrivance in order to make them in the form of a Corinthian pillar, the Base to open for adjusting them & on the top of the Pillar . . . to have a neat brass or bronze figure holding the scale. As the workmen with you are more in the way of fancy things they could hit if off better there than could be done here.32

  With particular reference to those making machines, there survives a sketchbook that belonged to William Creighton, who rose from erecting engines for Boulton & Watt to become head of their drawing office in 1815, and was a highly active contributor to James Watt Junior’s affective education.33 The sketchbook is a weighty tome, the size of two modern telephone directories, and among well-drawn maps and astronomical charts there is an entire section titled ‘Architectural Scraps’. This is packed with drawings, not just of bridges, factory chimneys, and one or two mills, but principally of 56 British cathedrals in intricate detail, complete with measurements, antique temples, and over 100 Ionic, Doric and Corinthian columns, all carefully drawn, proportioned and dimensioned.34 Creighton noted the source that inspired each drawing, and from this information we can see that he used Ware’s Complete Body of Architecture, the Antiquities of Athens and Chambers’ Treatise on the Decorative part of Civil Architecture (first published in 1759), as well as referring to Piranesi. These, then, suggest that others beyond Boulton & Watt took inspiration from the antique.

  It may be that producing work inspired by antiquity was a more
accessible occupation than it might initially appear. Piranesi declared in 1769 that ‘An artist, who would do himself honour, and acquire a name, must not content himself with copying faithfully the ancients, but studying their works he ought to show himself of an inventive . . . and of a creating genius.’35 Rather than rigidly copying antique forms, with all the study and scholarship of the literature that would entail, Piranesi suggests progressing beyond those forms, using them as a platform for exploration and invention.36 The springboard for this leap was already being assembled in the world of manufacturing and consumption as Boulton & Watt developed the steam engine.

  Antiquity inspired much of the output of Matthew Boulton’s Soho Manufactory. In 1767 the Duke of Cumberland commissioned Boulton & Fothergill to make ‘three Great Solomonean Candlesticks’, each almost a metre tall, comprising fluted Corinthian columns on decorative plinths surmounted by the candleholders, themselves formed of decorative tripods.37 Slender wine jugs and flagons were made with vase-like bodies, tall ‘loop’ handles and surfaces decorated with Vitruvian scrollwork.38 Candle vases and other exquisite objects were embellished with goat’s or lion’s head motifs, satyrs, Sphinxes, gold decoration, acanthus leaves, engravings of classical scenes and even beautifully detailed sculptural figures wearing robes. Boulton pushed his workmen to the limit when producing such items: Josiah Wedgwood wrote that

  Mr Boulton was making an immense large Tripod . . . to finish the top of Demosthenes Lanthorn building . . . from Mr Stewarts design.39 The legs were cast and weighed about 5 cwt. But they (the workmen) stagger’d at the bowl, & did not know which way to set about it. A council of the workmen was call’d & every method of performing this wonderfull work canvass’d over. They concluded by shaking their heads, & ended where they begun.