by Ben Russell
The potential of cast iron for multiplying decorative details in machinery was not lost on contemporary engineers, who wrestled with the question of what an aesthetic reflecting the steam engine’s importance, status and power should consist of. Engineer and historian Greville Bathé described the period from 1840 until 1860 as a ‘somewhat glamorous period in engineering progress’.77 Similarly Julie Wosk believed that ‘after 1830 . . . designers confronted the need to create engine frames that embodied the century’s pride in technology’.78 However, both these authors place the emphasis too late: there was considerable work on a new aesthetic for the engine much earlier than 1830. And rather than a series of phases that machine design went through, it is more useful to identify a number of parallel strands in machine design.
First among these was the application of antiquity. Even if a formal relationship between the classical orders and engineering is difficult to identify, antique details were widely adopted and enduring. As beam engines evolved into self-contained structures from being built into a masonry engine house, columns proliferated, often fluted, with plain Doric and more ornate Ionic and Corinthian capitals, and supporting entablatures that included delicate moulded detail.79 The frames of marine engines followed suit on a larger scale, frequently incorporating arches with a decorative keystone cast into the metal above.80 Later the number of columns was reduced, the entablature done away with and the rocking beam supported on a single, much more robust column.81 Alternatively the beam could be supported by an A-frame, which might comprise columns set at an angle (which type was favoured by Boulton & Watt’s archrival Matthew Murray of Leeds), or a cast plate frame with carefully rounded cut-outs to reduce the amount of metal needed, with indented panels and decorative roundels.82
The aesthetic transformation of the engine was noted by contemporaries. Visiting the Soho Foundry in 1814, Swiss engineer Johann Conrad Fischer was amazed that ‘What might have seemed impossible has now been achieved. What was once a confused pile of piping and cylinders has become an elegant iron building of Doric and Corinthian pillars.’83 Yet at the same time, since Boulton & Watt’s patents were no longer valid, they had no claims to a monopoly on decorating their engines – in fact they may even have lagged behind. James Watt Junior wrote in September 1823 that an acquaintance had visited the works of London engineer Henry Maudslay and spoke of ‘the workmanship and appearance of the engines he has completed for the Navy: Wonder we cannot adopt the same beautiful Gothic in our framing and the same neatness of finish?’84
This quotation leads us beyond the purely antique forms towards other influences that came to bear for relatively short but intense periods. The nineteenth century saw a revival of medieval Gothic architecture in Britain, from Horace Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill in southwest London, begun in 1749, to the new Houses of Parliament at Westminster, rebuilt by Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry after being devastated by fire in 1834. Similar influences quickly spread into engineering: John Braithwaite of London built a water pump for Lord Brownlow’s country house in 1817 which had its cylinders, air vessels and pipes encased by pointed-arch framing.85 The 1830s saw a range of similar designs: William Joyce of Greenwich built ‘Pendulous’ steam engines with Gothic frames in 1834 and W. Pope of London built an even larger version which was ‘clothed with iron Gothic tracery’.86 Gothic influences endured particularly in the U.S.: the Henry Ford Museum has an outstanding engine by New York’s Novelty Ironworks dated from 1855, which would not look out of place working in a cathedral.87
Gothic forms were supplemented by an Egyptian revival in mechanical form. In 1840 John Marshall, flax spinner of Leeds, commissioned a new building in the Holbeck area of the city from the architect Ignatius Bonomi.88 It was partly inspired by the temple at Edfu on the River Nile in Egypt, after which it took its name of ‘Temple Mill’, and its immense internal area had a frontage comprising stout columns with papyrus-headed capitals supporting an entablature decorated with other Egyptian motifs.89 Inside Benjamin Hick of Bolton constructed a powerful twin beam engine which repeated many of the Egyptian details from outside, down to the ‘chronometric’ governor, a name evoking the capabilities of its builders, in the form of a winged scarab beetle.90
If these startling reinventions of long-established designs suggest discontinuity, they are balanced by strong elements of stability and continuum. By adopting classical, Gothic or (to a lesser extent) Egyptian stylings, engineers were experimenting on the basis of their prior knowledge, which was as much cultural as technical. But alongside these projects, working out the best balance between functional utility and decorative appearance, evolved a new aesthetic informed not so much by the past, as by formal knowledge of materials, assessment of how they could be worked, and understanding of the effects that could be achieved.
Pumping set with framing in the Gothic style, by John Braithwaite of London, 1817.
This approach is best conveyed, not by Boulton & Watt in Birmingham, or even Murray in Leeds, but by the engineers of London and, particularly, Henry Maudslay. Maudslay’s works, just off Westminster Bridge Road and across the river from Whitehall, have been alluded to already: they were founded in 1798 and became a hothouse for engineering talent. Many engineers, including James Nasmyth and Joseph Whitworth, worked there before founding their own companies.91 Nasmyth recalled Maudslay’s maxims for machine design: ‘First, get a clear notion of what you desire to accomplish’, ‘keep a sharp lookout upon your materials; get rid of every pound of material you can do without’, ‘avoid complexities, and make everything as simple as possible’ – or, as the historian James Hamilton has put it, understanding, economy, simplicity.92 Maudslay had given physical form to these concepts as early as 1802, when he secured the contract to construct a suite of machines to make pulley-blocks at the Royal Navy’s Portsmouth Dockyard. The demand was so prodigious – over 100,000 blocks per year, in a range of sizes – that he constructed 45 machines that together formed a production line, the first set of single-purpose, entirely metal-constructed machines anywhere in the world. The machines paid ‘the most scrupulous attention to accuracy and durability . . . presenting an elegant proportion in their form, which is very agreeable to the eye’, and set new standards in metal construction: economy in the use of metal, the replacement of solid forms with carefully formed bracing and restrained use of decorative details like plain columns and finials.93 This approach was carried through to the machine tools Maudslay built for his London works, and in turn influenced those who trained there.94
Model Hick double beam engine in the Egyptian style, 1840, and displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Here, then, was the start of a new machine aesthetic which had its own character. Just as Augustus Pugin complained that architects constructed ornaments instead of ornamenting construction, so the new aesthetic was informed by the basic form of the mechanism itself. With ‘strength in the proper place, stability without unnecessary weight, and simplicity of form without meanness’, further ornament was unnecessary, ‘because their own proportions [would] constitute their greatest’.95
After 1800, two competing pressures shaped how this new approach evolved. On the one hand, as machines became larger and more self-contained, the aesthetic opportunities increased. Marine engines were some of the largest engines built at the time and offered some of the greatest opportunities for decoration.96 On the other, engineers sought to reduce weight and lower the centre of gravity, doing away with as much framing as possible and making engines ‘direct-acting’ to remove the need for the great rocking beam. As they did so, these engineers were ‘exhilarated and enthused about the beauty of their own creations, about whose formal qualities and the newness of these qualities they were quite clear in their minds.’97 Remnants of old forms began to disappear, and the new approach, ‘equally remarkable for elegance of appearance and compactness of arrangement’, gained ground.98
This is not to characterize the new way of designing machines as a comp
lete break with the past: in its details, it was not. As Michael Wright has written of the Portsmouth machines, icons of modernity that became ‘must-see’ tourist destinations on a par with the Soho Manufactory or Etruria, ‘there are features that seem to be borrowed from woodwork and others from the smithy: cross-bracing certainly looks like carpentry’ and other details ‘are reminiscent of the way that the parts of wagons and carriages are lightened; while the use of latticework . . . imitates wrought ironwork’.99 This most likely reflects Maudslay’s training as a carpenter and blacksmith. In fact, Maudslay’s ‘table’ steam engine, a compact machine patented in 1807, was criticized as being ‘a little too complex . . . its frame reminds one of an antiquated style of cabinet work’.100 As for Maudslay’s famous maxims, Jean-Antoine Knollet (1700–1770) a prominent lecturer in natural philosophy, constructed his own scientific instruments and, in doing so, had developed four guiding principles: that they should be precisely made; with no superfluous decoration; of the simplest and strongest construction; and capable of performing several tasks.101 Maudslay was early in scaling up these principles onto an industrial scale, and particularly in applying them to cast iron, but the principles per se had existed for some time. And the delineation between scientific and industrial scales could be hazy: the mural quadrant made for Kew observatory in 1770 by Sisson of London needed a robust latticework of struts for rigidity across its great 8-foot radius, for example, and the instrument maker Edward Troughton had large items cast and machined by Maudslay’s engineering competitor Bryan Donkin at Bermondsey.102
Although we have described distinct ‘design styles’ – classical, Gothic, a new ‘machine aesthetic’ – surviving artefacts also point to the parallel existence of an active vernacular school of engineering design. A Lancashire clockmaker needed a small full-size engine to drive his tools and commissioned it from a local blacksmith. It was relatively unadorned when compared to the polished products from a works like Maudslay’s, but entirely appropriate for the job it was required to do, and its simple, robust design spoke of the smith’s versatility and sense of authorship, down to the incorporation of a small brass heart inlaid into the base.103 An individual named Blankly built an exquisite gilt-brass beam engine model, decorating the cylinder with an engraved masonic badge including the eye of God, a sun and moon, a compass and a square.104 Other models became objets d’art, with the balance between function and decoration tipped firmly to the latter: decorative ‘bun’ feet, spiral knurled columns, condenser cisterns or boiler casings surrounded by brass sheet decorated with patterns, flowers or leaves, even construction in silver.105 Still more are fine examples of engineering skill, but follow a design entirely unique to the builder, with suggestions of classical columns and free-style decoration, all brought to a bright, finely polished finish.106 This vernacular style emphasized engineers’ personal motivations and interests, not formal design protocols.
Mortising machine from the Portsmouth blockmills, 1803. The machine cut a slot through a thick block of wood to accommodate a pulley-wheel, around which ropes could pass. Its design combines strength with elegance.
Some nineteenth-century commentators would take a dim view of this approach. Samuel Clegg wrote his Architecture of Machinery to ‘inquire into the reasons of error, and to endeavour to point out certain rules for design, by attention to which the many irregularities in construction and form so constantly met with in machinery are to be avoided; and to explain the correct principles of “taste”.’107 Clegg’s father had been apprenticed to Boulton & Watt, so he may have inherited some sense of the proper (or one might say austere) in his approach to machines.108 But Clegg in his turn had critics: some of his examples of tasteful engineering design were dismissed by the editor of the Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal as ‘architectural monstrosities’ that were ‘vapid and quakerlike’.109
In treating the output of the early nineteenth-century engineers as art, then, we can see that its substance, and its virtues or defects, were both varied and contested. In an age before standardization engineers were free to pursue their own paths within the parameters set by the need to stay afloat commercially, and they did so with diverse results. The antique continued to hold sway into the 1840s but, in the United Kingdom at least, it was increasingly surpassed by the new functional approach.
Regardless of how it was attained, however, the period until the 1840s was unrivalled in its pursuit of beauty in engineering. Thomas Tredgold might have criticized Maudslay’s table engine, but he still believed ‘the beauty of the workmanship is unequalled’.110 Maudslay’s epitaph, fittingly cast into an iron tombstone, remarked on his combination of ‘mathematical accuracy and beauty of construction’ (my emphasis). Engineers found beauty even in simple aspects of their work. John Robison noted that a slide valve’s ‘sliding plate performs the office of four cocks in a very beautiful and simple manner’.111 When Hans Casper Escher visited Manchester in 1814, he wrote that ‘One must admire the steam engines here. In beauty and efficiency they bear the same relationship to French steam engines as English spinning engines bear to those of Saxony.’112
The engine in all its forms exerted a continued imaginative effect on those who saw it at work. Sir George Head wrote of the engine supplying air blast to iron furnaces at the Low Moor Iron Works, ‘I have listened to a storm on the Atlantic, I have stood on the Table Rock at Niagara, yet never did I hear a sound in nature equal to this – so terrific, or of so stunning a din.’113 Summarizing the effect of steam in a Leeds cotton mill, Sir George was convinced that
the movements of the engine altogether were so perfect and free from friction, the brilliancy of polish bestowed on many of its parts so lustrous and the care and attention paid to the whole so apparent that imagination might readily have transferred the edifice to a temple, dedicated by man, grateful for the stupendous power that moved within, to Him who built the universe.114
The emergence of the engine as a carefully styled object reflects its role as symbol of the new industrial age, signalling dignity, prosperity and status as much as technical mastery.
This approach was entirely congruent with how the antique was appropriated and imitated in other industries, comprising ‘an evocation of objects in other forms, and indeed the new form might well surpass the original in inventiveness’.115 Before the emergence of a formal engineering profession, engineers built an entire generation of machines that amplified ancient designs into new, confident and imaginative forms. This process was not just explored at the Soho Foundry or in Birmingham. As Boulton & Watt left the scene, they handed over to engineers spread across Britain: in London, Manchester, Lancashire and Tyneside. But what, so to speak, of James Watt and his son? The younger Watt settled down to become, in the words of historian Eric Robinson, ‘a pillar of society as well as something of a dandy’, while Peter Jones has him living ‘a solitary, bachelor existence with just a cat, a dog, and a Sicilian manservant for company’.116 With the future of the engine-building company in safe hands, his father was about to embark on one last, big project: sculpture copying.
SEVEN
Life after Death, 1800–1924
THE STAIRCASE UP TO the second floor of James Watt’s house, Heathfield, was steep and dark. Going up from the first-floor bedrooms to the two servant’s rooms and a cistern cupboard above, visitors reached a landing with an insubstantial wooden banister. At the far end was a broad wooden door, to the left of which was a demi-circular shelf ready to receive plates of food if the occupant of the room beyond was too busy to be disturbed. From beyond the door would come a rhythmic whirring and grinding. Lifting the latch and peering in, the visitors would see James Watt, clad in a leather apron, head down and brow furrowed in concentration as he worked the treadle of a giant machine reaching almost to the ceiling. Part of the machine’s framing would be covered with a piece of cotton waste secured with string, so that Watt wouldn’t strike his head on it, and the cutting tool sent out showers of dust as it bit into a
piece of plaster of Paris. Around the workshop plaster moulds lay half-assembled with string, containers held plaster mixtures and on the shelves rested figurines styled after the antique. This was James Watt’s workshop.1
The workshop was in the attic of Heathfield, commissioned by Watt from the architect James Wyatt in 1789 for a site on Handsworth Heath, a mile and a half northwest from the centre of Birmingham. Watt and his family moved in during September 1790. The following year, they took the opportunity to buy more of the surrounding heathland, and amassed 40 acres of grounds, gardens and woodland to form a ‘large and charming park’.2 Heathfield would be Watt’s home as he withdrew from the steam-engine business, and for the rest of his life. It was a fine house, in a marked Neoclassical style, of which Mrs Watt was both proud and protective: having indoctrinated the servants with ‘the thrifty and far-seeing habits of the most enlightened Scotch housewifery’, she taught the family’s two pugs to wipe their feet before entering the house and, being ‘not so amiable in her household as she might have been’, was alleged to have had a window ‘placed in the wall which separated her sitting room from the kitchen, so that she had the servants continually under her eye’.3 Watt may have been a ‘potent commander of the elements’, an ‘abridger of time and space’ whose ‘cloudy machinery’ had changed the world, but at Heathfield Mrs Watt held sway.4 Watt, with his penchant for chemical experiments and instrument making, retired to the attic.
Watt’s workshop, as illustrated in Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers Boulton and Watt (1865). This is the earliest known image of the workshop.