by Ben Russell
However, precision did not necessarily trump cheapness in the world of sculpture copying for the masses; it is telling that both John Hawkins and, to a slightly lesser extent, Benjamin Cheverton died in reduced circumstances. For all the ingenuity of their machines, mechanical sculpture copying was time-consuming, and that made it costly. A prime demonstration of this is provided by Watt, who conscientiously noted the time taken for each of the processes needed to make a single bust of Sappho in January 1811: a total of 39 hours.43 Assuming a mechanical carver could produce two busts in a long, 80-hour week, perhaps three with practice, this was still far behind the output for producing plaster casts. Making portrait busts after the antique, the drapery of robes around the shoulders and breast, with complex folds and layers, was very expensive to produce by hand, whereas in cast form it could be executed quickly and cheaply.44 And Achille Collas, manufacturing sculpture by machine in France, found that pirates immediately cast copies of his copies and sold them much cheaper than he could.45 Francis Chantrey’s bust of Sir Walter Scott was considered to be one of his finest works, and Chantrey himself made 40 copies to give to Scott’s admirers – but thousands of poor-quality copies were also quickly made by Italian craftsmen based in London.46 Watt’s decision to leave the exploitation of the sculpture machines to others, like Hawkins, was a prudent one.
Watt’s sculpture-copying machines are enigmatic, then. They show Watt’s instinct for latching on to a new area of work and coming up with a solution. However, whether that solution would ever have found a viable purpose outside the workshop is questionable. Late in life Watt turned away from a commercial application for the machines to making sculpture simply for the stimulation and challenge of creating something new. And create he did, in vast quantities: Watt’s complete sculpture collection, which remains largely hidden in the Science Museum’s stores, contains approximately 400 casts, originals, copies, busts, cameos, medallions and more, from figures in the Egyptian style to busts of Niobe, Homer and Aristotle.47 Friends and associates from Joseph Black to the astronomer William Herschel found their image multiplied on the machines. Watt even obtained a death mask of Matthew Boulton following his death in 1809, and this was copied six times in reduced form.
What became more significant than the commercial aspects of sculpture for Watt were the practicalities of multiplying his own image. And among his friends and colleagues, Watt found time to manufacture self-portraits in considerable numbers. Twenty small medallion-size portraits survive in his sculpture collection, and so do a number of large portrait busts: two by Sir Francis Chantrey and three by Peter Turnerelli. The Turnerelli bust, executed in 1807, is rather unflattering, but Chantrey’s, commissioned by Watt in 1814, was strikingly successful; Watt himself copied it to send to his friends ‘as the productions of a young artist just entering on his eighty-third year’, reduced in size as he did not think himself ‘of importance enough to fill up so much of my friends’ house as the original bust does’.48 Chantrey and Watt knew each other well, discussing together the copying machines, and as Chantrey portrayed Watt in life, so he also had the job of memorializing him in death. The two men exchanged final letters in May 1818, and the following year, on 19 August, Watt died at Heathfield, aged 83. Chantrey’s bust was the basis for a full-size statue on his tomb at St Mary’s Church, Handsworth, where Watt was interred as he wished, ‘in the most private manner without show or parade’.49 Other versions were placed in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh. It was acclaimed as the finest resemblance of a man eulogized on his monument in Westminster Abbey as one of ‘the real Benefactors of the World’.
A reduced-size plaster mould and cast from the death mask of Matthew Boulton, James Watt’s business partner and friend, made 1809–19.
As well as the Chantrey and Turnerelli busts, Watt’s workshop contains a mystery object that has only recently been identified. On the central workbench sat a highly complex plaster mould comprising 43 separate parts. In 2010 conservators painstakingly opened the mould and separated the individual pieces to reveal a man – but who? The parts were scanned with a laser to produce a digital image, and these were then combined electronically to reveal a previously unknown bust of Watt, which was rendered into a physical artefact using a three-dimensional printer that built up layers of nylon fused together by heat.50 Establishing the author of the bust involved further detective work; among his sculpture collection was a small low-relief self-portrait of Watt that closely resembled the new bust. The small copy was signed on the back, in Watt’s hand, ‘Reduced from Gahagan’s bust by scraping 1807’ – giving a date for the original and a pointer to one of the Gahagan family of sculptors, although which of them remains unclear, being the artist commissioned to make the original.51
Watt was, then, generating images of himself in considerable quantities. Maria Edgeworth visited Heathfield in April 1820, and noted the array of portraits of Watt that greeted her: ‘his picture, his bust, his image everywhere’.52 His bust proved highly charismatic: when Edgeworth saw it she was struck ‘almost breathless’, and in 1841 a writer was inspired by it to write that ‘As I came home, the booming rattle of the train seemed like the spirit of Watt still animating inert matter.’53 By generating images of himself, Watt was carrying out on a small scale a process that was to be repeated much more widely after his death. Immortalized in marble, plaster or ivory, he became the human face of far wider changes transforming the face of industrial Britain.
Portrait bust of James Watt newly manufactured in 2010 from the original mould (1807), also shown in sections, by one of the Gahagan family of sculptors.
Watt’s copying machines represent a growing trend towards the mechanization of all sorts of manufactures. Their nearest industrial counterparts were the machines used by the Bank of England to make the dies for minting coins, which used a similar stylus and cutting tool arrangement to engrave the detail of an original produced by an artist onto a steel copy. The multiplication of the finished product fell to Matthew Boulton, who turned his attention to minting machinery driven by Watt’s engine; a single set of eight coining presses could produce more than 460,000 halfpenny coins, each perfectly identical, in every twelve-hour working day.54 Boulton’s minting machines are suggestive of a broader trend towards mechanization; in cotton factories, an automatic spinning machine of 1825 could process 100 lb of cotton sixteen times faster than the equivalent machine in 1780, in only 125 hours as opposed to 2,000.55 The changes in machine tools, machines for building other machines, were equally far-ranging, and their potentialities are demonstrated by the steam hammers built by James Nasmyth of Manchester, which replaced the team of sweating hammermen plying their sledges, or the water-powered helve wheel, with a giant steam-powered hammer head that could pound the heaviest forging or delicately crack the shell of an egg in a wine glass, as it was often called upon to do at public demonstrations. Faced with these new capabilities, Thomas Carlyle, in his essay ‘Signs of the Times’ of 1829, characterized the period as ‘not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word.’56 And these machines were increasingly ‘self-acting’, incorporating into their mechanisms the skills previously bred into the expert artisans who worked with them.
Watt’s steam engine was the icon of Carlyle’s age of machinery, instrumental in ‘effecting the most remarkable revolution in all departments of industry that the world has ever seen’.57 By 1850 Britain was using half as much steam power again as the whole of western Europe.58 The historian Asa Briggs has written of a widely accepted ‘gospel of steam’ based, for example, on the creative power of invention that it represented, the universality of its expected capabilities and the rising living standards that it brought.59 Although historians have realized since that the expectations of steam, and its status as a symbol of progress, ran somewhat in advance of its actual employment, and waterwheels actually provided more power generation t
han engines until the mid-nineteenth century, this did not reflect at that time on Watt himself.
The Romantic poet William Wordsworth believed Watt was, ‘considering both the magnitude and the universality of his genius . . . perhaps the most extraordinary man that this country ever produced’.60 He became the first engineer to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey, with a memorial installed in 1834 following a decade of lobbying by many prominent figures representing Britain’s new industrial interests. Watt became a new kind of industrial hero, compared to Isaac Newton in astronomy and William Shakespeare in literature. He was elevated into the traditional national pantheon of aristocrats and monarchs, military men and statesmen. And in this respect Watt blazed a trail for the community of engineers and inventors to attain heroic stature in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.61
Images of Watt, in the shape of portraits and busts, statues and memorials, played a major role in his posthumous promotion; a whole genre of ‘Watt art’ sprang up. The story that, as a child, he had toyed with the steam issuing from a kettle to try to ascertain its nature acquired the status of a parable in Victorian Britain, and was depicted in a series of popular prints.62 Another mezzotint by J. E. Lauder, dated 1860, shows Watt as a Romantic, philosophical figure, leaning over John Anderson’s model of the engine, concentrating intently and solving its problems by the power of thought. And when portraits of Britain’s 51 most distinguished men of science were put together into a single ensemble image of that name by William Walker in 1862, Watt sat prominently at the very centre, the focal point for the image and, by extension, the community of scientists and engineers standing around him.
The generation of so much iconography around Watt fed debates about the nature of his achievements throughout the nineteenth century. First, these concerned his priority with the steam engine and how it measured up to that built by others. The earliest articles that surveyed the engine’s development, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1797, were written by Watt’s friend John Robison with input from Watt.63 An article in Olinthus Gregory’s Treatise on Mechanics of 1807, accusing Watt of seeking to ‘repress the energies of his contemporaries’ and monopolize engine construction, was suppressed after pressure from Watt.64 After Watt’s death in 1819 his son remained avidly protective of his father’s reputation; François Arago, who wrote the first biography of James Senior, wrote of ‘the religious respect with which my friend the present Mr James Watt regards all that recalls the remembrance of his father’.65
James Scott after R. W. Buss, Watt’s First Experiment of Steam, 1849.
This careful shaping of Watt’s legacy reflects a second aspect of the debate about him: whether he was a philosopher or a craftsman. In his retirement Watt was keen to emphasize the ‘philosophical’ nature of his work on the steam engine. This was particularly manifested in manipulation of the story that, as a child, he was enthralled by the steam issuing from a kettle. Although the story as subsequently told concerned the potential industrial power of the steam, Watt and his son instead emphasized that it was about the steam’s philosophical properties – in fact, Watt Junior himself modified the original account.66 Watt’s intention in emphasizing this was to explain his independence from Joseph Black in devising the theories of heat that underpinned the steam engine’s performance. By comparison, subsequent biographers, most notably Samuel Smiles, gave Watt’s workshop prominence in their accounts, identifying it as a place of handicraft rather than philosophy. Historian David Miller argues that in so doing, Smiles ‘was effectively developing an image of Watt that projected the old craftsman of the Heathfield Hall workshop backwards, rather than the young philosopher of the kettle myth forwards, in time’.67
The controversy over Watt’s legacy, and what he stood for, has raged up to the present day as engineering and science have been afforded differing degrees of priority.68 Watt was at first perceived as a lone heroic engineer, but from the late 1820s, as the engineering profession transformed Britain with bold new railway and civil engineering projects, he was joined by others like Isambard Kingdom Brunel and George Stephenson. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century there was a move away from praising engineers and inventors to emphasizing the role of the scientist and ‘basic scientific research’, and replacing talk of inventions with ‘applied science’.69 By the centenary of Watt’s death in 1919, however, he had been firmly reappropriated as a craftsman and engineer: it is telling that one of the largest groups of contributors to the commemorative appeal launched in 1919 ‘comprised workers in engineering and metalworking firms throughout the Birmingham region’.70 Most recently the debate has come full circle, and Watt has been a case study in the interplay of ideas between science and industry, and the subject of detailed reconstructions of the philosophical world that he lived in. However, amid the books and two-dimensional material, the busts and other sculptural representations of Watt, his workshop itself has sometimes been mentioned but rarely considered in detail. Exploring what happened to the workshop after Watt’s death in 1819 sheds new light on how to think about Watt, and all that he stood for.
As Watt was continuously reappraised and reappropriated by different groups, his workshop always remained as a presence in the background. Watt’s wife Anne continued to live at Heathfield until her own death in 1832 but, in Watt’s will, he carefully left all his ‘books and prints . . . tools models book cases drugs and curiosities’, the majority of which were in the workshop, to his son.71 Watt Junior kept the workshop door firmly locked and the room remained entirely untouched until his own death in 1848. It was only opened for the first time for Watt’s biographer J. P. Muirhead in 1853. Muirhead’s description of the workshop indicates its tremendous imaginative power, for he wrote that
The classical ‘garret’ and all its mysterious contents . . . have ever since been carefully preserved in the same order as when the hand and ‘eye of the master’ were last withdrawn from them . . . all things there seemed still to breathe of the spirit that once gave them life and energy; and only the presence of some reverend dust silently announced, that no profane hand, forgetful of the ‘religio loci’ [place of sanctity], had been permitted to violate the sanctities of that magical retreat.72
For Muirhead the workshop was a place of religious significance, as it was for the biographer Samuel Smiles, who finished a detailed account of its contents by stating that in it the ‘spirit’ of Watt’s work survived, as if embodied in the artefacts ‘fast crumbling to decay’.73 Here was the workshop as an industrial shrine. Even if it had remained untouched for so long, the mere fact of its existence cast a spell over those concerned with Watt and how he was presented. It particularly did so for Bennet Woodcroft, director of the Patent Office Museum.
Woodcroft (1803–1879) was chief among the nineteenth-century pursuers of Watt ‘relics’. An engineer and inventor from Sheffield, he had worked in textile weaving and printing and in marine propulsion, where he patented a series of screw propellers. With growing expertise on the operation of Britain’s patent system, in the 1850s he was charged with establishing the basic infrastructure to efficiently administer an expanding torrent of inventions seeking patent protection. As well as making information about patents more easily accessible, including the monumental task of publishing over 14,000 specifications in five years, Woodcroft also began the Patent Office library of technical literature, developed a portrait gallery of inventors and assembled a collection of artefacts that were housed in the Patent Office Museum in South Kensington, London.74 Woodcroft was highly active, his patent work was strategically important to Britain as nineteenth-century industry expanded and, with the Patent Museum, he had the chance to indulge his antiquarian instincts. He was a forceful character, obstinate, determined and difficult to thwart in pursuit of historic artefacts for the collections, and high on his list of desirable acquisitions for the Patent Museum were artefacts associated with Watt.
Early among these was a ‘tea kettle’ said to be in the possessi
on of Watt’s descendants. James Gibson Watt, then head of the Watt family, wrote to the Patent Museum on 27 September 1863: ‘I am satisfied it is not . . . the one which he originally observed the steam lifting the lid when boiling on the fire . . . The one I have was evidently made by his orders and used as an experimentalising steam kettle.’75 Undaunted, the museum curator Francis Pettit Smith replied, ‘As this one was actually constructed for and used by James Watt in his early investigations of the properties of steam it cannot fail to attract great notice and prove to be a very interesting & valuable acquisition to our present collection.’76 The kettle was subsequently delivered to the Patent Museum by Mr Gibson Watt’s solicitor and it remains on display today, close to two of Watt’s oldest steam engines, also acquired for the museum in 1861: the ‘Lap’ engine of 1788, and fragments of ‘Old Bess’, dating from 1777.77
Alongside these items, however, Watt’s workshop remained the ultimate prize. Bennet Woodcroft wrote to a Birmingham contact in May 1863, remarking on ‘a rumour now current that the Trustees of the late Mr Watt contemplate opening the room at Heathfield Hall . . . which, by agreement with the tenant, has been hitherto kept closed’.78 That came to nothing, but four months later, Francis Pettit Smith wrote rather unsubtly to James Gibson Watt, ‘How often I have longed to take a peep into Heathfield . . . where I am informed a host of invaluable relics do still exist – which in honour to the illustrious man should once more see the daylight – and be preserved to the end of time in some public institute like this.’79 By January 1864 no progress had been made, and Woodcroft, exasperated, wrote to Pettit Smith, ‘I am ready to go with you any day to Birmingham whether Mr Gibson Watt gives his permission or not. If I can’t go into the house I will stand outside.’80 Woodcroft and Smith finally got into the workshop with Gibson Watt on Wednesday, 5 April 1864, having spent twenty minutes fighting with the door and then breaking the window frame in an attempt to open it. Woodcroft’s subsequent letter to a colleague, Sir John Romilly, provided details of what he found within, from the initial ‘stratum of dust’, to the contents beneath, which were ‘most systematically arranged’. Woodcroft continued,