James Watt

by Ben Russell

  In drawers were found splendid works of art carved by [sculpture copying] machines & produced in a variety of substances from marble, mother of pearl, to common deal. At Christie and Mantons these works produced by James Watt’s own hands with the aid of machinery made by himself would realize fabulous prices. Mechanical drawings, chemicals, optical instruments and almost every imaginable thing that room contains.

  The visitors were so engrossed in what they saw that they spent seven hours exploring, and Woodcroft left his glasses behind; they were later returned to him by Mary Pemberton, daughter of the tenant, accompanied by a ‘kindly expressed’ note.81

  Watt’s alleged ‘experimentalising steam kettle’, forming part of a self-contained ‘bachelor’s stove’ with grate and cooking pan, c. 1760.

  Woodcroft’s fascination with the workshop reflected a very particular, mechanical view of the world and of Watt. This view was based on a realization that many of the industrial sites and machines of Britain’s Industrial Revolution were, even in the 1860s, at risk of destruction. The Penydarren Ironworks in South Wales, one of the six largest in Britain, closed in 1859, and the buildings were ruined and abandoned before 1870.82 Many other ironworks followed, unable to compete with cheaper steel production. In Birmingham the Soho establishments associated with Boulton and Watt were disappearing, too. The engineer J. C. Fischer revisited the Soho Foundry in July 1851, but reported that

  this great plant had suffered a complete decline . . . The many workshops were quite empty, deserted, and decayed . . . I would never have believed so rapid a change possible had I not seen it with my own eyes. Here as in many another place the inscription ‘sic transit gloria mundi’ would indeed be appropriate.83

  A short distance away, the Soho Manufactory was either empty or being sublet, and was demolished in early 1863.84 The first items of correspondence between Woodcroft and Watt’s descendants date from May 1863, suggesting that the loss of the Soho building may have piqued Woodcroft’s initial interest in preserving Watt’s workshop.85

  Individual machines also faced an uncertain future. Just as Woodcroft was gearing up to acquire Watt’s workshop, he was also pursuing the engine from Henry Bell’s steamship Comet, which marked the beginning of steam navigation in Britain.86 The engine had been built on the Clyde Estuary in 1812, not far from Watt’s home town in Greenock. However, the vessel was wrecked on rocks at Craignish Point in the Sound of Jura. The engine was salvaged and put to work at two Glasgow factories before being moved to Glasgow Polytechnic which, in 1855, burned down: the engine was buried by the collapsing building. Unsurprisingly the engine was described as being ‘in a very rusty dilapidated condition’ by 1862.87 This galvanized Woodcroft into action: he wrote to Francis Pettit Smith, ‘Get the Comet engine as soon as possible in all its filth.’88 Even with the main negotiations concluded, one further task remained: to obtain the engine’s original cylinder. It was eventually obtained ‘not by purchase but as a special gift from Mr Bell’s widow, in whose home . . . it was doing duty as a chimney can!’89 Given the viscitudes experienced by many historic machines before finding places of refuge, the survival of Watt’s workshop is exceptional.

  Even if an artefact did perchance find its way to a museum, its survival was still not guaranteed, because popular fascination with historic machines was manifested in a very tactile, hands-on way. Robert Southey had complained in 1807 that ‘The English have a barbarous habit of seeing by the sight of touch . . . they can never look at any thing without having it in their hand, nor show it to another person without touching it with a stick.’90 In 1782, upon visiting Stratford upon Avon to see William Shakespeare’s chair, a popular attraction for visitors, Karl Phillip Moritz wrote that it ‘was so cut to pieces that it hardly looked like a chair; for every one that travels through Stratford, cuts off a chip, as a remembrance which he carefully preserves, and deems a precious relique’.91 In the 1860s visitors to the Patent Office Museum treated the historic machines in the same way. Francis Pettit Smith commented in 1864 that ‘There is a very curious taste on the part of the English public to pull things about, and we are forced to put everything under glass cases, or else it would be taken to pieces.’92 Later, in 1877, the then curator of the Patent Office Museum, Archibald Stuart Wortley, protested that the historic steam locomotive Rocket was ‘suffering much from the public picking off scaling pieces of rust’ and ‘carrying them away as memorials’.93 Just as inventors achieved heroic status after 1850, so did the objects they built. Flakes of rust replaced the remains of saints, and the splinters of Shakespeare’s chair, as the holy relics of nineteenth-century industry.

  As with so many other artefacts, the future of Watt’s workshop was never entirely certain. Woodcroft forged ahead with the construction of a special room to accommodate it in his ‘fire-proof, police guarded’ offices at Southampton Row in London’s Holborn district and, for good measure, had built for James Gibson Watt a facsimile of a small engine that had belonged to his illustrious predecessor, which was almost certainly intended as a gift to smooth the path of negotiation towards acquiring the workshop.94 It was not for want of trying, then, that Woodcroft’s work ultimately came to nothing. His masters at the Treasury complained at the cost of acquiring the workshop and the risk of a financial payout if, having been acquired, it was subsequently damaged or destroyed.95 A competing group, the Birmingham-based Committee of the James Watt Memorial, was also attempting to preserve the workshop in April 1865. They were led by prominent local antiquarian Samuel Timmins, who had declared: ‘It is most greatly to be desired that these great and priceless memorials of the genius of James Watt may . . . be preserved for ever for the veneration of the future pilgrims to the shrines of industrial heroes.’96 Finding themselves caught between Timmins in Birmingham and Woodcroft in London, Watt’s descendants adopted a policy of strict neutrality: Timmins tried to gain hold of the workshop again in 1876, getting as far as removing some of its contents before being ordered by telegram to put them back again.97

  The Patent Museum on the front page of the Graphic newspaper (1878). The heroic objects pictured include Richard Arkwright’s spinning machine at bottom left, the locomotive Rocket alongside it, and the ‘Comet’ marine engine at top right.

  The workshop remained at Heathfield for the rest of the nineteenth century. The last word on the matter for Bennet Woodcroft came in April 1877, almost a year after he had officially retired. Reviewing his correspondence regarding the workshop, he wrote, ‘I felt disappointed with my own productions. They fall far short of doing justice to the subject.’98 This is uncharacteristic of a man who was usually so bullish, and it would have been a source of some regret to him that the sacred precincts of the workshop were being violated. After 1864 the Pemberton family, tenants of Heathfield, became guardians of the key for the workshop door. They had found all Watt’s old furniture stored away in an outbuilding, and ‘filled up corners and other odd spaces in play and bed-rooms with costly old cabinets and bureaux and within them displayed our treasures’ – it remains a possibility that they found their way inside the workshop, too.99 Worse was to come. In 1876 Heathfield was let to prominent Birmingham industrialist Sir George Tangye, and the events leading up to his moving in were only revealed after the workshop was acquired by the Science Museum. Major Gibson Watt, then head of the family, thinking Tangye would require the space in the workshop, wrote that his father

  had everything packed up . . . 20 cases were sent off . . . when Mr Tangye said he would be only too pleased to keep the attic as it was. Everything that had not been despatched was therefore unpacked & put back in its original position as near as possible. That is not generally known, & I have not mentioned it to anyone before.100

  Far from being undisturbed, the workshop contents were subject to some considerable disruption.

  Aside from unexpected removals, the workshop contents were in a parlous physical condition by the 1880s. Roasted in summer, frozen in winter, with woodworm attacking th
e framing of the sculpture machines, and even errant visitors moving or removing artefacts, the workshop entered a period of decline.101 It may have been during this period that a lavatory pan dating from the 1850s found its way, upended, into one corner of the room. However, this deterioration also provided motivation to record its contents and, for the first time, a more detailed understanding was reached of what the workshop actually contained. Edward Collins, the man responsible for managing the Heathfield estate, made a detailed inventory that recorded 2,626 individual objects, or groups of items, and described what he thought they were.102 What is clear from the inventory is the sheer diversity of the workshop’s contents: although Bennet Woodcroft sought to acquire the workshop as a shrine to Watt the steam engineer, he was inadvertently preserving evidence of a very different Watt who worked on a wide range of other projects.

  The multifaceted nature of the workshop had already been noted by Samuel Smiles when he visited it in 1864 or 1865, and his evocation of what he saw is valuable enough to be quoted in detail:

  Many objects lay about or in the drawers . . . busts, medallions, and figures, waiting to be copied by the sculpture machine, many medallion moulds, a store of plaster of Paris, and a box of plaster casts from London. Here are Watt’s ladles for melting lead, his foot-rule, his glue-pot, his hammer. Reflecting mirrors, an extemporized camera with the lenses mounted on pasteboard, and many camera-glasses laid about, indicate interrupted experiments in optics. There are quadrant glasses, compasses, scales, weights, and sundry boxes of mathematical instruments . . . on the shelves are minerals and chemicals in pots and jars, on which the dust of nearly half a century has settled.103

  Smiles wrongly identified a number of items in the workshop while describing them, including a model of the governor used by Watt to regulate the speed of the steam engine. But among all this, the number of objects connected with steam can be counted on the fingers of two hands. What in fact characterizes the workshop most of all is the close proximity of objects of ‘craft’ and ‘philosophy’: thermometers lie in drawers alongside tools for engraving scales, and sets of stamps for forming letters in metal. A surveyor’s tripod rests against a shelf holding apparatus specially made for Watt’s experiments on heat, and glass carboys for use in chemical experiments sit with an unfinished plaster mould of a male figure after the antique.

  Only in 1924 did a plan for preserving this diverse range of items finally coalesce. The centenary of Watt’s death in 1919 had passed amid growing interest from local people, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the American Society of Engineers in preserving Heathfield. However, their negotiations in pursuit of this end were ultimately unsuccessful, and the house was proposed for demolition so that the grounds could accommodate new houses for Birmingham’s expanding population. In April 1924 Henry Lyons, director of the Science Museum in London, was in contact with Major Gibson Watt, and by November 1924 it was clear that the house would not be saved. Thereafter the Science Museum moved speedily: on 17 December a team arrived on site and began carefully to pack the workshop for transport to London. With the contents removed, the floorboards were lifted, and the door and frame, window skylight, even the fireplace, followed to their new home in London. The workshop contents were reassembled in an exact reconstruction of the workshop, and today they form the centrepiece of a major gallery. Watt would most likely be embarrassed at the amount of attention the workshop receives.

  To conclude, then, we return to the question of whether Watt was a philosopher or a craftsman. There are two things to consider: the historiography of Watt – what historians have argued and written about him – and the nature of the workshop itself. The former has been fluid, and evolved over time. In comparison, the workshop itself has remained a relative constant. A very small number of objects may have gone missing in the nineteenth century, but the gaps they left behind are hard to identify among the 8,434 items that remain, and which present us with one of the fullest physical pictures remaining anywhere of life in the workshop or laboratory in the late eighteenth century. All of them belonged to one man, and the sheer quantity of material, crossing the boundaries between philosophy and craft, makes it hard to categorize the contents against any one of the labels that have been applied to Watt over time: philosopher or craftsman primarily, but engineer and chemist, as well.

  In the fields of science and technology conceptions of ‘craft’ were for a long time particularly mechanical in their outlook. That view was sustained right up to Henry Dickinson’s acquisition of Watt’s workshop for the Science Museum in 1924 and beyond. David Miller has referred to Dickinson’s description of Watt as ‘the young workman in his leathern apron’, sitting with a model of the separate condenser resting on his lap, as representing Watt the craftsman.104 We can bring the book to a close by amplifying another of Miller’s points, that Watt the philosopher and Watt the practical chemist were one and the same person.105 In a world where not only science and technology but art and consumption besides came hand in hand, a young workman in his apron might equally have been a chemist avoiding splashes of acid or watching the thermometers during a heat experiment, a sculptor pouring wet plaster into moulds, an instrument maker engraving the scale on a quadrant, or a foundryman fettling a cast Doric column-head for the framing of a beam engine. The mutual exclusivity of the labels applied to Watt – philosopher or craftsman, particularly – becomes hard to sustain: he lived in multiple worlds, and many of his associates would have done as well. All of those worlds were ultimately underpinned by one thing, however: without the ability to do and make as well as think, ideas will forever remain just ideas. To have a material effect on the world, they have to be given tangible form. The themes highlighted in this book – power, precision, consumption and the antique – informed how this could be done during Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

  JAMES WATT: A CHRONOLOGY

  1736 Born in Greenock, Scotland

  1753 Moves to Glasgow to act as his father’s agent

  1755–6 Trains as an instrument maker in London

  1757 Appointed instrument maker to Glasgow College

  1759 Enters partnership with John Craig and opens their shop

  1763 Receives John Anderson’s model engine to repair

  1765 John Craig dies

  1767 Enters partnership with John Roebuck to develop the engine

  1768 First meets Matthew Boulton and acquires a share in the Delftfield Pottery

  1769 First engine at Kinneil finished, and Watt patents the separate condenser

  1773 Watt’s first wife dies

  1774 Boulton takes over Roebuck’s share of the engine, and Watt moves to Birmingham

  1776 Boulton & Watt’s first engine at Bloomfield Colliery starts work, and Watt remarries

  1781–2 Patents obtained on improvements to the rotative engine

  1790 Builds his house, Heathfield, at Handsworth, Birmingham

  1792–9 Legal actions against infringers of separate condenser patent

  1795 Opening of Soho Foundry

  1804 Begins work on his reducing sculpture-copying machine

  1809 Starts building his equal-size copying machine, and Boulton dies

  1819 Dies and is buried at St Mary’s Church, Handsworth

  REFERENCES

  Introduction: Do We Want the Dust?

  1 The foregoing description is based on Collins’ photographs taken from the window. Science Museum technical file T/1924–792.

  2 Science Museum technical file T/1924–792, E. Collins to H. W. Dickinson, 7 December 1924.

  3 Science Museum technical file T/1924–792, E. Collins to H. W. Dickinson, 16 December 1924.

  4 Science Museum technical file T/1924–792, E. Collins to H. W. Dickinson, 29 December 1924.

  5 Science Museum technical file T/1924–792, E. Collins to H. Lyons, 23 February 1925.

  6 T. Carlyle, ‘Chartism’, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, V (1869), p. 399.

  7 J. Mokyr, The Enlightened
Economy: Britain and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1850 (London, 2009).

  8 A. Turner, Early Scientific Instruments: Europe, 1400–1800 (London, 1987), p. 226.

  9 P. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment: Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1820 (Manchester, 2008).

  10 J. Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy, p. 61.

  11 Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, pp. 126–7.

  12 J. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises or the Doctrine of Handy-works (Mendham, 1994). Reprinted from the 1703 edition: p. 4 of preface.

  13 Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy, p. 110.

  14 C. Fox, The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven, CT, 2009), p. 8.

  15 Ibid., p. 6.