Iron, Steam & Money

by Roger Osborne

  Eric Robinson, ‘James Watt:

  Engineer by Act of Parliament’ (1969)

  * * *

  When Watt visited Soho in early 1769, with a brand-new patent in his pocket, Boulton was already a major figure in British manufacturing. The two men instantly knew they could work together. Perhaps Watt saw that Boulton was the necessary complement to his own gloomy character – an energetic optimist who would carry him through his difficulties – while Boulton surely recognised the seriousness of Watt’s character. When he returned to Glasgow Watt proposed to Roebuck that Boulton come in as a partner by buying one-third of the interest in the patent. Roebuck and Boulton already knew each other, having worked together on a plan to manufacture thermometers.

  Watt was delighted not just by the prospect of investment but especially by Boulton’s personal enthusiasm. As he wrote soon after his return to Glasgow: ‘It gave me great joy when you seemed to think so favourably of our scheme as to wish to engage in it.’ Boulton on the other hand was both excited about the project and in need of money – the building of Soho had nearly ruined him and he was often better at spending than making money. However, while Roebuck was open to outside investment in the engine he was reluctant to surrender his ownership of two-thirds of the patent; he offered Boulton a licence to build the engine in the three industrial Midlands counties. Boulton wrote a long letter to Watt explaining why he could not take Roebuck’s ‘three-counties’ offer, and invited Watt to Soho where he would be given his own engineering works. In Boulton’s ringing phrase: ‘It would not be worth my while to make for three counties only; but I find it very well worth my while to make for all the world.’9

  Watt knew that he could get better components and technical support in Birmingham and the Midlands than in Glasgow and central Scotland. Birmingham was a burgeoning centre of engineering with experienced ironmasters in nearby Staffordshire and Shropshire. But he was tied to Scotland by his work, family and Roebuck. And Watt could not agree to anything while Roebuck owned the majority of the patent. By then he was once again immersed in canal-building in order to earn his living. He didn’t care for the work: ‘Nothing is more contrary to my disposition than bustling & bargaining with mankind,’ he wrote, ‘yet that is the life I now constantly lead . . . I am also in a constant fear that my want of experience may betray me into some scrape, or that I shall be imposed upon by the workmen.’10

  Watt was, by his own admission, inclined to periods of melancholy, frustration and inactivity. ‘Of all things in life,’ he said at this time, ‘there is nothing so foolish as inventing.’ From autumn 1769 until 1772 Watt was engaged as an engineer on the Monkland to Glasgow canal at £200 per annum. During this time he devised a method for ensuring that the surveyor’s level stayed static while taking readings, using a combination of spirit levels; he also dallied with a method for estimating distances using a telescope. But Watt was a chronic pessimist and was dissatisfied with his work. In January 1771 he wrote: ‘Today I entered the 35th year of my life & I think I have hardly done 35 pence worth of good in the world but I cannot help it. I do as much as indolence and ennui permit & I think myself less indolent than I once was.’11

  Although a full-sized engine had been put up at Kinneil in late 1769 Watt was unable to spare enough time to work on it. In the meantime John Roebuck found himself in serious financial difficulties. He had developed a colliery at Bo’ness to supply the Carron ironworks, but this had become prone to serious flooding, while another chemical project had come to nothing. These misfortunes coincided with a catastrophic collapse in Scottish banking following the crash of Neal, James, Fordyce and Down in 1772, and the following year Roebuck was declared bankrupt. Watt blamed himself for his partner’s plight and pleaded for Boulton to step in and buy Roebuck’s share in the 1769 patent. Roebuck had no alternative but to sell: on 17 May 1773 Boulton bought his share, while Watt wrote off the money he was personally owed, as Roebuck’s financial support had dried up after the initial payment of £1,000. Watt now dismantled the Kinneil engine (which was valued at precisely zero by the estate’s creditors) and sent the parts down to Boulton at Soho.

  In September 1773 James Watt’s wife died leaving him with two young children. With Boulton now owning his patent, his ties to Scotland were becoming even less important. ‘The engineering business is not a vigorous plant here,’ he wrote in December 1773. ‘We are in general very poorly paid, this last year my whole gains do not exceed £200 though some people have paid me very gentily. There are also many disagreeable circumstances I cannot write, in short I must as far as I can see change my abode . . . I am heartsick of this cursed country.’12 By April 1774 he had finished his contract to survey the route of what was to be the Caledonian canal and in May, aged thirty-eight, James Watt gave up his surveying business, left his children with relatives and moved to Birmingham.

  Let us pause here on the brink of the watershed. In 1774 Newcomen engines were being used in coal and tin mines for pumping water; they had been gradually improved but were limited by their size and fuel requirements to coal and metal mines. At the same time men like John Wilkinson and the Darby family of Coalbrookdale were refining techniques for iron-making, producing better materials and higher quality engineering components. In the early 1770s another revolution was under way in Derbyshire where Richard Arkwright opened a cotton-spinning mill housing his new spinning frame, driven by water power.

  Matthew Boulton was not a mining man; he was a well-travelled metal-maker familiar with every aspect of manufacturing. While Watt was intent on building an engine to do the same work as Newcomen’s, but more efficiently, Boulton will have known that the industrial world was desperate for a better source of power to drive its machinery. Mill-owners, ironmasters, forges and textile mills were increasingly frustrated with the limits of water power on which their enterprises depended. Britain was approaching the limits of what its natural resources could offer.

  In May 1774 James Watt was installed in Boulton’s old house in Newhall Walk, Birmingham, and the Kinneil engine was re-erected at the Soho works where Watt was given a large workshop. One of the reasons why Watt had come to the Midlands was to source high-precision components; he immediately showed that, once he had the right materials and support, he was as adept at making machinery as he was at inventing. But Watt’s problems with the engine were far from over. The continuing difficulty was the need to fit a good seal around the piston head along the whole length of the stroke; keeping the seal needed a combination of a true cylinder and a flexible seal. Seals made of wool, felt, strawboard, pulp and horse muck were all tried and failed; a solution began to appear only when Boulton asked John Wilkinson, who had just patented a boring mill for producing true cylinders for cannon, to make iron engine cylinders for Watt. By around the end of 1774, with improved cylinders and effective seals made of oakum and hemp, Watt finally had a working engine.

  However, the original patent for a new engine had been granted in January 1769 for just seven years, and so had only a little over a year to run. There were plenty of good engineers around who might have been able to build an engine on the basis of information provided in the patent, so Matthew Boulton knew he had to either seek an extension of the 1769 patent or apply for a new one.

  The application for an extension was presented to Parliament on 23 February 1775. Watt described the improvements he was intent on making to the Newcomen engine and supplied a drawing in support, while Boulton argued that he did not request a monopoly over all steam engines, but the possibility of a decent return. Boulton was a good political operator and prolific networker and over his years in industry he had cultivated enough people with influence to persuade Parliament to extend Watt’s patent. The bill granting a twenty-five-year extension and extending the patent to Scotland was passed on 22 May 1775; the Act described Watt as ‘Engineer, by Act of Parliament’.

  The patent extension remains the most controversial aspect of James Watt’s career. Because his original paten
t was so widely drawn, from 1769 to 1800 no other engineer felt legally secure in publicly proposing improvements to steam engines. Watt had been required to submit a specification within four months of the granting of the 1769 patent; at that time his friend Dr Small had advised him to ‘give neither drawings nor descriptions of any particular machinery, but specify in the clearest manner that you have discovered some principles’.13 The patent was for a ‘new method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire engines’ and could therefore be used to cover almost any new development in steam engines. The decision was criticised at the time and historians have accused Watt of misusing a system that was designed to protect inventions, not block innovation.

  A number of points should be made in Watt’s defence. First, in 1769 patents were routinely overthrown, leaving their specifications open to use by others; so the deliberate vagueness of Watt’s specification should be viewed in that light.

  Second, the state of patent law at the time made it essential for any inventor to get as wide a protection as possible but, as we have seen, even then the granting of a patent offered no guarantees, since it could be challenged in the courts (see Chapter 3). A patent gave you permission to enter the arena of the court, but did not mean you would win your case. Third, Watt did not sit on his laurels and just wait for his earnings to roll in. He worked assiduously to improve his engine, making adaptations and improvements that rendered it workable in a huge range of situations; his engines brought great benefits to the Cornish mining industry and to iron, pottery, glass and metal-production. Finally, while Watt deliberately turned away from the use of high-pressure steam, and stands accused of obstructing developments by William Murdoch and Richard Trevithick (see Chapter 9) his position is unlikely to have made a huge difference: the high-grade materials and engineering skills necessary for high-pressure application were not available much before the 1800s, the decade of Trevithick’s great breakthroughs.

  Immediately after the patent was extended Boulton and Watt came to a financial agreement. Boulton discharged all existing debts on the project, agreed to meet all costs of experiment and pay Watt £300 a year, in return for two-thirds of the earnings for the duration of the patent. Boulton immediately urged Watt to draw up plans for a pumping engine for Bloomfield colliery at Tipton in Staffordshire, which would contain a fifty-inch-diameter cylinder, a huge step up from Watt’s twelve-inch experimental engine. They also drew up plans for a thirty-eight-inch cylinder-blowing engine for the blast furnace at John Wilkinson’s ironworks at New Willey in Shropshire. Wilkinson was commissioned to supply the iron cylinders; the Bloomfield engine was built to Watt’s satisfaction and set running on 8 March 1776. The blowing engine for Wilkinson’s ironworks began powering the furnace at about the same time; both machines were successful. They used a fraction of the fuel of Newcomen engines and, while the early installations needed constant repair, they provided useful experience for Boulton and Watt and evidence to the wider world that Watt’s engines really did work. It had taken Watt eleven years to construct the first working engine – about the same time as Newcomen had spent on realising his idea. The year 1776 saw the birth of the nation that was to epitomise the modern world; it also saw the first running of a machine that was to change the fate of humanity.

  When Boulton invited James Watt to Birmingham he had envisaged the mass production of engines at his Soho works. But it soon became clear that the engines would need to be put together on site, from drawings and specifications provided by the firm of Boulton & Watt, who would also supply most of the key components. Watt’s design was more complicated and intricate than the Newcomen engine, and the parts had to be made more precisely. The firm introduced conditions into their licences specifying that the valve assemblies had to be made and supplied by Boulton & Watt and, in some cases, refused to sell licences unless the cylinders were supplied by John Wilkinson.

  Customers considering a Boulton & Watt engine needed convincing: the Newcomen engines were no longer covered by any patent, so anyone was able to construct them for free. Boulton & Watt offered either to convert existing engines or build new ones, and licence agreements specified a royalty based on the amount of fuel saved by the user compared to their existing Newcomen engine. The promised reduction in fuel was a massive incentive, especially in the mining districts of Cornwall where coal was expensive. Even the most efficient Newcomen engine, John Smeaton’s at the Chacewater mine at Wheal Busy, was converted to the Watt system; and once Watt’s patent expired in 1800 almost all the Newcomen engines were converted or replaced.

  However, even as James Watt’s ambitions were finally beginning to be realised, his financial standing was still in question – at least in the eyes of his prospective father-in-law. In 1776 the inventor travelled back to Glasgow to propose marriage to Ann, daughter of James McGrigor, a dyer. But McGrigor would not give consent without seeing the financial agreement between Boulton and Watt that guaranteed Watt’s income. Unfortunately the agreement had been agreed on a handshake, and so Watt had to bluster while writing a speedy request to Boulton to bodge up a legally binding letter. After marrying Ann, Watt moved to a new house in Regent’s Place in Birmingham.14

  * * *

  The First Watt Engine

  ‘On Friday last a steam engine constructed upon Mr Watt’s new principles was set to work at Bloomfield colliery, near Dudley, in the presence of its Proprietors . . . and a number of scientific gentlemen whose curiosity was excited by so singular and so powerful a machine and whose expectations were fully gratified by the Excellence of its performance. The Workmanshop of the Whole did not pass unnoticed, nor unadmired. All the iron foundry parts (which are unparalleled for truth) were executed by Mr Wilkinson; the Condensor, with the Valves, Pistons and all the small work, at Soho, by Mr Harrison and others, and the Whole was erected by Mr Perrins, conformable to the Plans and under the Directions of Mr Watt. From the first Moment of its setting to Work, it made about 14 to 15 strokes per minute, and emptied the Engine Pit (which is about 90 Feet deep and stood 57 Feet high in Water) in less than an hour . . .

  ‘This engine is applied to the working of a Pump 14 Inches and a Half Diameter, which it is capable of doing to the Depth of 300 Feet, or even 360 Feet if wanted, with one Fourth of the Fuel that a common Engine would require to produce the same Quantity of Power. The Cylinder is 50 inches diameter and the length of the Stroke is 7 Feet . . .

  ‘They [the principles of the design] were invented by Mr Watt (late of Glasgow) after many years Study, and a great Variety of expensive and laborious Experiments; and are now carried into Execution under his and Mr Boulton’s Directions at Boulton and Fothergill’s Manufactory near this Town; where they have nearly finished four of them, and have established a Fabrick for them upon so extensive a Plan as to render them applicable to almost all Purposes where Mechanical Power is required, whether great or small, or where the Motion wanted is either rotary or reciprocating.’

  Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 11 March 177615

  * * *

  Boulton was confident that, having proved the engine’s efficiency, there was a potentially limitless market in Britain and Europe. When James Boswell visited Soho in 1776, then filled with 700 workers, Boulton told him, ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – power.’16 Engines were rapidly built for a distillery at Stratford-le-Bow in London, for Bedworth colliery, Coventry, and at Torryburn in Fifeshire. Each time he designed an engine Watt made improvements, either in component quality or innovations like jackets for the cylinder and condenser. Early signs of the difficulty of enforcing the patent came when the French engineer Jean-Claude Périer approached John Wilkinson directly about supplying components for an engine that he wanted to build in France; Wilkinson refused but the request showed the need to extend protection to other countries. Consequently Boulton & Watt obtained a fifteen-year patent in France in 1778, and it was Périer who built two Watt engines at Chaillot on the outskirts of Paris. But once engineers
could examine the engines, there was the danger that the most talented and unscrupulous among them would try to make their own.

  Engine construction: Steam engines under construction at the factory of Boulton & Watt, Soho, Birmingham.

  It was Cornwall that was the most promising location for Watt’s engine in those early days. The Cornish mining industry was a difficult but lucrative trade. Tin, copper, lead and zinc had been mined there since Roman times, but access to deeper seams through the use of gunpowder to blast the hard granite, which required Newcomen engines to pump out water, had led to a significant expansion of the industry.

  Boulton knew that Cornwall was the place where the most money could be made; he also saw that there would be a struggle to overcome the independence and hostility of Cornish engineers, so he invited a group of mine-owners and engineers to visit the Bloomfield engine. This had the desired effect and orders began to arrive from Cornwall. In fact the Cornish owners were desperate to save costs; the 1768 rediscovery of the main seam of copper ore at Parys Mountain on Anglesey had challenged their supremacy. Though the Parys ore was low quality, it was so plentiful and easy to extract that it caused a huge drop in ore prices. To the Cornish miners Watt seemed like a godsend.