Chapter XXIII Closing Years of James Watt — His Death — Conclusion
The fragile and sickly Watt outlived the most robust of his contemporaries. He was residing at Glenarbach, near Dumbarton, with relatives, when the intelligence reached him of the death of his partner. To his son James he wrote at once, expressing his deep sorrow at the loss of his “very worthy and beloved friend.”413 To Mr. Boulton’s son and successor he wrote,—“However we may lament our own loss, we must consider, on the other side, the torturing pain he has so long endured, and console ourselves with the remembrance of his virtues and eminent qualifications. Few men have possessed his abilities, and still fewer have exerted them as he has done; and if to these we add his urbanity, his generosity, and his affection to his friends, we shall make up a character rarely to be equalled. Such was the friend we have lost, and of whose affection we have reason to be proud, as you have to be the son of such a father.”414
The deaths of his friends, one by one, reminded Watt of his own mortality, and frequent references to the subject occur in his letters about this time. He felt as if he were in danger of being left in the world alone. But he did not give himself up to melancholy, as he had been prone to do at the earlier periods of his life. Shortly after his son Gregory died, he wrote to a relative,—“I know that all men must die, and I submit to the decrees of Nature, I hope with due reverence to the Disposer of events. Yet one stimulus to exertion is taken away, and, somehow or other, I have lost my relish for my usual occupations. Perhaps time may remedy that in some measure; meanwhile I do not neglect the means of amusement which are in my power.”
Watt was at no loss for occupation to relieve the tedium of old age. He possessed ample resources in himself, and found pleasure alike in quiet meditation and in active work. His thirst for knowledge was still unslaked, and he sought to allay it by reading. His love of investigation was as keen as ever, and he gratified it by proceeding with experiments on air, on light, and on electricity. His inventive faculty was still potent, and he occasionally varied his occupation by labouring to produce a new machine or to improve an old one. At other times, when the weather allowed, he would take a turn at planting in his grounds and gardens; and occasionally vary his pleasure by a visit to Scotland, to London, or to his estate in Wales. Strange to say, his health improved with advancing age, and though occasionally dyspeptic, he was now comparatively free from the racking headaches which had been the torment of his earlier years. Unlike Boulton, who found pleasure in the active pursuit of business, Watt had always regarded it as a worry, and he was now glad to have cast it altogether behind him. His mind was free from harassing cares; his ambition in life was satisfied; he was no more distressed by fears of Cornish pirates; and he was content to enjoy at last the fruits of his labour in peace. And thus it was that Watt’s later years may be pronounced to have been the happiest of his life.
He had, indeed, lost nearly all his old friends, and often thought of them with a melancholy regret, not, however, unmingled with pleasure. But other young friends gathered about him, sat at his feet, and looked up to him with an almost reverential admiration. Among these we find Rennie and Telford the engineers, Campbell the poet, Humphry Davy, Henry Brougham, Francis Horner, and other rising men of the new generation. Lord Brougham bears testimony to Watt’s habitual cheerfulness, and his enjoyment of the pleasures of society during the later years of his life. “I can speak on the point,” he says, “with absolute certainty, for my own acquaintance with him commenced after my friend Gregory’s decease. A few months after that event, he calmly and with his wonted acuteness discussed with me the composition of an epitaph to be inscribed on his son’s tomb. In the autumn and winter of 1805 he was a constant attendant at our Friday Club, and in all our private circles, and was the life of them all.”415
To the close of his life Watt continued to take great pleasure in inventing. It had been the pursuit of his life, and in old age it became his hobby. “Without a hobby-horse,” said he, “what is life?” He proceeded to verify his old experiments, and to live over again the history of his inventions. When Mr. Kennedy of Manchester asked him, at one of his last visits to Heathfield, if he had been able, since his retirement from business, to discover anything new in the steam-engine, he replied, “No; I am devoting the remainder of my life to perfect its details, and to ascertain whether in any respect I have been wrong.”
But he did not merely confine himself to verifying his old inventions. He also contrived new ones. One of the machines that occupied his leisure hours for many years, was his machine for copying statuary. We find him busy with it in 1810, and he was still working upon it in the year of his death, nearly ten years later. The principle of the machine was to make a cutting tool or drill travel over the work to be executed, in like ratio with the motion of a guide-point placed upon the bust to be copied. It worked, as it were, with two hands; the one feeling the pattern, the other cutting the material into the required form. The object could be copied either of the full size, or reduced with the most perfect accuracy to any less size that might be required.416 In preparing the necessary tools, Watt had the able assistance of his friend Murdock, who was always ready with his kindly suggestions and criticisms. In January, 1813, Watt wrote him,—“I have done a little figure of a boy lying down and holding out one arm, very successfully; and another boy, about six inches high, naked, and holding out both his hands, his legs also being separate. But I have been principally employed in making drawings for a complete machine, all in iron, which has been a very serious job, as invention goes on very slowly with me now. When you come home, I shall thank you for your criticisms and assistance.”417
The material in which Watt executed his copies of statuary were various,—marble, jet, alabaster, ivory, plaster of Paris, and mahogany. Some of the specimens we have seen at Heathfield are of exquisite accuracy and finish, and show that he must have brought his copying-machine to a remarkable degree of perfection before he died. There are numerous copies of medallions of his friends,—of Dr. Black, De Luc, and Dr. Priestley; but the finest of all is a reduced bust of himself, being an exact copy of Chantrey’s original plaster-cast. The head and neck are beautifully finished, but there the work has stopped, for the upper part of the chest is still in the rough. Another exquisite work, than which Watt never executed a finer, is a medallion of Locke in ivory, marked “January, 1812.” There are numerous other busts, statuettes, medallions,—some finished, others half executed, and apparently thrown aside, as if the workman had been dissatisfied with his work, and waited, perhaps, until he had introduced some new improvement in his machine.
Watt took out no patent for the invention, which he pursued, as he said, merely as “a mental and bodily exercise.” Neither did he publish it,—but went on working at it for several years before his intentions to construct such a machine had become known. When he had made considerable progress with it, he learned, to his surprise, that a Mr. Hawkins, an ingenious person in his neighbourhood, had been long occupied in the same pursuit. The proposal was then made to him that the two inventors should combine their talents and secure the invention by taking out a joint patent. But Watt had already been too much worried by patents to venture on taking out another at his advanced age. He preferred prosecuting the invention at his leisure merely as an amusement; and the project of taking out a patent for it was accordingly abandoned. It may not be generally known that this ingenious invention of Watt has since been revived and applied with sundry modifications by our cousins across the Atlantic, in fashioning wood and iron in various forms; and powerful copying-machines are now in regular use in the Government works at Enfield, where they are employed in rapidly, accurately, and cheaply manufacturing gun-stocks!
Watt carried on the operations connected with this invention for the most part in his Garret, a room immediately under the roof at the kitchen end of the house at Heathfield, and approached by a narrow staircase. It is a small room, low in the ceiling, and lighted by a low broad window, looking into the shrubbery. The ceiling, though low, inclines with the slope of the roof on three sides of the room, and, being close to the slates, the place must necessarily have been very hot in summer, and very cold in winter. A stove was placed close to the door, for the purpose of warming the apartment, as well as enabling the occupant to pursue his experiments, being fitted with a sand-bath and other conveniences. But the stove must have been insufficient for heating the garret in very cold weather, and hence we find him occasionally informing his correspondents that he could not proceed further with his machine until the weather had become milder.
His foot-lathe was fixed close to the window, fitted with all the appliances for turning in wood and metal fifty years since; while a case of drawers fitted into the recess on the left-hand side of the room, contained a large assortment of screws, punches, cutters, taps, and dies. Here were neatly arranged and stowed away many of the tools with which he worked in the early part of his life, one of the drawers being devoted to his old “flute tools.” In other divisions were placed his compasses, dividers, scales, decimal weights, quadrant glasses, and a large assortment of instrument-making tools. A ladle for melting lead, and a soldering-iron were hung ready for use near the stove.
Crucibles of metal and stone were ranged on the shelves along the opposite side of the room, which also contained a large assortment of bottles filled with chemicals, boxes of fossils and minerals, jars, gallipots, blowpipes, retorts, and the various articles used in chemical analysis. In one corner of the room was a potter’s lathe. A writing-desk was placed as close to the window, for the sake of the light, as the turning-lathe would allow; and in the corner was the letter-copying machine, conveniently at hand.
In this garret Watt spent much of his time during the later period of his life, only retiring from it when it was too hot in summer, or too cold in winter to enable him to prosecute his work. For days together he would confine himself here, without even descending to his meals. He had accordingly provided himself, in addition to his various other tools, with sundry kitchen utensils,—amongst others, with a frying-pan and Dutch oven—with which he cooked his meals. For it must be explained that Mrs. Watt was a thorough martinet in household affairs, and, above all things, detested “dirt.” Mrs. Schimmelpenninck says she taught her two pug-dogs never to cross the hall without first wiping their feet on the mat. She hated the sight of her husband’s leather apron and soiled hands while he was engaged in his garret-work, so he kept himself out of her sight at such times as much as possible. Some notion of the rigidity of her rule may be inferred from the fact of her having had a window made in the kitchen wall, through which she could watch the servants, and observe how they were getting on with their work. Her passion for cleanliness was carried to a pitch which often fretted those about her by the restraints it imposed; but her husband, like a wise man, gently submitted to her rule. He was fond of a pinch of snuff, which Mrs. Watt detested, regarding it only as so much “dirt;” and Mr. Muirhead says she would seize and lock up the offending snuff-box whenever she could lay hands upon it. He adds that at night, when she retired from the dining-room, if Mr. Watt did not follow at the time fixed by her, a servant would enter and put out the lights, even when a friend was present, on which he would slowly rise and meekly say, “We must go.” One can easily understand how, under such circumstances, Watt would enjoy the perfect liberty of his garret, where he was king, and could enjoy his pinch of snuff in peace, and make as much “dirt” with his turning-lathe, his crucibles, and his chemicals, as he chose, without dread of interruption.
One of the fears which haunted Watt as old age advanced upon him was, that his mental faculties, in the exercise of which he took so much pleasure, were deserting him. To Dr. Darwin he said, many years before,—“Of all the evils of age, the loss of the few mental faculties one possessed in youth is most grievous.” To test his memory, he again began the study of German, which he had allowed himself to forget; and he speedily acquired such proficiency as enabled him to read the language with comparative ease. But he gave still stronger evidence of the integrity of his powers. When in his seventy-fifth year, he was consulted by the Glasgow Waterworks Company as to the best mode of conveying water from a peninsula across the Clyde to the Company’s engines at Dalmarnock,—a difficulty which appeared to them almost insurmountable; for it was necessary to fit the pipes, through which the water passed, to the uneven and shifting bed of the river. Watt, on turning over the subject in his mind, shortly hit upon a plan, which showed that his inventive powers were unimpaired by age. Taking the tail of the lobster for his model, he devised a tube of iron similarly articulated, of which he forwarded a drawing to the Waterworks Company; and, acting upon his recommendation, they had the tube forthwith executed and laid down with complete success. Watt declined to be paid for the essential service he had thus rendered to the Waterworks Company; but the directors made handsome acknowledgment of it by presenting him with a piece of plate of the value of a hundred guineas, accompanied by the cordial expression of their thanks and esteem.
Watt did not, however, confine himself to mechanical recreations at home. In summer-time he would proceed to Cheltenham, the air of which agreed with him, and make a short stay there; or he would visit his friends in London, Glasgow, or Edinburgh. While in London, his great delight was in looking in at the shop-windows,—the best of all industrial exhibitions,—for there he saw the progress of manufacture in all articles in common use amongst the people. To a country person, the sight of the streets and shop-windows of London alone, with their display of objects of art and articles of utility, is always worth a visit. To Watt it was more interesting than passing along the finest gallery of pictures.
At Glasgow, where he stayed with his relatives the Macgregors, he took pleasure in revisiting his old haunts, dined with the College Professors,418 and noted with lively interest the industrial progress of the place. The growth of Glasgow in the course of his lifetime had, indeed, been extraordinary, and it was in no small degree the result of his own industrial labours. The steam-engine was everywhere at work; factories had sprung up in all directions; the Broomielaw was silent no longer; the Clyde was navigable from thence to the sea, and its waters were plashed by the paddles of a thousand steamers. The old city of the tobacco lords had become a great centre of manufacturing industry; it was rich, busy, and prosperous; and the main source of its prosperity was the steam-engine. A long time had passed since Watt had first taken in hand the repair of the little Newcomen engine in Glasgow College, and afterwards laboured in the throes of his invention in his shop in the back court in King Street. There were no skilled mechanics in Glasgow then, and the death of the “old white-iron man” who helped him had been one of his sorest vexations. Things were entirely changed now. Glasgow had already become famous for its engine-work, and its factories contained among the most skilled mechanics in the kingdom. Watt’s early notion that Scotchmen were incapable of becoming first-rate mechanics, like Englishmen, was confuted by the experience of hundreds of workshops; and to none did the practical contradiction of his theory give greater pleasure than to himself. He delighted to visit the artisans at their work, and to see with his own eyes the improvements that were going forward; and when he heard of any new and ingenious arrangement of engine-power, he would hasten to call upon the mechanic who had contrived it, and make his acquaintance.
One of such calls, which Watt made during a visit to Glasgow, in 1814, has been pleasantly related by Mr. Robert Hart, who, with his brother, then carried on a small steam-engine factory in the town. “One forenoon,” he says, “while we were at work, Miss Macgregor and a tall elderly gentleman came into the shop. She, without saying who he was, asked if we would show the gentleman our small engine. It was not going at the time, and was covered up. My brother uncovered it. The gentleman examined it very minutely, and put a few pointed questions, asking the reason for making her in that form. My brother, seeing he understood the subject, said that she had been so made to try what we thought was an improvement; and for this experiment we required another cistern and air-pump. He was beginning to show what was properly Mr. Watt’s engine, and what was not; when, at this observation, Miss Macgregor stopped him, saying,—‘Oh, he understands it; this is Mr. Watt.’ I never at any time saw my brother so much excited as he was at that moment. He called on me to join them, saying,—‘This is Mr. Watt!’ Up to this time I had continued to work at what I was doing when they came; and, although I had heard all that was said, I had not joined the party till I learned who he was. Our supposed improvement was to save condensing water, and was on the principle introduced by Sir John Leslie, to produce cold by evaporation in a vacuum. Mr. Watt took much interest in this experiment, and said he had tried the same thing on a larger scale, but without the vacuum, as that invention of Professor Leslie’s was not known at the time. He tried it exposed to the air, and also kept wet; and at one of the large porter-breweries in London he had fitted up an apparatus of the same nature. The pipes forming his condenser were laid in the water of the Thames, but he could not keep them tight, from the expansion and contraction of the metal, as they were exposed to various temperatures.” The conversation then diverged to the subject of his early experiments with the Newcomen engine, the difficulties he had encountered in finding a proper material for steam-pipes, the best method of making steam-joints, and the various means of overcoming obstacles which occur in the prosecution of mechanical experiments, in the course of which he reverted to the many temporary expedients which he had himself adopted in his early days.
Watt was so much pleased with the intelligence of the brothers Hart, that he invited them to call upon him that evening at Miss Macgregor’s, where they found him alone with the ladies. “In the course of conversation,” continues Mr. Hart, “which embraced all that was new at the time, the expansion and the slow contraction of metals were touched on. This led to a discussion on iron in engine-making,” in which Watt explained the practice which experience had led him to adopt as the best. The conversation then turned upon the early scene of his inventions, the room in the College, the shop in King Street, the place on Glasgow Green near the Herd’s house where the first idea of a separate condenser flashed upon his mind, and the various steps by which he had worked out his invention. He went on to speak of his experience at Kinneil and Boroughstoness, of the Newcomen engine he had erected and worked there for the purpose of gaining experience, and incidentally referred to many of the other interesting events in his past career. At a late hour the brothers took their leave, delighted, as they well might be, with the affability and conversableness of “the great Mr. Watt.”
But it was not mechanics alone that Watt fascinated by his powers of conversation and his stores of knowledge relating to the special business of his life: he was equally at home amongst philosophers, women, and children. When close upon his eighty-second year, he formed one of a distinguished party assembled in Edinburgh, at which Sir Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey, and others were present. He delighted the northern literati with his kindly cheerfulness, not less than he astonished them by the extent and profundity of his information. “This potent commander of the elements,” says Scott,—“this abridger of time and space, this magician, whose cloudy machinery has produced a change in the world, the effects of which, extraordinary as they are, are perhaps only now beginning to be felt,—was not only the most profound man of science, the most successful combiner of powers, and combiner of numbers, as adapted to practical purposes,—was not only one of the most generally well-informed, but one of the best and kindest of human beings. There he stood, surrounded by the little band of Northern literati, men not less tenacious, generally speaking, of their own opinions, than the national regiments are supposed to be jealous of the high character they have won upon service. Methinks I yet see and hear what I shall never see or hear again. The alert, kind, benevolent old man had his attention alive to every one’s question, his information at every one’s command. His talents and fancy overflowed on every subject. One gentleman was a deep philologist, he talked with him on the origin of the alphabet as if he had been coeval with Cadmus; another, a celebrated critic, you would have said the old man had studied political economy and belles-lettres all his life; of science it is unnecessary to speak, it was his own distinguished walk.”419
Indeed, the extent of his knowledge was the wonder of all who came in contact with him. “It seemed,” said Jeffrey, “as if every subject that was casually started had been that which he had been occupied in studying.” Yet, though no man was more ready to communicate knowledge, none could be less ambitious of displaying it. In company, when not spoken to, he sat as if tranquilly pursuing his own meditations, with his head bent forward or leaning on his hand. But as he could not fail to be a prominent feature in any society that he entered, it was seldom that he was left outside the circle of social talk. Men of letters, men of science, artists, ladies and children, thronged about him. Once when on a visit to his friend Rennie in London, he accompanied him to an evening party at Sir George Warrender’s. At first he sat by himself, quiet and abstracted, until some young ladies engaged him in conversation, which gradually turned upon the mystery of the fabrics they wore, the insignificant materials out of which they were formed, and the beauty and value given to them by the industry and ingenuity of man; and, other auditors being attracted by his descriptions, he shortly found himself the centre of a group of fair and admiring listeners.
He seemed to be alike at home on all subjects, the most recondite and the most common, the most special and the most general. Mrs. Schimmelpenninck420 relates how he took her upon his knee when a little girl, and explained to her the principles of the hurdy-gurdy, the piano, the Pan’s-pipe, and the organ; teaching her how to make a dulcimer and improve a Jew’s-harp. To a Swedish artist he communicated the information that the most pliant and elastic painting-brush was to be made out of rats’ whiskers. He advised ladies how to cure smoky chimneys, how to warm and ventilate dwellings, and how to obtain fast colours, while he would willingly instruct a maid-servant as to the best way of cleaning a grate.421 A lady still living, who remembers Watt, informs us that he used to carry a carpenter’s foot-rule in the side pocket of his breeches, and would occasionally bring it out in after-dinner conversation or elsewhere, to illustrate the subject under discussion.
He was full of anecdotes relating to all manner of subjects, which he was accustomed to tell in a very effective way.422 He spoke in a low grave tone, with a broad Scottish accent. The late Mr. Murdock mentioned to us one of his favourite stories relating to two smugglers pursued by excisemen. The two smugglers had reached the mouth of a coal-pit and got into the corve-cage with their apparatus, the excisemen only coming up in time to see them descending the shaft, where they were soon out of sight. On the ascending corves coming up to the settle-board, the excisemen asked to be sent down after the smugglers, and they were sent down accordingly. Halfway down the shaft they met the smugglers in the other cage coming up! And so the relator kept them ascending and descending, passing and repassing each other,—his auditors being in convulsions of laughter, while he himself seemed wholly unmoved. Campbell, the poet, who paid Watt a visit in February, 1819, only six months before his death, describes him as so full of anecdote that he spent one of the most amusing days he had ever enjoyed with a man of science and a stranger to his own pursuits. To the last he was a great reader of novels; and Mrs. Watt and he had many a hearty cry over the imaginary woes of love-lorn heroes and heroines. Scott says no novel of the least celebrity escaped his perusal, and that this gifted man of science was as much addicted to productions of this sort as if he had been a very milliner’s apprentice of eighteen. A lady, still living,423 informs us that she remembers the admiration which Watt expressed for the Waverley novels, then making their appearance in rapid succession, and used to quote his opinion as a great authority for her own devotion to such works,—forgetting that, as the old frame requires the arm-chair after the heat and burden of the day, so the taxed mind needs rest and recreation after long years of study, anxiety, and labour.
Mr. Stockdale, of Carke, gives the following account of a visit which his sister, a cousin of Mr. Boulton’s, paid to Heathfield in 1818, shortly before Mr. Watt’s death:—“When tea was announced to Mr. Watt, he came from his ‘garret,’ and on being told who my sister was, he asked after her relations in the kindest way, and then sat down in his arm-chair. A cup of tea was handed to him, and alongside of it was placed a small cup containing a yellow powder, of which he took a spoonful and put it into his tea, observing that he had long been plagued with a stomach complaint, for which he had found this powder of mastich a sovereign remedy. He talked more than my sister expected. Sometimes he fell into a reverie, appearing absorbed in thought, his eyes fixed on space, and his head leaning over his chest. After a while, he retired to his study, and my sister returned to Soho.” Mr. Hollins, of Birmingham, sculptor, supplies the following further reminiscence. When a youth in a local architect’s office, he was sent out to Heathfield one afternoon, to submit to Mr. Watt the plans of certain proposed alterations in the parish church of Handsworth. The church stood a few fields off, and its spire rose above the trees within sight of the drawing-room windows. It was his parish church, in which his friend Boulton had been buried, and where he himself was to lie. When the young man mentioned his errand, Mr. Watt said he was just about to take his afternoon’s nap. “But you can sit down there and read that newspaper, and when I have got my nap I will look at the plans.” So saying he composed himself to rest in his arm-chair; the youth scarce daring to turn the page for fear of disturbing him. At length, after a short sleep, he woke full up and said, “Now let me see them.” He looked over the plans, examined them in detail, and criticised them keenly. He thought the proposed alterations of a paltry character, unworthy of the wealth and importance of the parish; “Why,” said he, “if these plans be carried out, preaching at Handsworth will be like pitching the word of God out of a keyhole!” When Mr. Watt’s decided views as to the insufficiency of the design was reported to the committee, steps were taken greatly to enlarge it, and Handsworth Church was thus indebted to his suggestions for much of its present beauty.
He proceeded with the completion of his sculpture-copying machine until nearly the close of his life. When the weather was suitable, he would go up stairs to his garret, don his woollen surtout and leather apron, and proceed with his work. He was as fastidious as ever, and was constantly introducing new improvements. It was a hobby and a pursuit, and served him as well as any other. To M. Berthollet he wrote,—“Whatever may be its success, it has at least had the good effect of making me avoid many hours of ennui, by employing my hands when I could not employ my head, and given me some exercise when I could not go out.” It also pleased him to see the invention growing under his hands as of old, though it is possible that during his later years he added but little to the machine. Indeed, it seems to have been as nearly as possible complete by the year 1817, if we may judge by the numerous exquisitely-finished specimens of reduced sculpture—busts, medallions, and statuary—laid away in the drawers of the garret at Heathfield. He took pleasure in presenting copies to his more intimate friends, jocularly describing them as “the productions of a young artist just entering his eighty-third year.” Shortly after, the hand of the cunning workman was stopped by death. The machine remained unfinished, according to its author’s intentions; and it is a singular testimony to the skill and perseverance of a man who had accomplished so much, that it is almost his only unfinished work.
In the autumn of 1819 he was seized by his last illness. It could scarcely be called a seizure, for he suffered little, and continued calm and tranquil, in the full possession of his faculties, almost to the last. He was conscious of his approaching end, and expressed from time to time his sincere gratitude to Divine Providence for the worldly blessings he had been permitted to enjoy, for his length of days, and his exemption from the infirmities of age. “I am very sensible,” said he to the mourning friends who assembled round his deathbed, “of the attachment you show me, and I hasten to thank you for it, as I feel that I am now come to my last illness.” He parted with life quietly and peacefully, on the 19th of August, 1819, in the eighty-third year of his age. He was buried near his deceased friend and partner Mr. Boulton, in Handsworth Church. Over his remains, which lie in a side aisle, was placed a monument by Chantrey, perhaps his finest work, justifying the compliment paid to the sculptor that he “cut breath;” for when first uncovered before the old servants assembled round it at Soho, it so powerfully reminded them of their old master, that they “lifted up their voices and wept.”
Watt has been fortunate in his monumental honours. The colossal statue of him in Westminster Abbey, also from the chisel of Chantrey, bears upon it an epitaph from the pen of Lord Brougham, which is beyond comparison the finest lapidary inscription in the English language; and among its other signal merits, it has one which appertains rather to its subject than its author, that, lofty as is the eulogy, every word of it is true.424 The monument was raised by public subscriptions, initiated at a meeting in London presided over by the Prime Minister, and attended by the most illustrious statesmen, men of science, men of letters, and men of art, of the time, who met for the purpose of commemorating in some suitable manner the genius of Watt. “It has ever been reckoned one of the chief honours of my life,” says Lord Brougham, “that I was called upon to pen the inscription upon the noble monument thus nobly reared.”
Watt was also honoured during his lifetime. Learned Societies were proud to enrol him amongst their members. He was a Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Edinburgh, a Foreign Associate of the Institute of France, and a Member of the Batavian Society. The University of Glasgow conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Law. Lord Liverpool offered him a baronetcy; but, consistent with the simplicity of his character, he declined the honour. He was invited to serve as Sheriff on two occasions, for Staffordshire and for Radnorshire; but he strongly pleaded to be excused undertaking the office. He was “a timid old man,” and hoped that he “should not have a duty imposed upon him that he was totally unfit for, nor have his grey hairs weighed down with a load of vexatious cares. My inventions,” he said, “are giving employment to the best part of a million of people, and having added many millions to the national riches, I have a natural right to rest in my extreme age.” His pleas were in both cases regarded as sufficient, and he was excused the office.
It is altogether unnecessary to pronounce a panegyric on the character and achievements of James Watt. This has already been done by Lord Jeffrey in language that cannot be surpassed. Sir James Macintosh placed him “at the head of all inventors in all ages and nations;” and Wordsworth the poet, twenty years after his death, said, “I look upon him, considering both the magnitude and the universality of his genius, as perhaps the most extraordinary man that this country ever produced: he never sought display, but was content to work in that quietness and humility, both of spirit and of outward circumstances, in which alone all that is truly great and good was ever done.”
Watt was himself accustomed to speak of his inventions with the modesty of true genius. To a nobleman who expressed to him his wonder at the greatness of his achievements, he said, “the public only look at my success, and not on the intermediate failures and uncouth constructions which have served as steps to enable me to climb to the top of the ladder.” Watt looked back upon his twenty long years of anxiety and labour before the engine succeeded, and heaved a sigh. “Without affecting any maidenly coyness,” he wrote to Dr. Darwin, who proposed to eulogise him in his ‘Botanic Garden,’ “you really make me appear contemptible in my own eyes by considering how far short my pretensions, or those of the invention, were of the climax of human intellect,—I that know myself to be inferior to the greatest part of enlightened men in most things. If I have excelled, I think now it has been by chance, and by the neglects of others. Preserve the dignity of a philosopher and historian; relate the facts, and leave posterity to judge. If I merit it, some of my countrymen, inspired by the amor patriæ, may say, ‘Hoc a Scoto factum fuit.’”
Although the true inventor, like the true poet, is born, not made,—and although Watt pursued his inventions because he found his highest pleasure in inventing,—yet his greatest achievements were accomplished by unremitting application and industry. He was a keen observer and an incessant experimenter. “Observare” was the motto he deliberately adopted; and it expresses the principle and success of his life. He was always on the watch for facts, noting and comparing them. He took nothing for granted; and accepted no conclusions save on experimental evidence. “Nature can be conquered,” he said, “if we can but find out her weak side.” His patience was inexhaustible. He was never baffled by failure, from which he declared that he learnt more than from success. “It is a great thing,” he once observed to Murdock, “to find out what will not do: it leads to one finding out what will do.”
“Give me facts,” he once said to Boulton, “I am sick of theory: give me actual facts.” Yet, indispensable though facts are, theory is scarcely less so in invention; and it was probably because Watt was a great theorist, that he was a great inventor. His invention of the separate condenser was itself the result of a theory, the soundness of which he proved by experiment. So with the composition of water, the theory of which he at once divined from the experiments of Priestley. He continued theorising during the whole progress of his invention of the steam-engine. New facts suggested new arrangements and the application of entirely new principles, until in course of time the engine of Newcomen became completely transformed.
Watt’s engine was not an invention merely—it might almost be called a creation. “The part which he played,” says M. Bataille, “in the mechanical application of the force of steam, can only be compared to that of Newton in astronomy, and of Shakspeare in poetry. And is not invention the poetry of science? It is only when we compare Watt with other mechanicians that we are struck by his immense superiority,—when we compare him, for example, with Smeaton, who was, perhaps, after him, the man who had advanced the farthest in industrial mechanism. Smeaton began, about the same time as Watt, his inquiries as to the best means of improving the steam-engine. He worked long and patiently, but in an entirely technical spirit. While he was working out his improvements, Watt had drawn forth from his fertile imagination all those brilliant inventions to which we owe the effective working steam-engine. In a word, Smeaton knew how to improve, but Watt knew how to create.”425
As for the uses of the steam-engine, they are too widely known to stand in need of illustration. Had Watt, at the outset of his career, announced to mankind that he would invent a power that should drain their mines, blow their furnaces, roll and hammer their metals, thrash and grind their corn, saw their timber, drive their looms and spindles, print their books, impel ships across the ocean, and perform the thousand offices in which steam is now regularly employed, he would have been regarded as an enthusiast, if not as a madman. Yet all this the steam-engine has done and is now doing. It has widely extended the dominion of man over inanimate nature, and given him an almost unbounded supremacy over the materials which enter into his daily use. It has increased his power, his resources, and his enjoyments. It is the most universal and untiring of labourers,—the steam-power of Great Britain alone being estimated as equal to the manual labour of upwards of four hundred millions of men, or more than double the number of males supposed to inhabit the globe.426 It is, indeed, no exaggeration to say that the steam-engine of Watt is, without exception, the greatest invention of modern times; and that it has been instrumental in effecting the most remarkable revolution in all departments of industry that the world has ever seen.
Some months since, we visited the little garret at Heathfield in which Watt pursued the investigations of his later years. The room had been carefully locked up since his death, and had only once been swept out. Everything lay very much as he left it. The piece of iron he was last employed in turning lay on the lathe. The ashes of the last fire were in the grate, the last bit of coal was in the scuttle. The Dutch oven was in its place over the stove, and the frying-pan in which he cooked his meal was hanging by its accustomed nail. Many objects lay about or in the drawers, indicating the pursuits which had been interrupted by death,—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, the contents of which do not seem to have been disturbed. Here are Watt’s ladles for melting lead, his foot-rule, his glue-pot, his hammer. Reflecting mirrors, an extemporised 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, once doubtless highly prized. In one place a model of the governor, in another of the parallel motion, and in a little box, fitted with wooden cylinders mounted with paper and covered with figures, is what we suppose to be a model of his proposed calculating machine. On the shelves are minerals and chemicals in pots and jars, on which the dust of nearly half a century has settled. The moist substances have long since dried up, the putty has been turned to stone, and the paste to dust. On one shelf we come upon a dish in which lies a withered bunch of grapes. On the floor, in a corner, near to where Watt sat and worked, is a hair-trunk—a touching memorial of a long past love and a long dead sorrow. It contains all poor Gregory’s school-books,—his first attempts at writing, his boy’s drawings of battles, his first school exercises down to his College themes, his delectuses, his grammars, his dictionaries, and his class books,—brought into this retired room, where the father’s eye could rest upon them. Near at hand is the sculpture-machine, on which he continued working to the last. Its wooden framing is worm-eaten and dropping into dust, like the hands which made it. But though the great workman has gone to rest, with all his griefs and cares, and his handiwork is fast crumbling to decay, the spirit of his work, the thought which he put into his inventions, still survives, and will probably continue to influence the destinies of his race for all time to come.
Footnotes
1 Article “Government,” in ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’
2 The principle of the Æolipile is the same as that embodied in Avery and Ruthven’s engines for the production of rotary motion. “These engines,” says Bourne, “are more expensive in steam than ordinary engines, and travel at an inconvenient speed; but in other respects they are quite as effectual, and their construction is extremely simple and inexpensive.”
3 See Bennet Woodcroft’s ‘Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria,’ from the original Greek. London, 1851.
4 Les Raisons des Forces Mouvantes, avec diverses machines tant utiles que plaisantes, &c., par Solomon de Caus, Ingénieur et Architecte du Roy. Frankfort, 1615.
5 De Caus eventually returned to France, and was appointed engineer to the King. During the later years of his life he was employed in carrying out plans for the better supply of Paris with water. The story so often told of De Caus having been shut up in the Bicêtre turns out to be a fiction. Though a Huguenot, he was not persecuted by Richelieu, but was, on the contrary, employed by him; and in 1624 he dedicated to that prelate his treatise entitled ‘Horologes Solitaires.’ Mr. Charles Read, editor of several interesting memoirs of early French Protestants, has recently brought to light and published in the ‘Gazette des Tribunaux’ the proofs of the patronage of De Caus by Richelieu, and reproduced the original documents, which he discovered slumbering in the dust of the State Records at Paris. In 1621 De Caus is found proposing to Louis XIII. to adopt measures for cleansing Paris and the faubourgs of dirt and uncleanness, by a system of reservoirs established at elevated points, and by fountains at various places which he indicated. The king and his council sent the propositions to the chief magistrate of Paris, and Mr. Read transcribes the deliberation which took place on the subject at the City Council, as handed down in the records deposited in the Imperial Archives. De Caus died at Paris, and was buried in the church of La Trinité in February, 1626.
6 Dr. Bayly, in his ‘Apothegms’ (1682), p. 87, describes the fright given to some Puritan visitors on the occasion of their searching Raglan Castle for arms, the Marquis of Worcester being a known Papist. “Having carried them up and down the castle, his lordship at length brought them over a high bridge that arched over the moat between the castle and the great tower, wherein the Lord Herbert had lately contrived certain water-works, which, when the several engines and wheels were set agoing, much quantity of water through the hollow conveyances of the aqueducts was to be let down from the top of an high tower.” When all was ready for the surprise, the water was let in, and it made such a hideous and fearful noise by reason of the hollowness of the tower, and the neighbouring echoes of the castle, that the men stood amazed and terror-struck. At this point up came a man staring and running, who exclaimed, “Look to yourselves, my masters, for the lions are got loose.” Whereupon the Puritans fled down the narrow staircase in such haste that they lost footing and fell, tumbling one over the other, and never halted until they had got the castle out of sight. Mr. Dircks, in his able and exhaustive ‘Life, Times, and Scientific Labours of the Marquis of Worcester,’ London, 1865, says that this hydraulic apparatus “probably depended for its operation on the influence of heat from burning fuel acting on a suitably constructed boiler, and so arranged as to be able to apply the expansive force of steam to the driving of water through vertical pipes to a considerable elevation.” But it does not seem to us that the facts stated are sufficient to warrant this assumption.
7 Mr. Dircks says “it was a machine consisting of a wheel 14 feet in diameter, carrying forty weights of forty pounds each, and is supposed to have rotated on an axle supported on two pillars or upright frames,” as indicated in the ‘Century of Inventions,’ Art. 56.
8 ‘Weld’s Royal Society,’ i. 53.
9 ‘Industrial Biography,’ p. 57.
10 ‘A Century of the Names and Scantlings of such Inventions as at present I can call to mind to have tried and perfected, which (my former Notes being lost) I have, at the instance of a powerful Friend, endeavoured now, in the year 1655, to set these down in such a way as may sufficiently instruct me to put any of them in practice.’ London, 1663.
11 The writer of the elaborate article “Lock,” in the supplement to the ‘Penny Cyclopædia’ (ii. 217), in describing the combination lock, says: “The Marquis of Worcester, in whose ‘Century of Inventions’ several different kinds of lock, which lay claim to the most marvellous properties, are enumerated, would appear, from his 72nd article, to have devised an improvement on this apparatus; as he refers to ‘an escutcheon to be placed before any of these locks,’ one of the properties of which he describes as being that ‘the owner, though a woman, may, with her delicate hand, vary the ways of coming to open the lock ten millions of times beyond the knowledge of the smith that made it, or of me who invented it.’ The details of this invention are not given; but in the third volume of the ‘Transactions of the Society of Arts,’ pp. 160–5, is an escutcheon of similar character, invented by Mr. Marshall, and rewarded by the Society in 1784. The details of this ingenious contrivance are fully given in the volume referred to.”
12 His words are these:—“One of the most curious things that I wished to see was an hydraulic machine which the Marquis of Worcester has invented, and of which he is making trial. I went with all speed to Fox-hall, on the other side of the Thames, a little below Lambeth, which is the Palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury, in sight of London. This machine will raise to the height of forty feet, by the strength of one man only, and in a minute of time, four large buckets of water through a pipe of eight inches. But what will be the most powerful help to the wants of the public is the work which is performed by another ingeniously-constructed machine, which can be seen raised on a wooden tower on the top of Somerset House, which supplies that part of the town with water, but with some difficulty, and a smaller quantity than could be desired. It is somewhat like our Samaritane water-work on the Pont Neuf; and on the raising-pump they have added an impulsion which increases the force; but for what we obtain by the power of the Seine, they employ one or two horses, which incessantly turn the machine, as the river changes its course twice a day, and the spring or wheels which are used for the ebbing tide would not do for the flow.”—Sorbière, ‘Relation d’un Voyage en Angleterre.’
13 The Works of the Hon. Robert Boyle, v. 532.
14 Dircks’s ‘Life and Times,’ &c., 356.
15 Mr. Woodcroft is, however, of opinion that the Marquis’s contrivance was but a boat with paddle-wheels, with an axis across it, which axis was turned by the action of the stream on the paddles, and thus wound up a rope and dragged the boat onward to the other end of the rope fixed by an anchor; certainly a more clumsy and less notable contrivance than that of a steamboat.
16 Letter to some person unknown, quoted by Mr. Dircks from the Badminton MSS.—Dircks’s ‘Life, Times,’ &c., 276.
17 We are informed that Morland’s Tuba Stentorphornica, or speaking-trumpet, is still to be seen at Trinity College, Cambridge. Butler, in his ‘Hudibras,’ alludes to the invention:—
“I heard a formidable voice
Loud as the stentorphornic noise.”
18 His first idea seems to have been to employ gunpowder for the production of motive power, for in the ‘Calendar of State Papers’ (Dom) we find the following entry:—“Decr. 11th, 1691.—Warrant for a grant to Sir Samuel Morland of the sole use for 14 years of his invention for raising water out of pits, &c., to a reasonable height, by the force of powder and air conjointly.”—(‘Entry Book,’ V., p. 85.) In vol. XLVI., p. 49, we find this entry under the same date:—“Warrant for a grant to Sir S. Morland of the sole making of an engine invented by him for raising water in mines or pits, draining marshes, or supplying buildings with water.”
19 The ‘Harleian Miscellany’ (Brit. Mus.), No. 5771, contains the following brief tract in French, written by Morland in 1682. It is on vellum, and entitled ‘Les Principes de la Nouvelle Force de Feu:’—“L’eau estant evaporée par la force de feu, ces vapeurs demandent incontinant une plus grand’espace [environ deux mille fois] que l’eau n’occupoiet auparavant, et plus tost que d’etre toujours emprisonnés, feroient crever une piece de canon. Mais estant bien gouvernées selon les regles de la statique, et par science reduites a la mesure au poids, et à la balance, alors elles portent paisiblement leurs fardeaux [comme des bons chevaux] et ainsy seroient elles du grand usage au gendre humain, particulièrement pour l’elevation des eaux, selon la table suivante que marque les nombres des livres qui pourrant estre levés 1800 fois par heure, à 6 pouces de levée, par de cylindres à moitie remplies d’eau, ausi bien que les divers diametres et profondeurs des dit cylindres.” Tables are then given, showing the power requisite to raise given quantities of water to certain heights by cylinders of different dimensions.
20 M. Bergenroth says the documents at Simancas consist of—1. A holograph letter of Blasco Garay to the Emperor, dated Malaga, 10th Sept., 1540, containing his report on the trial trip of one of his paddle-wheel ships; 2. The report of the Captain Antonio Destigarura on the same trial trip; 3. The report of the Provcedores of Malaga concerning the same trip, dated 27th July, 1540; 4. The report of Blasco Garay to the Emperor, dated 6th July, 1543, concerning the trial trip of another of his paddle-wheel ships made at Barcelona in June, 1543; 5. A letter of Blasco Garay to Carrs, dated 20th June, 1543. In none of these is there to be found any reference to steam-power; but only to the power of men employed in driving the paddle-wheels. This is confirmed by the independent examination of the same documents by J. Macgregor, Esq., of the Temple, who gives the result in a Letter to Bennet Woodcroft, Esq., inserted as a note to the ‘Abridgments of the Specifications relating to Steam Propulsion,’ pp. 105–7.
21 Burn, ‘History of Foreign Protestant Refugees,’ 261.
22 In a letter, dated Shilston, August 9th, 1727, he writes:—“The late Mr. Thomas Savery, inventor of the engines for rowing, and raising water by fire, was, I believe, well known to several of the Royal Society, perhaps to the President; but as I am a perfect stranger, do acquaint you that his father was youngest brother to my grandfather. The late Servington Savery, M.D., of Marlborough, was one of my family, viz., a brother to my deceased father.”
23 It is now in the possession of Capt. Lowe, of the 26th Regiment, whose grand-aunt was a Miss Savery of Shilston.
24 ‘Navigation Improved; or the Art of Rowing Ships of all rates in calms, with a more easy, swift and steady motion than oars can. Also, a description of the engine that performs it; and the Author’s answer to all Mr. Drummer’s objections that have been made against it. By Tho. Savery, Gent. London, 1698.’
25 Mr. Davies Gilbert says even this method was comparatively modern, as he remembered a carpenter who used to boast that he had assisted in making the first whim ever seen westward of Hayle.—Davies, ‘Parochial History of Cornwall,’ London, 1838, ii. 83.
26 Borlase, ‘Natural History of Cornwall,’ 175–6.
27 The absurd story is told by Dr. Desaguliers (‘Experimental Philosophy,’ ii. 465) that Savery, having read the Marquis’s book, “was the first to put in practice the raising of water by fire, which he proposed for the draining of mines;” and having copied the Marquis’s engine, “the better to conceal the matter, bought up all the Marquis of Worcester’s books that he could purchase in Paternoster-row and elsewhere, and burned ’em in the presence of the gentleman, his friend, who told me this!” It need scarcely be said that it was very unlikely that Savery should have attempted thus to conceal an invention recorded in a printed book which had been in circulation for more than forty years.
28 Switzer, ‘System of Hydrostaticks and Hydraulicks,’ London, 1729.
29 The patent is dated the 25th July, 1698, and is entitled, “A grant to Thomas Savery, Gentl., of the sole exercise of a new invenc̃on, by him invented, for raiseing of water, and occasioning moc̃on to all sort of mill works, by the impellant force of fire, which will be of great use for draining mines, serving towns with water, and for the working of all sorts of mills when they have not the benefit of water nor constant winds; to hold for 14 years; with usual clauses.”
30 ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ No. 252. Weld’s ‘Royal Society,’ i. 357.
31 ‘The Miner’s Friend, or an Engine to Raise Water by Fire, described, and of the manner of fixing it in Mines, with an account of the several uses it is applicable unto; and an answer to the objections made against it. By Tho. Savery, Gent.’ London, 1702.
32 Two boilers, a large, A, and a smaller, B, were fixed in a furnace, and connected together at the top by a pipe, C. The larger boiler was filled two-thirds full, and the smaller quite full of water. When that in the larger one was raised to the boiling-point, the handle of the regulator, D, was thrust back as far as it would go, by which the steam forced itself through the pipe connected with the vessel E, expelling the air it contained through the clack at F. The handle of the regulator being then drawn towards you, the communication between the boiler and the vessel, E, was closed, and that between the boiler and the second vessel, G, was opened, which latter was also filled with steam, the air being in like manner discharged through the clack, H. Cold water was then poured from the water-cock, I, on to the vessel E, by which the steam was suddenly condensed, and a vacuum being thereby caused, the water to be raised was drawn up through the sucking-pipe, J, its return being prevented by a clack or valve at K. The handle of the regulator D being again thrust back, the steam was again admitted, and pressing upon the surface of the water in E, forced it out at the bottom of the vessel and up through the pipe L, from which it was driven into the open air. The handle of the regulator was then reversed, on which the steam was again admitted to G, and the water in like manner expelled from it, while E, being again dashed with cold water, was refilling from below. Then the cold water was turned upon G, and thus alternate filling and forcing went on, and a continuous stream of cold water kept flowing from the upper opening. The large boiler was replenished with water by shutting off the connection of the small boiler with the cold water pipe, M, which supplied it from above, on which the steam contained in the latter forced the water through the connecting pipe, C, into the large boiler, and kept it running in a continuous stream until the surface of the water in the smaller boiler was depressed below the opening of the connecting pipe, which was indicated by the noise of the clack, when it was refilled from the cold water pipe, M, as before.
33 Switzer, ‘Introduction to a General System of Hydrostaticks and Hydraulicks,’ 237.
34 Dr. Wilkes in ‘Shaw’s History of Staffordshire,’ i. 85, 119.
35 Bradley, ‘Discourses on Earth and Water, &c.’ Westminster, 1727.
36 We are informed by Quartermaster Conolly, R.E., who has given much attention to the early history of the Royal Engineers, that the book of Warrants and Appointments, anno 1712, No. 172½, in the Tower Record-room, contains the following memorandum in pencil on the inside cover:—[Thomas] “Savery, Engineer officer, 1702–14.”
37 A pamphlet published in 1712, entitled ‘An Impartial Inquiry into the Management of the War in Spain,’ contains the following reference to Savery:—“Sums allowed by Parliament for carrying on the war in Spain... for the year 1710. To Thomas Savery, Esq., for Thomas Cale, surgeon, for care of disabled soldiers, 306l. 6s. 4d.”
38 Newcomen’s house occupies the centre of the above engraving—the house with the peaked gable-end supported by timbers.
39 Pamphlet on ‘Dartmouth: the advantages of its Harbour as a Station for Foreign Mail Packets, and a Short Notice of its Ancient and Present Condition.’ By A. H. Holdsworth. London, 1841.
40 Switzer, ‘Introduction to a System of Hydrostatics and Hydraulics,’ p. 342.
41 Harris, ‘Lexicon Technicum.’
42 It has been stated that Newcomen took out a patent for his invention in 1705; but this is a mistake, as no patent was ever taken out by Newcomen. It is supposed that Savery, having heard of his invention, gave him notice that he would regard his method of producing a speedy vacuum by condensation, as an infringement of his patent, and that Newcomen accordingly agreed to give him an interest in the new engine during the term of Savery’s patent. It will, however, be observed that the principle on which Newcomen’s engine worked was entirely different from that of Savery.
43 Scogging is a north country word, meaning skulking one’s work, from which probably the boy gave the contrivance its name. Potter, however, grew up to be a highly-skilled workman. He went abroad about the year 1720, and erected an engine at a mine in Hungary, described by Leupold in his ‘Theatrum Machinarum,’ with many encomiums upon Potter, who was considered the inventor.
44 The illustration shows the several parts of Newcomen’s atmospheric engine. a is the boiler; b, the piston moving up and down; c, the cylinder; d, a pipe proceeding from the top of the boiler, and inserted into the bottom of the cylinder, having a cock, e, to interrupt the flow of steam at pleasure; f, cold-water cistern, from which the cold water is conveyed by the pipe g, called the injection-pipe, and thrown in a jet into the cylinder, b, on turning the injection-cock, h; the snifting-valve, i, enables the air to escape from the cylinder, while the siphon-pipe, j, enables the condensed steam to flow from the same cavity in the form of water; k, the main lever beam; l, the counterpoise or weight hung on the balance-beam, or on m, the pump-rod which works the pump, n.
45 Mr. Lemon eventually became the principal merchant and tin-smelter of Cornwall. Mr. Davies Gilbert says:—“The energies of his mind were not limited to these undertakings, great though they were. He cultivated a taste for literature, and, which is extremely unusual, acquired, amidst business, and at a middle age, the power of reading the classic authors in their original language.... He was distinguished in his district as “the great Mr. Lemon,” but such were the impressions of his abilities, his exertions, and general merit, that a progress so rapid and unexampled does not appear to have excited envy, or any of those bad passions which usually alloy the enjoyment of prosperity.”—‘History of Cornwall,’ ii. 84.
46 “It may be interesting to know that it required three hands to work Newcomen’s first engines. I have heard it said that when the engine was stopped, and again set at work, the words were passed “Snift Benjy!” “Blow the fire, Pomery!” “Work away, Joe!” The last let in the condensing water. Lifting the condensing clack was called “snifting,” because on opening the valve, the air rushing through it made a noise like a man snifting. The fire was increased through artificial means by another hand, and all being ready, the machine was set in motion by a third.”—Cyrus Redding, ‘Yesterday and To-day.’ London, 1863. The “snifting clack” was a valve in the cylinder opening outwards, which permitted the escape of air or permanently elastic fluid, which could not be condensed by cold and run off through the eduction-pipe.
47 In 1737 he published a Treatise on the subject entitled, ‘A description and Draught of a new-invented Machine for carrying Vessels or Ships out of or into any Harbour, Port, or River, against Wind or Tide, and in a Calm,’ by Jonathan Hulls.
48 In describing his mode of obtaining rotary motion by ratchet wheels, a weight, and ropes, Hulls states that he uses two axes, one behind the other, each of which is essential to the object; and he then adds, that when his tow-boat is to be used in shallow rivers, the machine works by two cranks fixed to the hindermost axis; to which cranks are fixed two shafts (or poles) of proper length to reach the bottom of the river, and which move alternately forward from the motion of the wheels by which the vessel is carried on: so that the cranks, as described by Hulls, receive rotary motion from the axis on which they are placed, and do not, as has been erroneously stated, impart that motion to it.—Bennet Woodcroft, ‘Sketch of the Origin and Progress of Steam Navigation.’ London, 1848.
49 There are several versions of the same satire current to this day in the villages of Campden and Hanging Aston.
50 Borlase, ‘Natural History of Cornwall,’ p. 175.
51 Among the few household articles belonging to him which descended to his son, and afterwards to his grandson the engineer, were two portraits, one of Sir Isaac Newton, and the other of John Napier, the inventor of Logarithms.
52 The mansion house of the Shaws is now principally occupied as manorial offices. The fine old garden and pleasure-grounds have been presented by Sir John Shaw to the people of Greenock as a public park for ever. It is now called “The Watt Park,” and a more beautiful spot (bating the smoke of the busy town below) is scarcely to be found in Britain.
53 In 1715 the Greenock and Cartsdyke men kept strict watch and ward for eighty days against a threatened visit of Rob Roy and his caterans. The conduct of these unruly neighbours continued to cause apprehensions amongst the townspeople until a much later period, especially during fair time, then the great event of the year. The fair was the occasion of the annual gathering of the people from the neighbouring country to buy and to sell. Highlandmen came from the opposite shores and from the lochs down the Clyde, men caring little for Lowland law, but duly impressed by a display of force. Their boats were drawn up on the beach with their prows to the High Street, the north side of which at that time lay open to the sea. The Highland folk lived and slept on board, each boat having a plank or gangway between it and the shore. On the first day of the fair Sir John Shaw, the feudal superior, convened the local dignitaries, the deacons and the trades, and after drinking the King’s health and throwing the glasses amongst the populace, they formed in procession and perambulated the town.
54 Some of her neighbours thought her stately and unbending, and that she affected a superior style of living. In the ‘Memorials of Watt,’ by the late George Williamson, Esq., Greenock, are to be found many curious and interesting details as to the Watt family; collected partly from tradition and partly from local records. Of Mrs. Watt’s “superior style of living,” compared with the custom of the period, the following anecdote is given:—“One of the author’s informants on such points, a venerable lady in her eightieth year, was wont to speak of the worthy baillie’s wife with much characteristic interest and animation. As illustrative of the internal economy of the family, the old lady related an occasion on which she had spent an evening, when a girl, at Mrs. Watt’s house, and remembered expressing with much naïveté to her mother on returning home, her childish surprise that ‘Mrs. Watt had two lighted candles on the table.’ Among these and other reminiscences of her youth, our venerable informant described James Watt’s mother, in her expressive Doric, as ‘a braw, braw woman—none now to be seen like her.’” p. 128–9.
55 The truth in regard to young Watt’s first years in the public school is, that, owing doubtless to infirm health, to the suffering and depression which affected his whole powers, he was prevented for a considerable time displaying even a very ordinary and moderate aptitude for the common routine of school lessons; and during those years he was regarded by his schoolmasters as slow and inapt. Although to some minds facts of such a nature may be conceived to mar the romance of a great man’s history, yet, seeing they rest on authenticity which cannot be impugned, there appears no reasonable ground on which it may be thought that they ought to be passed over as if they had not existed, or were altogether unfounded.—Williamson’s ‘Memorials of Watt,’ p. 130.
56 The Shaw baronetcy was the reward of the feudal superior’s services on the occasion. The banner carried by the tenantry in the civil war was long preserved in Greenock, and was hung up with the other town flags in one of the public rooms.
57 According to Smeaton’s report in 1755, there were in spring tides only 3 feet 8 inches water at Pointhouse Ford. Measures were taken to deepen the river, and operations with that object were begun in 1768. Salmon abounded in the Clyde, and was so common that servants and apprentices were accustomed to stipulate that they should not have salmon for dinner more than a certain number of days in the week.
58 The “middens” in the street were sometimes complained of as a nuisance; and in 1776, the magistrate threatened a penalty of 5s. if middens of which complaint had been made were not removed within 48 hours.
59 The Highland gentry and people regarded the Lowlanders as their natural enemies, fair subjects for plunder at all times as opportunities offered. The Lowlanders, on their part, regarded the Highlanders very much as the primitive settlers of North America regarded the Cherokee and Chocktaw Indians. Sometimes a band of uncouth half-clad Highlandmen would suddenly rush down upon the Lowlands, swoop up all the cattle within their reach, and drive them off into the mountains. Hence the Lowlanders and the Highlanders were always in a state of feud. Long after the ’45 a Highlandman would “thank God that he had not a drop of Lowland blood in his veins.”
60 The only trade which Glasgow carried on with foreign countries previous to the Union, was in coal, grindstones, and fish,—Glasgow-cured herrings being in much repute abroad. After the Union partnerships were formed; vessels were built down the Clyde, and chartered for carrying on the trade with Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina. The first honest vessel crossed the Atlantic from the Clyde in 1719; in 1735 the Virginia merchants in Glasgow had fifteen vessels engaged in the trade, and the town shortly after became the great mart for tobacco. Of the 90,000 hogsheads imported into the United Kingdom in 1772, Glasgow alone imported 49,000, or more than one-half. The American Revolution had the effect of completely ruining the tobacco trade of Glasgow, after which the merchants were compelled to turn to other fields of enterprise and industry. The capital which they had accumulated from tobacco enabled them to enter upon their new undertakings with spirit, and the steam-engine which had by that time been invented by their townsman James Watt, proved their best helper in advancing the prosperity of modern Glasgow. The rapidity of its progress may be inferred from the following facts. In 1735, though the Glasgow merchants owned half the entire tonnage of Scotland, it amounted to only 5600 tons. In that year the whole shipping of Scotland was only one-fortieth part of that of England: it is now about one-fifth. From 1752 to 1770 the total tonnage dues of the harbour of Glasgow amounted to only 147l., or equal to an average of about 8l. per annum. In 1780, the Clyde having been deepened in the interval, they reached 1515l.; and in 1854, they amounted to 86,580l. The increase has been quite as great in later years. In point of value of exports, Glasgow ranks fourth among the ports of the United Kingdom; and Greenock now takes precedence of Bristol.
61 For many curious particulars of Old Glasgow and its society, see Dr. Strang’s ‘Glasgow and its Clubs.’
62 a temporary wooden theatre was run up in 1752, but the religious prejudices of the population were violently excited by the circumstance, and the place was attacked by a mob and seriously damaged. The few persons who went there had to be protected from insults. In 1762, when some persons proposed to build a theatre, not a single individual who had ground within the burgh would grant them a site. Two years later the theatre was erected outside the precincts, and on the night on which it was opened it was wilfully set on fire by some persons instigated by the preaching of a neighbouring methodist, when it narrowly escaped destruction.
63 When the Lowlanders want to drink a cheering cup, they go to the public-house, called the Change-house, and call for a chopin of twopenny, which is their yeasty beverage, made of malt, not quite so strong as the table-beer of England.... The Highlanders, on the contrary, despise the liquor, and regale themselves with whisky, or malt spirit, as strong as Geneva, which they swallow in great quantities, without any signs of inebriation: they are used to it from the cradle, and find it an excellent preservative against the winter cold, which must be extreme on these mountains.—Smollett, ‘Expedition of Humphry Clinker.’
64 Letter to his father quoted in Muirhead’s ‘Life of Watt,’ p. 39.
65 The following “letter of Guildry” embodied the local regulations which existed for the purpose of preventing “loss and skaith” to the burgesses and craftsmen of Glasgow by the intrusion of “strangers”:—“The Dean of Guild and his Council shall have full power to discharge, punish, and unlaw all persons, unfreemen, using the liberty of a freeman within the burgh, as they shall think fit, ay and while the said unfreemen be put off the town, and restrained, or else be made free with the town and their crafts; and sic like, to pursue, upon the judges competent, all persons dwelling within this burgh, and usurping the liberty thereof, obtain decrets against them, and cause the same to be put to speedy execution.”
66 When we visited the room some years since, we found laid there the galvanic apparatus employed by Professor Thomson for perfecting the invention of his delicate process of signalling through the wires of the Atlantic Telegraph.
67 The illustration does not show the Inner Quadrangle, situated to the left of the Main Court, that part of the building having been added since the view was published.
68 The author of ‘Glasgow, Past and Present’ thus writes:—“Last week (Nov. 1851) I was crossing the ferry at the west end of Tradeston, and in the course of our passage over we turned round the bow of a large ship. The ferryman, looking up to her leviathan bulwarks, exclaimed, ‘She came up here yesterday, drawing eighteen feet water!’ Now, upon this very spot seventy years ago, when a very little boy, I waded across the river, my feet never being off the ground, and the water not reaching above my arm-pits. The depth at that time could not have been much more than three feet.”
69 The ‘Glasgow Courant’ of Oct. 22, 1759, contains the following advertisement:—
“Just Published,
“And to be Sold by James Watt, at his Shop in the College of Glasgow, price 2s. 6d.,
“A large Sheet Map of the River Clyde, from Glasgow to Portincross, from an Actual Survey.
“To which is added,
“A Draught of Part of the North Channel, with the Frith of Clyde according to the best authorities.”
70 General T. Perronet Thompson is another remarkable instance of a person without ear for music, who has mastered the principles of harmony and applied them in the invention of his “Enharmonic Organ.”
71 Watt seems to have made other organs besides those above mentioned. Not long since a barrel-organ of his construction was offered for sale at Glasgow. It was originally in the form of a table, about three feet square, having no appearance of a musical instrument externally. At this table, when Watt and his friends were seated, he would set the concealed mechanism in action, and surprise them with the production of the music. It has since been mounted with an organ front and sides, with gilt pipes. When in proper tune it is of considerable power and pleasing harmony; and continues orthodox in its psalm tunes, which range from “Martyrs” to the “Old Hundred.” A correspondent writes as follows:—“A large organ made and used by Watt when he had his shop in Glasgow, was disposed of by him, when he finally left this city. It came into the possession of the late Mr. Archibald M‘Lellan, coach-builder, Miller Street, Glasgow, and he had it fitted up in his elegant residence in that fine old street. I have heard it played by Mr. M‘Lellan. After his death it was sold, and purchased by Mr. James G. Adam of the Denny print-works. Mr. Adam died, and the organ was advertised for sale, in 1864, and purchased for 10l., by Adam Sim, Esq., of Coulter Mains, in whose possession it now is. Mr. Sim has authentic documents to prove that this organ was really James Watt’s.”
72 The club he frequented was called the Anderston Club, of which Mr. (afterwards Professor) Millar, Dr. Robert Simson, the mathematician, Dr. Adam Smith, Dr. Black, and Dr. Cullen, were members. The standing dish of the club was hen-broth, consisting of a decoction of “how-towdies” (fowls), thickened with black beans, and seasoned with pepper. Dr. Strang says Professor Simson was in the habit of counting the steps from his house to the club, so that he could tell the distance to the fraction of an inch. But it is not stated whether he counted the steps on his return, and found the number of steps the same.
73 John Anderson was a native of Greenock, and an intimate friend of James Watt. He was appointed professor of Hebrew in his twenty-seventh year, and succeeded Dr. Dick as professor of Natural Philosophy in 1757. Watt spent many of his evenings at his residence within the College, and had the free use of his excellent private library. Professor Anderson is entitled to the honour of being the first to open classes for the instruction of working men—“anti-toga classes,” as he called them—in the principles of Natural Philosophy; and at his death he bequeathed his property for the purpose of founding an institution with the same object. The Andersonian University was opened in 1796, long before the age of Mechanics’ Institutes.
74 At a meeting held in Glasgow in 1839 to erect a monument to Watt, Dr. Ure observed:—“As to the latent heat of steam,” said Mr. Watt to me, “it was a piece of knowledge essential to my inquiries, and I worked it out myself in the best way that I could. I used apothecaries’ phials for my apparatus, and by means of them I got approximations sufficient for my purpose at the time.” The passage affords a striking illustration of the large results that may be arrived at by means of the humblest instruments. In like manner Cavendish, when asked by a foreigner to be shown over his laboratories, pointed to an old tea-tray on the table, containing a few watch-glasses, test papers, a balance, and a blowpipe, and observed, “There is all the laboratory I possess.”
75 Watt’s notes to Robison’s Articles on ‘Steam and Steam-engines.’
76 The following advertisement in the ‘Glasgow Journal’ of the 1st Dec., 1763, fixes the date of this last removal:—
“James Watt has removed his shop from the Saltmercat to Mr. Buchanan’s land in the Trongate, where he sells all sorts of Mathematical and Musical Instruments, with variety of toys, and other goods.”
77 About the site of the Humane Society’s House.
78 Mr. Robert Hart’s ‘Reminiscences of James Watt,’ in ‘Transactions of the Glasgow Archæological Society, 1859.’
79 “The last step of all,” says Professor Jardine, “was more difficult—the forming of the separate condensing vessel. The great knowledge he had acquired of the mechanical powers enabled him to construct it, but I have often heard him say this was a work of great difficulty, and that he met with many disappointments before he succeeded. I have often made use of this beautiful analysis received from Mr. Watt, in another department in which I have been long engaged, to illustrate and encourage the progress of genius in youth, to show, that once in possession of a habit of attention, under proper direction, it may be carried from one easy step to another, till the mind becomes qualified and invigorated for uniting and concentrating effort—the highest exertion of genius.”
80 “I have now (April, 1765) almost a certainty of the facturum of the fire-engine, having determined the following particulars: The quantity of steam produced; the ultimatum of the lever engine; the quantity of steam destroyed by the cold of its cylinder; the quantity destroyed in mine; and if there be not some devil in the hedge, mine ought to raise water to 44 feet with the same quantity of steam that theirs does to 32 (supposing my cylinder as thick as theirs), which I think I can demonstrate. I can now make a cylinder 2 feet diameter and 3 feet high, only a 40th of an inch thick, and strong enough to resist the atmosphere; sed tace. In short, I can think of nothing else but this machine.”—Watt to Dr. Lind, quoted in Muirhead’s ‘Life of Watt,’ 94–5.
81 For Memoir of Roebuck, see ‘Industrial Biography,’ p. 133.
82 When we visited the place many years ago, Miss Stewart’s spinnet still stood in the drawing-room, but there was not a tone left in it. Like many other old houses, Kinneil has the reputation of being haunted. The ghost is that of a “Lady Lilburne,” wife of the Parliamentary General, who is said to have thrown herself out of one of the windows during her husband’s absence.
83 Dr. Small was born in 1734 at Carmylie, Angus, Scotland, of which parish his father was the minister. He had been for some time the professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Williamsburg, Virginia, from whence he returned to England and settled at Birmingham.
84 “I have,” he writes, “just now got a curious book, being an account of all the machines, furnaces, methods of working, profits, &c., of the mines of the Upper Hartz. It is unluckily in German, which I understand little of, but am improving in by the help of a truly Chymical Swiss Dyer, who is come here to dye standing red on linen and cotton, in which he is successful. He is according to the custom of philosophers ennuyé to a great degree, but seems to be more modest than is usual with them; and, what is still more unusual, is attached only to his dyeing, though he has a tolerable knowledge of chymestry. He promises to make me a coat that will not wet though boiled in water. This would be of great use to a hundred people I see just now running by, wet to the skin.... I verily believe the drops are an inch in diameter! To return to the book—it contains an account of all the unsuccessful experiments that have been tried in the Hartz, and I assure you it gives me some consolation to see the great Liebnitz, the rival of Newton, bungling repeatedly, applying wind mills to raise ore while water ran idle past him. There is among other machines the fellow of Blackie’s, only worked by water, and a full and true account of why it did not succeed, which he should read. Their machines in general display great ingenuity though ignorance of principles.”—Watt to Small, May 28, 1769. Boulton MSS.
85 “I mentioned to you a method of still doubling the effect of the steam, and that tolerably easy, by using the power of steam rushing into a vacuum, at present lost. This would do a little more than double the effect, but it would too much enlarge the vessels to use it all. It is peculiarly applicable to wheel engines, and may supply the want of a condenser where force of steam is only used; for, open one of the steam valves and admit steam, until one-fourth of the distance between it and the next valve is filled with steam, shut the valve, and the steam will continue to expand and to press round the wheel with a diminishing power, ending in one-fourth of its first exertion. The sum of this series you will find greater than one-half, though only one-fourth steam was used. The power will indeed be unequal, but this can be remedied by a fly, or in several other ways.”—Watt to Small, 28th May, 1769. Boulton MSS.
86 He anticipated the use of high-pressure steam, as afterwards employed in the locomotive by Trevithick, in the following passage:—“I intend,” he said, “in many cases to employ the expansive force of steam to press on the piston, or whatever is used instead of one, in the same manner as the weight of the atmosphere is now employed in common fire-engines. In some cases I intend to use both the condenser and this force of steam, so that the powers of these engines will as much exceed those pressed only by the air, as the expansive power of the steam is greater than the weight of the atmosphere. In other cases, when plenty of cold water cannot be had, I intend to work the engines by the force of steam only, and to discharge it into the air by proper outlets after it has done its office.”—Watt to Small, March, 1769. Boulton MSS.
87 Mr. Hart’s “Reminiscences of James Watt,” in ‘Transactions of the Glasgow Archæological Society,’ Part I. 1859.
88 The telescope was mounted with two parallel horizontal hairs in the focus of the eyeglass, crossed by one perpendicular hair. The measuring pole was divided into feet and inches, so that, wrote Watt, “if the hairs comprehend one foot at one chain distance, they will comprehend ten feet at ten chains,” and so on. This invention Watt made in 1770, and used the telescope in his various surveys. Eight years later, in 1778, the Society of Arts awarded to a Mr. Green a premium for precisely the same invention.
89 Letter to Small, 24th Nov. 1772. Watt, however, took no steps to bring this invention before the public, and in 1777, a similar instrument having been invented by Dr. Maskelyne, was presented by him to the Royal Society. Thus Watt also lost the credit of this invention.
90 The Company afterwards came to grief. The original subscription list was not filled up, and the stagnation in trade which took place at the outbreak of the American war, brought the works to a standstill. In 1782 the concern was sold to the Messrs. Stirling, who eventually became the sole proprietors and finished the undertaking.
91 There was then a ford at Dumbuck, a few miles below Glasgow, which prevented boats of more than ten tons burden ascending to the Broomielaw. This was shortly after removed by the Clyde Trust, who have expended 3,564,397l. in improvement of the navigation between 1770 and 1863, the revenue collected during the same time in dues having been 2,288,000l. Vessels drawing 21 feet can now ascend to the Broomielaw; and when the present improvements are completed the depth at high water is expected to be upwards of 24 feet.
92 Watt to Small, 21st Dec. 1770. Boulton MSS.
93 The bridge was partially destroyed by a flood in 1806, when one of the central piers was thrown down. Two of the arches fell, and were rebuilt, but the others stand as originally constructed.
94 The child was stillborn. Of four other children who were the fruit of this marriage, two died young. A son and daughter survived; the son, James, succeeded his father, and died unmarried, at Aston Hall, near Birmingham, in 1848. The daughter married Mr. Miller, of Glasgow, whose grandson, the present J. W. Gibson Watt, Esq., succeeded to the Watt property.
95 There seems reason to believe that the capacity for skilled industry is to a certain extent transmissible; and that the special aptitude for mechanics which characterises the population of certain districts, is in a great measure the result of centuries of experience, transmitted from one generation to another. Mr. Morell takes the same view: “We have every reason to believe,” he says, “that the power of specialised instincts is transmitted, and when the circumstances favour it, goes on increasing from age to age in intensity, and in a particular adaptation to the purposes demanded. All confirmed habits which become a part of the animal nature, seem to be imparted by hereditary descent; and thus what seems to be an original instinct may, after all, be but the accumulated growth and experience of many generations.”
96 For Memoir of Huntsman, see ‘Industrial Biography,’ 102–110.
97 While on Snow-hill, Mr. Boulton’s business was principally confined to the making of buttons, shoe-buckles, articles in steel, and various kinds of trinkets. His designation was that of “toymaker,” as is shown by the following document copied from the original:—“Received of Matthew Boulton, toymaker, Snow-hill, three shillings and sixpence, for which sum I solemnly engage, if he should be chosen by lot to serve in the militia for this parish, at the first meeting for that purpose, to procure a substitute that shall be approved of. Birmingham, January 11, 1762, Henry Brookes, Sergt.” The Birmingham toymaker was, however, often a man doing a large business, producing articles of utility as well as ornament. Mr. Osler, the Birmingham manufacturer of glass beads and other toys, when examined before a Committee of the House of Commons many years since, astonished the members by informing them that trifling though dolls’ eyes might appear to be as an article of manufacture, he had once obtained an order for 500l. worth of the article. “Eighteen years ago,” said he, “on my first going to London, a respectable-looking man in the city asked me if I could supply him with dolls’ eyes; and I was foolish enough to feel half offended; I thought it derogatory to my dignity as a manufacturer to make dolls’ eyes. He took me into a room quite as wide, and perhaps twice the length of this, and we had just room to walk between the stacks, from the floor to the ceiling, of parts of dolls. He said, ‘These are only the legs and the arms; the trunks are below.’ But I saw enough to convince me, that he wanted a great many eyes.... He ordered various quantities, and of various sizes and qualities. On returning to the Tavistock Hotel, I found that the order amounted to upwards of 500l.... Calculating on every child in this country not using a doll till two years old, and throwing it aside at seven, and having a new one annually, I satisfied myself that the eyes alone would produce a circulation of a great many thousand pounds. I mention this merely to show the importance of trifles.”—Babbage, ‘Economy of Machinery and Manufactures,’ 243–5.
98 Mr. Boulton afterwards purchased the fee simple of the property, together with much of the adjoining land. The nature of his tenure caused him to take a lively interest in the question of common lands enclosure, and at a much later period (17th April, 1790) we find him writing to the Right Hon. Lord Hawkesbury as follows:—“The argument of robbing the poor [by enclosures of wastes] is fallacious. They have no legal title to the common land; and the more of it that is cultivated, the more work and the more bread there will be for them. I speak from experience; for I founded my manufactory upon one of the most barren commons in England, where there existed but a few miserable huts filled with idle beggarly people, who by the help of the common land and a little thieving made shift to live without working. The scene is now entirely changed. I have employed a thousand men, women, and children, in my aforesaid manufactory for nearly thirty years past. The Lord of the Manor hath exterminated these very poor cottages, and hundreds of clean comfortable cheerful houses are found erected in their place. Thus the inhabitants of the parish have been trebled without at all increasing the poor levies. I am more confirmed in this view when I turn my eyes to a neighbouring parish (Sutton Colefield), where there are 10,000 acres of common land uncultivated, and yet the poor rates are very high. Let this land be divided, enclosed, cultivated, and rendered saleable to active, industrious, and spirited men; and the poor will then have plenty of work, and the next generation of them will be fully reconciled to earning their bread instead of begging for it.”—Boulton MSS.
99 Mr. Keir, in a MS. memoir of Mr. Boulton now before us, says he was the first to introduce the silver plate business at Birmingham, and to make complete services in solid silver. But the business was not profitable, in consequence of the great value of the material, the loss of interest upon which was not compensated by the additional price put upon it for workmanship. One good consequence of the silver plate business, however, was the establishment of an assay office in Birmingham, the necessary Act for which was obtained at Mr. Boulton’s expense, and proved of much advantage to the town.
100 “If, in the course of your future travelling,” he wrote Mr. Wendler (July, 1767), “you can pick up for me any metallic ores or fossil substances, or any other curious natural productions, I should be much obliged to you, as I am fond of all those things that have a tendency to improve my knowledge in mechanical arts, in which my manufactory will every year become more and more general, and therefore wish to know the taste, the fashions, the toys, both useful and ornamental, the implements, vessels, &c., that prevail in all the different parts of Europe, as I should be glad to work for all Europe in all things that they may have occasion for—gold, silver, copper, plated, gilt, pinchbeck, steel, platina, tortoiseshell, or anything else that may become an article of general demand. I have lately begun to make snuff-boxes, instrument-cases, tooth-picks, &c., in metal, gilt, and in tortoiseshell inlaid, likewise gilt and pinchbeck watch-chains. We are now being completely fixed at Soho, and when Mr. Fothergill returns (which will not be for six months), I shall then have more time to attend to improvements than I have at present.”—Boulton MSS.
101 Boulton to Wedgwood, January, 1769.—Wedgwood was one of his most intimate friends; the two alike aiming at excellence in their respective branches of production. Their kindred efforts seem to have excited the ire of some satirist, whose effusion against them in the ‘Public Ledger’ is thus referred to in the postscript of a letter from Wedgwood to Boulton, dated 19th February, 1771:—“If you take in the ‘Public Ledger’ you’ll see that Mr. Antipuffado has done me the honour to rank me with the most stupendous geniuses of the age, and has really cut me up very cleanly. He talks, too, that he should not wonder if some surprising genius at Birmingham should be tempted to make Roman medals and tenpenny nails, or Corinthian knives and daggers, and style himself Roman medal and Etruscan tenpenny nail-maker to the Empress of Abyssinia. But see the paper: I believe it is the first week in February, and is one of the better sort of this class.”—Boulton MSS.
102 The clocks, with several other articles, were sent out to Russia, and submitted to the Empress through the kindness of Earl Cathcart. His lordship, in communicating the result to Mr. Boulton, said—“I have the pleasure to inform you that her Imperial Majesty not only bought them all, last week, but did me the honour to tell me that she was extremely pleased with them, and thought them superior in every respect to the French, as well as cheaper, which entitled them in all lights to a preference.”
103 Pet names of his two children, Matthew Robinson and Anne Boulton.
104 These letters are without date, but we infer that they were written in the summer of 1767.
105 Boulton to the Duke of Richmond, April 8, 1770. The Duke was engaged at the time in preparing a set of machines for making the various experiments in Natural Philosophy described in S’Gravande’s book. The Duke was himself a good turner and worker in metal.
106 The manufactory was complete so far as regarded the hardware manufacture. But additions were constantly being made to it; and, as other branches of industry were added, it became more than doubled in extent and accommodation.
107 Boulton to John Taylor, 23rd January, 1769. Boulton MSS.
108 When the canal came to be constructed at the point at which it passed Soho, it occasioned him great anxiety through the leakage of the canal banks and loss of water for the purposes of his manufactory. The supply, especially in dry summers, was already too limited; but the canal threatened to destroy it altogether. Writing to Mr. Thomas Gilbert, M.P., on the subject in February, 1769, he said, “The very holes which Mr. Smeaton hath dug to try the ground, drink up the water nearly as fast as you can pour it in.... Let Smeaton or Brindley, or all the engineers upon earth give what evidence they will before Parliament, I am convinced by last summer’s experience that if the proprietors of the canal continue to take the two streams on which my mill depends, it is ruined. I might as well have built it upon the summit of the hill.” After the act had passed he wrote his friend Garbett, “I have seen the testimony of the two engineers, Smeaton and Yeoman, but I value the opinions of neither of them, nor of Brindley nor Simcox (in this case), nor of the whole tribe of jobbing ditchers, who are retained as evidence on any side which first applies for them.” His alarms, however, proved unfounded, as the leakage of the canal was eventually remedied; and in November, 1772, we find him writing to the Earl of Warwick, “Our navigation goes on prosperously; the junction with the Wolverhampton Canal is complete; and we already sail from Birmingham to Bristol and to Hull.”—Boulton MSS.
109 Among Boulton’s scientific memoranda, we find some curious speculations, bearing the date of 1765, relative to improvements which he was trying to work out in gunnery. He proposed the truer boring of the guns, the use of a telescopic sight, and a cylindrical shot with its end of a parabolic form as presenting in his opinion the least resistance to the air.
110 On the 22nd May, 1765, Franklin writes Boulton,—“Mr. Baskerville informs me that you have lately had a considerable addition to your fortune, on which I sincerely congratulate you. I beg leave to introduce my friend Doctor Small to your acquaintance, and to recommend him to your civilities. I would not take this freedom, if I were not sure it would be agreeable to you; and that you will thank me for adding to the number of those who from their knowledge of you must respect you, one who is both an ingenious philosopher and a most worthy honest man. If anything new in magnetism or electricity, or any other branch of natural knowledge, has occurred to your fruitful genius since I last had the pleasure of seeing you, you will by communicating it greatly oblige me.”
111 Franklin to Boulton, March 19, 1766. Boulton MSS.
112 Darwin to Boulton, March 11, 1766. Boulton MSS.
113 The following passage occurs in his letter:—“Suppose one piston up, and the vacuum made under it by the jet d’eau froid. That piston cannot yet descend, because the cock is not yet opened which admits the steam into its antagonist cylinder. Hence the two pistons are in equilibrio, being either of them pressed by the atmosphere. Then, I say, if the cock which admits the steam into the antagonist cylinder be opened gradually and not with a jerk, that the first mentioned [piston in the] cylinder will descend gradually and yet not less forcibly. Hence by the management of the steam cocks the motion may be accelerated, retarded, destroyed, revived, instantly and easily. And if this answers in practice as it does in theory, the machine cannot fail of success! Eureka!”
114 Small wrote Watt from Birmingham, on the 7th January, 1768:—“Our friend Boulton will by this post send letters both to you and Dr. Roebuck. I know not well how to resolve without seeing you. I have not the pleasure of being enough acquainted with Dr. R. to judge whether we should all suit one another. His integrity and generosity everybody agrees are great. You certainly know the proposal he has made to Boulton, who will tell you his determination about it. Before I knew of your connexion with Dr. R. my idea was that you should settle here, and that Boulton and I should assist you as much as we could, which in any case we will most certainly do. I have no kind of doubt of your success, nor of your acquiring fortune, if you proceed upon a proper plan as to the manner of doing business; which, if you do, you will be sole possessor of the affair even after your patent has expired. I had not thoroughly considered this part of the matter when you left me. In a partnership that I liked, I should not hesitate to employ any sum of money I can command on your scheme, and I am certain it may be managed with only a moderate capital. Whether it would be possible to manage the wheel and reciprocating engines by separate partnerships without their interfering I am not certain. If it is, Boulton and I would engage with you in either, provided you will live here.”—Boulton MSS.
115 Watt to Small, January 28, 1769. Boulton MSS.
116 Small to Watt, 18th April, 1769. Boulton MSS.
117 Roebuck was at this time willing to admit Boulton as a partner in the patent, but only as respected the profits of engines sold in the counties of Warwick, Stafford, and Derby. This Boulton declined, saying, “It would not be worth my while to make engines for three counties only; but it might be worth my while to make for all the world.”
118 Watt to Small, 28th April, 1769. Boulton MSS.
119 Watt to Small, 20th September, 1769. Boulton MSS.
120 “I am really very sorry on my own account,” he wrote, “that your engagements hinder you from entering into our scheme, for that ought to be the result of your deliberation. Though there are few things I have wished more for than being connected with you on many accounts, yet I should be very loath to purchase that pleasure at the expense of your quiet, which might be the case if you involved yourself in more business than you could easily manage, or, what is worse, find money for. Besides, this is not a trade, but a project; and no man should risk more money on a project than he can afford to lose.”—Watt to Small, 21st October, 1769. Boulton MSS.
121 Watt to Small, 20th September, 1769.
122 Small informed Watt that it was intended to make an engine for the purpose of drawing canal boats. “What Mr. Boulton and I,” he wrote, “are very desirous of is, to move canal boats by this engine; so we have made this model of a size sufficient for that purpose. We propose first to operate without any condenser, because coals are here exceedingly cheap, and because you can, more commodiously than we, make experiments on condensers, having several already by you. Above 150 boats are now employed on these new waveless canals, so if we can succeed, the field is not narrow.” This suggestion of working canal boats by steam immediately elicited a reply from Watt on the subject. Invention was so habitual to him that a new method of employing power was no sooner hinted than his active mind at once set to work to solve the problem. “Have you ever,” he wrote Small, “considered a spiral oar for that purpose, or are you for two wheels?” And to make his meaning clear, he sketched out a rough but graphic outline of a screw propeller. Small’s reply was unfavourable: he replied, “I have tried models of spiral oars, and have found them all inferior to oars of either of the other forms; I believe because a cylinder of water immersed in water can be easily turned round its own axis. We propose to try gun-lock springs with the fixed part longer than the moving. If we cannot succeed, we will have recourse to what you have so obligingly and clearly described.” Finally Watt writes a fortnight later, “concerning spirals, I do not continue fond of them.”
123 Roebuck to Boulton, February 12, 1770.
124 Small to Watt, 17th September, 1770. Boulton MSS.
125 Watt to Small, 20th October, 1770. Boulton MSS.
126 He then held an eighth share in the pottery, which brought him in about 70l. a year clear.
127 Watt to Small, 30th August, 1772. Boulton MSS.
128 Small to Watt, 16th November, 1772. Boulton MSS.
129 About this time, in order to bring himself and his engine into notice, Watt contemplated writing a treatise on steam and its applications. “I have some thoughts,” he wrote to Small, “of writing a book on the elements of the theory of steam-engines, in which, however, I shall only give the enunciation of the perfect engine. This book might do me and the scheme good. It would still leave the world in the dark as to the true construction of the engine. Something of this kind is necessary, as Smeaton is labouring hard at the subject, and if I can make no profit, at least I ought not to lose the honour of my experiments.”—Watt to Small, 17th August, 1773. Boulton MSS. To this letter Small replied, “The more I consider the propriety of your publishing about steam, the more I wish you to publish. Smeaton has only trifled hitherto, though he may perhaps discover something. He told Boulton some time ago that the circular engine would not do. He said he had considered it, and was sure of this. As B. does not much respect his genius, this had no effect.” Watt’s treatise was, however, never written; his attention being shortly after fully occupied by other and more engrossing subjects.
130 Boulton to Watt, 29th March, 1773. Boulton MSS.
131 “As I found the engine at Kinneil perishing, and as it is from circumstances highly improper that it should continue there longer, and as I have nowhere else to put it, I have this week taken it to pieces and packed up the ironwork, cylinder, and pump, ready to be shipped for London on its way to Birmingham, as the only place where the experiments can be completed with propriety. I suppose the whole will not weigh above four tons. I have left the whole of the woodwork until we see what we are to do.”—Watt to Small, 20th May, 1773. Boulton MSS.
132 In a letter to Small, Watt wrote, “I begin now to see daylight through the affairs that have detained me so long, and think of setting out for you in a fortnight at furthest. I am monstrously plagued with my headaches, and not a little with unprofitable business. I don’t mean my own whims: these I never work at when I can do any other thing; but I have got too many acquaintances; and there are too many beggars in this country, which I am afraid is going to the devil altogether. Provisions continue excessively dear, and laws are made to keep them so. But luckily the spirit of emigrating rises high, and the people seem disposed to show their oppressive masters that they can live without them. By the time some twenty or thirty thousand more leave the country, matters will take a turn not much to the profit of the landholders.”—Watt to Small, 29th April, 1774. Boulton MSS.
133 Watt to Small, 25th July, 1773. Boulton MSS.
134 Mr. Edgeworth was first introduced to the notice of Mr. Boulton in the following letter from Dr. Darwin (1767):—“Dear Boulton, I have got with me a mechanical friend, Mr. Edgeworth, from Oxfordshire,—the greatest conjurer I ever saw. God send fine weather, and pray come to my assistance, and prevail on Dr. Small and Mrs. Boulton to attend you to-morrow morning, and we will reconvey you to Birmingham if the devil permit. E. has the principles of nature in his palm, and moulds them as he pleases,—can take away polarity, or give it to the needle by rubbing it thrice on the palm of his hand! And can see through two solid oak boards without glasses! Wonderful! astonishing!! diabolical!!! Pray tell Dr. Small he must come to see these miracles. Adieu, E. Darwin.”
135 Richard Lovell Edgeworth says of this distinguished coterie,—“By means of Mr. Keir I became acquainted with Dr. Small of Birmingham, a man esteemed by all who knew him, and by all who were admitted to his friendship beloved with no common enthusiasm. Dr. Small formed a link which combined Mr. Boulton, Mr. Watt, Dr. Darwin, Mr. Wedgwood, Mr. Day, and myself together—men of very different characters, but all devoted to literature and science. This mutual intimacy has never been broken but by death, nor have any of the number failed to distinguish themselves in science or literature. Some may think that I ought with due modesty to except myself. Mr. Keir with his knowledge of the world and good sense; Dr. Small, with his benevolence and profound sagacity; Wedgwood, with his increasing industry, experimental variety, and calm investigation; Boulton, with his mobility, quick perception, and bold adventure; Watt, with his strong inventive faculty, undeviating steadiness, and bold resources; Darwin, with his imagination, science, and poetical excellence; and Day, with his unwearied research after truth, his integrity and eloquence;—proved altogether such a society as few men have had the good fortune to live with; such an assemblage of friends, as fewer still have had the happiness to possess, and keep through life.”—Memoirs, i. 186.
136 Dr. Roebuck proposed to confine Boulton’s profits to the engine business done only in three counties. It will be observed that Boulton declined to negotiate on such a basis.
137 Boulton to Watt, 7th February, 1769. Boulton MSS.
138 In a statement prepared by Mr. Boulton for the consideration of the arbitrators between himself and Fothergill as to the affairs of that firm, the following passage occurs:—“The first engine that was erected at Soho I purchased of Mr. Watt and Dr. Roebuck. The cylinder was cast of solid grain tin, which engine, with the boiler, the valves, the condenser, and the pumps, were all sent from Scotland to Soho. This engine was erected for the use of the Soho manufactory, and for the purpose of making experiments upon by Mr. Watt, who occupied two years of his time at Soho with that object: and lived there at Mr. Boulton’s expense. Nevertheless Mr. Watt often assisted Boulton and Fothergill in anything in his power, and made one journey to London upon their business, when he worked at adjusting and marking weights manufactured by Boulton and Fothergill.” In another statement of a similar kind, Mr. Boulton says,—“The only fire-engine that was erected at Soho prior to Boulton and Watt obtaining the Act of Parliament, was entirely made and erected in Scotland, and was removed here by sea, being a part of my bargain with Roebuck. All that were afterwards erected were for persons that ordered them, and were at the expense of erecting them.”—Boulton MSS.
139 Quoted in Muirhead’s ‘Mechanical Inventions of James Watt,’ ii. 79.
140 Watt to Boulton, 31st January, 1775. Boulton MSS.
141 Bonds were given for the 1000l., but the assignees of Roebuck becoming impatient for the money, Boulton discharged them to get rid of their importunity, long before any profits had been derived from the manufacture of the engines.
142 John Wilkinson, the “father of the iron-trade” as he styled himself, was a man of extraordinary energy of character. He was strong-headed and strong-tempered and of inflexible determination. His father, Isaac Wilkinson, who originally started the iron trade at Wrexham, was a man possessed of quick discernment and versatile talents, though he wanted that firmness and constancy of purpose which so eminently distinguished his son. Isaac Wilkinson used thus to tell his own history:—“I worked,” said he, “at a forge in the north. My masters gave me 12s. a week: I was content. They raised me to 14s.: I did not ask them for it. They went on to 16s., 18s.: I never asked them for the advances. They gave me a guinea a week! Said I to myself, if I am worth a guinea a week to you, I am worth more to myself! I left them, and began business on my own account—at first in a small way. I prospered. I grew tired of my leathern bellows, and determined to make iron ones. Everybody laughed at me. I did it, and applied the steam-engine to blow them; and they all cried, ‘Who could have thought it!’” His son John carried on the operations connected with the iron manufacture on a far more extensive scale than his father at Bradley, Willey, Snedshill, and Bersham. His castings were the largest until then attempted, and the boring machinery which he invented was the best of its kind. All the castings for Boulton and Watt’s large Cornish engines were manufactured by him, previous to the erection of the Soho foundry. He also bored cannon for the government on a large scale. Amongst his other merits, John Wilkinson is clearly entitled to that of having built the first iron vessel. It was made to bring peat-moss to his iron furnace at Wilson House, near Castle Head, in Cartmel, in order to smelt the hematite iron-ore of Furness. This was followed by other larger iron vessels, one of which was of 40 tons burden, and used to carry iron down the Severn. Before Wilkinson’s first iron boat was launched, people laughed at the idea of its floating,—as it was so well known that iron immediately sank in water! In a letter to Mr. Stockdale, of Carke, Cartmel, the original of which is before us, dated Broseley, 14th July, 1787, Mr. Wilkinson says, “Yesterday week my iron boat was launched,—answers all my expectations, and has convinced the unbelievers, who were 999 in 1000. It will be only a nine days’ wonder, and afterwards a Columbus’s egg.” In another letter, dated Bradley Iron Works, 24th Oct., 1788, he writes to the same,—“There have been two iron vessels launched in my service since 1st September. One is a canal-boat for this navigation, the other a barge of 40 tons, for the river Severn. The last was floated on Monday, and is, I expect, now at Stourport, a-lading with bar-iron. My clerk at Broseley advises me that she swims remarkably light, and exceeds even my own expectations.” For further notice of John Wilkinson, see ‘Lives of the Engineers,’ ii. 337, 356.
143 Boulton to Watt, 24th February, 1776. Boulton MSS.
144 Watt was himself occupied, during his temporary residence at Broseley, in devising improvements in the details of his engine. Boulton says—“I observe you are thinking of making an inverted cylinder. Pray how are you to counterbalance the descent of the piston and pump rods, which will be a vast weight? If by a counterweight you gain nothing. But if you can employ the power that arises from the descent of that vast weight to strain a spring that will repay its debts—if by it you can compress air in an iron cylinder which in its return will contribute to overcome the vis inertiæ of the column of water to be raised, you will thereby get rid of that unmechanical tax, and very much improve the reciprocating engine.”—Boulton to Watt, 24th February, 1776. Boulton MSS.
145 Boulton to Watt, 23rd April, 1776. Boulton MSS.
146 The arrangement between the partners is indicated by the following passage of Watt’s letter to Boulton:—“As you may have possibly mislaid my missive to you concerning the contract, I beg just to mention what I remember of the terms.
“1. I to assign to you two-thirds of the property of the invention.
“2. You to pay all expenses of the Act or others incurred before June, 1775 (the date of the Act), and also the expense of future experiments, which money is to be sunk without interest by you, being the consideration you pay for your share.
“3. You to advance stock in trade bearing interest, but having no claim on me for any part of that, further than my intromissions; the stock itself to be your security and property.
“4. I to draw one-third of the profits so soon as any arise from the business, after paying the workmen’s wages and goods furnished, but abstract from the stock in trade, excepting the interest thereof, which is to be deducted before a balance is struck.
“5. I to make drawings, give directions, and make surveys, the company paying the travelling expenses to either of us when upon engine business.
“6. You to keep the books and balance them once a year.
“7. A book to be kept wherein to be marked such transactions as are worthy of record, which, when signed by both, to have the force of the contract.
“8. Neither of us to alienate our share without consent of the other, and if either of us by death or otherwise shall be incapacitated from acting for ourselves, the other of us to be the sole manager without contradiction or interference of heirs, executors, assignees, or others; but the books to be subject to their inspection, and the acting partner of us to be allowed a reasonable commission for extra trouble.
“9. The contract to continue in force for twenty-five years, from the 1st of June, 1775, when the partnership commenced, notwithstanding the contract being of later date.
“10. Our heirs, executors, and assignees, bound to observance.
“11. In case of demise of both parties, our heirs, &c., to succeed in same manner, and if they all please, they may burn the contract.
“If anything be very disagreeable in these terms, you will find me disposed to do everything reasonable for your satisfaction.”—Boulton MSS.
147 Watt to Boulton, 3rd July, 1776. Boulton MSS.
148 Watt to Boulton, 8th July, 1776. Boulton MSS.
149 Boulton to Watt, 15th July, 1776. Boulton MSS.
150 During his Scotch visit, Watt spent much of his time in arranging his father’s affairs, which had got into confusion. He was now seventy-five years old, and grown very infirm. “He is perfectly incapable,” wrote his son, “of giving himself the least help, and the seeing him in such a situation has much hurt my spirits.”—Watt to Boulton, 28th July, 1766. Boulton MSS.
151 Boulton to Watt (without date), 1776. Boulton MSS. In this letter, Boulton throws out a suggestion for Watt’s consideration—“When,” he says, “we have got our two-foot pumps up, I think it would be right to try our Soho engine with a steam strong enough to work the pumps with the axis in the centre of the beam, which will be almost 19 lb. upon the inch.”
152 Boulton to Watt, 3rd November, 1776. In the same letter Boulton informs Watt that Perrins, another fireman, had returned from Bedworth, and had not a stroke to do, the fittings for the second engine not having arrived. The first engine was working twenty-four hours a day, but the pit was so full of water that the owners feared they would before long be drowned out; and if the work was stopped, the loss would be far greater than the whole value of the engine. But the sales of coal, though large, were but “a small consideration in comparison with the starving to death of the poor ribbon-weavers of Coventry and a great part of Oxfordshire.... Coals are 9d. and 10d. per cwt., and ’tis said they will be a shilling at Birmingham on Monday.”
153 Watt to Boulton, 3rd December, 1776. Boulton MSS.
154 Fire-engines at work were objects of curiosity in those days, and had many visitors. The engineman at the York Buildings reminded those who went to see his engine that something was expected, placing over the entrance to the engine room the following distich:—
“Whoever wants to see the engine here,
Must give the engine-man a drop of beer.”
155 “Mr. White told me this morning as a great secret,” wrote Boulton’s London agent, “that he has reason to believe that Carless and Webb were going beyond sea, for Carless had told him he had 1000l. offered for six years, and he overheard Webb say that he was ready at an hour’s warning.” Carless and Webb were immediately ordered back to Soho, and the firm obtained warrants for the apprehension of the men as well as of the person who had bribed them, if they attempted to abscond “even though,” said Watt to Boulton, “Carless be a drunken and comparatively useless fellow.” Later he wrote, “I think there is no risk of Webb’s leaving us soon, and he offers to re-engage. Carless has been working very diligently this week, and is well on with his nozzle patterns. I mentioned to William the story of Sir John Fielding’s warrant, to show him that we are determined to act with spirit in case of interlopers.”—Watt to Boulton, May 3, 1777.
156 Robert Hart’s ‘Reminiscences of James Watt,’ cited above.
157 Watt to Boulton, 4th August, 1777.
158 A mine so-called. Many of the Cornish mines have very odd names. “Cook’s Kitchen,” near Camborne, is one of the oldest and richest. Another is called “Cupboard.” There are also Wheal Fannys and Wheal Abrahams; and Wheal Fortunes and Wheal Virgins in great numbers.
159 Watt to Boulton, 14th August, 1777.
160 Watt to Boulton, 25th August, 1777. Boulton MSS.
161 “I have seen five of Bonze’s engines,” wrote Watt, “but was far from seeing the wonders promised. They were 60, 63, and 70 inch cylinders. At Dalcoath and Wheal Chance they are said to use each about 130 bushels of coals in the 24 hours, and to make about 6 or 7 strokes per minute, the strokes being under 6 feet each. They are burdened to 6, 6½, and 7 lbs. per inch. One of the 60 inches threw out about two cubic feet of hot water per stroke, heated from 60° to 165°. The 63 inches, with a 5 feet stroke, threw out 1½ cubic foot, heated from 60° to 159°,” and so on with the others.—Watt to Boulton, 25th August, 1777. Boulton MSS.
162 Watt to Boulton, 13th September, 1777.
163 Watt to Boulton, 2nd July, 1778. Boulton MSS.
164 Watt to Boulton, 8th July, 1778, Boulton MSS.
165 Watt to Boulton, 8th July, 1778. Boulton MSS.
166 While in Cornwall in the previous year, Watt wrote long letters to his partner as to certain experimental alterations of “Beelzebub.” This was the original engine brought from Kinneil, which continued to be the subject of constant changes. “I send a drawing,” he wrote on the 4th August, 1777, “of the best scheme I can at present devise for equalising the power of Beelzebub, and obliging him to save part of his youthful strength to help him forward in his old age.... As the head of one of the levers will rise higher than the roof, a hole must be cut for it, which may after trial be covered over. If the new beam answer to be centred upon the end wall and to go out at a window, it will make the execution easy.... I long (he concluded) to have some particulars of Beelzebub’s doings, and to learn whether he has got on his jockey coat yet [i. e. an outer cylinder], for till that be done, you can form no idea of his perfection.” The engine continued to be the subject of repeated alterations, and was renewed, as Watt observed, like the Highlandman’s gun, in stock, lock, and barrel. After the occurrence of the above fire, we learn from Watt’s MS. Memoir of Boulton, that “Beelzebub” was replaced by a larger engine, the first on the expansive principle, afterwards known by the name of “Old Bess.” This engine continued in its place long after the career of Boulton and Watt had come to an end; and in the year 1857, the present writer saw “Old Bess” working as steadily as ever, though eighty years had passed over her head. The old engine has since found an honourable asylum in the Museum of Patents at South Kensington.
167 Watt to Boulton, 8th August, 1778. Boulton MSS.
168 Watt to Boulton, 29th August, 1778. Later, Watt wrote from Redruth, “Captain Paul desires me to attend at Wheal Virgin meeting on Thursday, where several Tingtang people will be; but I shall only write, as I know they will be just in the worst of humours about Wheal Virgin affairs, and they are very disagreeable at the best. Every article must be settled and sealed with Cornish adventures before we begin, otherwise never.... Do not let Chelsea begin until signed and sealed. I hope you will not take amiss my writing so positively on this subject of agreements; but really my faith in mankind will carry me no further, and if I can’t get money, I’m resolved to save my bacon and to live in hunger and ease. As it is, we don’t get such a share of reputation as our works deserve, for every man who cheats us defames us in order to justify himself.”—Watt to Boulton, 6th September, 1778. Boulton MSS.
169 “With all the faults of the Cornish people, I think we have a better chance for tolerable honesty here than elsewhere, as, their meetings being public, they will not choose to expose themselves any further than strict dealing may justify; and besides, there are generally too many to cabal.”—Watt to Boulton, 29th August, 1778. Boulton MSS.
170 During his absence Mr. Keir took charge of the works at Soho. It had been intended to introduce him as a partner, and he left the glass-making concern at Stourbridge, into which he had entered, for the purpose; but when he came to look into the books of the Soho firm, he was so appalled by their liabilities that he eventually declined the connexion.
171 Matthews wrote him on the 8th October, 1778, that he had met a Mr. Boldero at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, who had much influence in Cornwall, and that he expressed the opinion that, if the engines could do what Boulton and Watt promised, they might soon get from 40,000l. to 80,000l. for them in Cornwall. Matthews accordingly recommended Boulton to apply to Elliot and Praed, the Cornish bankers, for an advance on security of the engine contracts.—It would appear from a letter written to Boulton a few days later, by Mr. Barton, Matthews’s partner, that Boulton was, amidst his many speculations, engaged in a privateering adventure during the war of the American Revolution:—“It may give you some pleasure,” wrote Barton, “to hear we are likely to receive some produce from our adventure to New York. One of the vessels our little brig took last year was fitted out at New York, and in a cruise of 13 weeks has taken 13 prizes, 12 of which are carried safe in, and we have advice of 200 hogsheads of tobacco being shipped as part of the prizes, which, if now here, would fetch us 10,000l. But while the embargo on shipping at New York continues, they cannot stir out of port. However, I think we shall see them before you raise that sum from your engine concern, and yet I hope that is not very far off.”
172 Watt to Black, 12th December, 1778.
173 Watt to Boulton, 15th Jan., 1779.
174 M. Perrier, of Paris, ordered an engine early in 1779, and the materials were despatched to Nantes by the end of May in the same year. The engine was erected by M. Jary at a colliery near Nantes, but the fitting was so bad—the steam-case having been forgotten—that it went only four strokes per minute. As Boulton and Watt sought a patent for France, it was necessary in the first place that Commissioners should certify that the new engine was superior to the common engine. This they could not do, and the patent was not secured. Watt feared that there was “a plot” against him; as Perrier immediately proceeded with a manufacture of steam-engines after the alleged invention of M. Betancourt, though this “invention” turned out to be a close copy of the engine M. Betancourt himself had imported from Soho.
175 Watt to Boulton, 27th January, 1779. Boulton MSS.
176 The following is Watt’s letter, written in a very unusual style:—
“Birmingham, June 30th, 1779.
“Hallelujah! Hallelujee!
We have concluded with Hawkesbury,
217l. per annum from Lady-day last;
275l. 5s. for time past; 157l. on account.
We make them a present of 100 guineas—
Peace and good-fellowship on earth—
Perrins and Evans to be dismissed—
3 more engines wanted in Cornwall—
Dudley repentant and amendant—
Yours rejoicing,
James Watt.”
177 Watt wrote Boulton, 2nd July, 1778,—“On the subject of Mr. Hall I should not have been so earnest had I not been urged on by the prospect of impending ruin, which may be much accelerated by a wicked or careless servant in his place.” Later, on the 6th August, Watt wrote, “I look upon Hall as a very great blunderer, and very inattentive to everything that has hitherto been committed to his care; but I think that our present necessities will oblige us to employ him.”—Boulton MSS.
178 Watt to Boulton, 11th August, 1779.
179 Watt to Boulton, 4th October, 1779.
180 Watt to Boulton, 28th October, 1779.
181 Watt told Sir Walter Scott that though hundreds probably of his northern countrymen had sought employment at his establishment, he never could get one of them to become a first-rate mechanic. “Many of them,” said he, “were too good for that, and rose to be valuable clerks and bookkeepers; but those incapable of this sort of advancement had always the same insuperable aversion to toiling so long at any one point of mechanism as to gain the highest wages among the workmen.”—Note to Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott.’ The fact, we suppose was, that the Scotch mechanics were only as yet in course of training,—the English having had a long start of them. Though Watt’s statement that Scotchmen were incapable of being first-class mechanics may have been true in his day, it is so no longer, as the workshops of the Clyde can prove; some of the most highly finished steam-engines of modern times having been turned out of Glasgow workshops.
182 The above anecdotes, of Murdock’s introduction to Soho, and the fight with the captains, were communicated by his son, the late Mr. Murdock of Sycamore Hill near Birmingham. He also informed us that Murdock fought a duel with Captain Trevithick (father of the Trevithick of Locomotive celebrity), in consequence of a quarrel between him and Watt, in which Murdock conceived his master to have been unfairly and harshly treated.
183 Watt to Boulton, from Chacewater, 16th October, 1779. Boulton MSS.
184 It appears from a statement prepared by Zaccheus Walker, the accountant of Boulton and Fothergill, that on an invested capital of about 20,000l., the excess of losses over profits during the eighteen years ending 1780, had been upwards of 11,000l.; and that but for the capital and credit of Matthew Boulton, that concern must have broken down.
185 Thomas Day, the eccentric but kindly author of ‘Sandford and Merton,’ lent Boulton 3000l. at 4 per cent. When Boulton came to pay a higher rate of interest on other loans, he wrote Day proposing to pay him the same rate; but Day refused to accept the advance, as he could not make more of his money elsewhere. Day, however, offered him some good advice. “Give me leave,” said he, “with the real interest of a sincere friend, to express my wishes that now at last when a fortune is within your power, you will contract that wide sphere of business in which your ingenuity has so long kept you engaged, and which has prevented you hitherto, if I may believe the words of one of your sincerest friends, the late Dr. Small, from acquiring that independence which you ought to have had long ago. I should think that now, like a good Christian, thoroughly convinced of the inutility of other works, you ought to attach yourself to the one thing needful, and determine to be saved ‘even as by fire.’ You are now, dear Sir, not of an age to sport any longer with fortune. Forgive the freedom of these sentiments, and believe me, with the greatest sincerity and regard, Yours, &c., “Thomas Day.”
186 Watt to Boulton, 20th January, 1779.
187 Some of the specimens in water colour are to be seen at the Museum of Patents, South Kensington. When the paper is moistened with the finger, the colour easily rubs off. The whole subject of these pictures has recently been thoroughly sifted by M. P. W. Boulton, Esq., in his ‘Remarks on some Evidence recently communicated to the Photographic Society’ (Bradbury and Evans, 1864), apropos of the Papers of Mr. W. P. Smith on the same subject, in which it was surmised that they were the result of some photographic process. Mr. Boulton clearly shows, from the original correspondence, that the process was mechanical colour-printing. He also adds,—“From the brief statements which I remember to have heard from my father concerning the polygraphic process, my impression of it was that it copied colour mechanically, not merely chiaro-scuro. And I agree with the opinion which has been expressed to other persons, that in the coloured specimens in the Museum, there are indications that the colour was laid on mechanically,—not by hand or brush.” As the process of “dead-colouring” the pictures is occasionally referred to, it is probable that the pictures passed through more stages than one, as in the case of modern colour-printing. In one of Eginton’s letters, three plates were spoken of as necessary for taking impressions of one of the pictures.
188 Watt to Dr. Black, 24th July, 1778.
189 Boulton to Watt, 14th May, 1780. Boulton MSS.
190 On the 18th May, 1780, Watt wrote Boulton, then in London, as follows:—“I am sorry, my dear Sir, to prove in any shape refractory to what you desire, but my quiet, my peace of mind, perhaps my very existence, depend on what I have told you. I am unhappy in not having any person I can advise with on this subject; and my own knowledge of it is insufficient. Therefore, if I appear too rigid, do not blame me, but my ignorance and timidity.” And again, on the 19th, on returning the draft mortgage, he wrote:—“If my executing this deed cannot be dispensed with, I will do it, but will not execute any personal bond for the money. I would rather assign you all Cornwall on proper conditions than execute this.”
191 Watt to Boulton, 11th April, 1780.
192 Boulton, at Plengwarry, to Watt, at Birmingham, 14th September, 1780. This day was Boulton’s birthday, and alluding to the circumstance he wrote,—“As sure as there are 1728 inches in a cubic foot, so sure was I born in that year; and as sure as there are 52 weeks in the year and 52 cards in the pack, so surely am I 52 years old this very day. May you and Mrs. Watt live very long and be very happy.”
193 Watt to Boulton, 10th October, 1780. Boulton MSS.
194 Watt to Boulton, 20th April, 1780.
195 Boulton to Watt, 25th and 30th September, 1780. Boulton MSS.
196 His partner Fothergill would not, however, consent to let Boulton go, and the Soho business was continued until the death of Fothergill (bankrupt) in 1782, after which it was continued for some time longer under the firm of Boulton and Scale.
197 Mrs. Watt to Mr. Boulton, then in London, 15th April, 1781. Boulton MSS.
198 In another letter Watt described himself as “worried by the Wheal Chanceians.... In short,” says he, “I am at this moment so provoked at the undeserved rancour with which we are persecuted in Cornwall, that, were it not on account of the deplorable state of debt I find myself in, I would live on bread and cheese, and suffer the water to run out at their adits, before I would relax the slightest iota of what I thought my right in their favour.”—Watt to Boulton, 17th October, 1780. Boulton MSS.
199 Watt to Boulton, 31st October, 1780. Boulton MSS.
200 “Though your long stay, when you were last here,” wrote Henderson, the resident agent, “must have been attended with great inconveniences, yet you are now very much wanted in Wheal Virgin affairs. Different interests have produced a sort of anarchy.... Were Mr. Watt here now, I don’t think his health would allow him to stand the battles with the different people. I have not written to him freely on this subject, as I am afraid it would hurt him.... Your authority here as an adventurer has much greater weight than anything I can propose.”—Henderson to Boulton, 4th February, 1781. Boulton MSS.
201 Watt to Boulton, 17th October, 1780.
202 In June, 1780, we find Boulton describing to Colonel Watson the progress of the Soho business, as follows:—“Since I had the honour of seeing you in England we have erected upwards of 40 of our new steam-engines, and have (from so much experience) obviated every difficulty, and made it a most practicable and perfect machine. The steam wheel we have not meddled with since you were at Soho, as we have been fully employed upon large beam-engines; besides, we have applied the beam engine to rotative motions so successfully that the wheel engine seems almost unnecessary.”
203 Watt had made use of the crank at a very early period. Thus we find him writing to Dr. Small on the 20th September, 1769,—“As to the condenser, I laid aside the spiral wheels because of the noise and thumping, and substituted a crank: in other respects it performed well enough.”
204 The invention was patented by James Pickard, a Birmingham button-maker, on the 23rd August, 1780 (No. 1263). Matthew Washborough of Bristol arranged with Pickard for employing it in the engine invented by him for securing circular motion. Washborough’s own patent has no reference to the crank, though he is usually named as the inventor of it.
205 At a later date we find him writing to his partner thus:—“I cannot agree with Mr. Palmer’s notion about the crank engine, as, though a crank is not new, yet that application of it is new and never was practised except by us. It is by no means our interest to demolish the crank patent, because then all our own machines of that kind will be of no use, and I am convinced that the crank can be made their superior.”—Watt to Boulton, 15th October, 1781.
206 Watt to Boulton, 19th November, 1780.
207 Boulton and Watt were by this time employing their engine for a like purpose, as appears from a letter of Boulton to S. Wyatt, dated 28th February, 1781, in which he says,—“We are now applying our engines to all kinds of mills, such as corn mills, rolling iron and copper, winding coals out of the pit, and every other purpose to which the wind or water mill is applicable. In such applications, one hundred weight of coals will produce as much mechanical power as is equal to the work of ten men for ten hours, and these mills may be made very much more powerful than any water-mills in England.” To Mr. Henderson he wrote at the same date:—“I make no scruple to say but that I could readily build a more powerful and in every respect better copper-rolling mill by steam than any water-mill now in England. As soon as the Cornish engines are at work, I intend to turn millwright and make our steam-mills universally known.”
208 Watt to Boulton, 21st April, 1781. On the following day (the 22nd April) Watt wrote another long letter to Boulton on the same subject. His mind could not be at rest, and he thus unburdened himself of his indignation:—“If you find yourself so circumstanced, as you say you are, that you dare not refuse [to erect the proposed engine for the Navy Board], then let them pay M. Washborough and have done with him, and let the engine be erected under our direction or Mr. Smeaton’s. With the latter I will go hand in hand; nay I will do more—I will submit to him in all mechanical matters; but I will by no means submit to go on with thieves and puppies, whose knowledge and integrity I contemn. Though I am not so saucy as many of my countrymen, I have enough of innate pride to prevent me from doing a mean action because a servile prudence may dictate it. If a king were to think Matt Washborough a better engineer than me, I should scorn to undeceive him. I should leave that to Matthew. The connexion would be stronger as the evidence would be undeniable. So much for heroics!... I will never meanly sue a thief to give me my own again, unless I have nothing left behind. As it now stands, I have enough left to make their patent tremble, and shall leave no mechanical stone unturned to aggrieve them. I will do more. I will publish my inventions, by which means they will be entirely precluded, because they must be fools indeed that will pay them for what they can have for nothing. I am very ill with a headache, therefore can write no more than passion dictates.”
209 Washborough was much mortified by the decision of the Navy Board, and alleged that he had been badly used by them. The anxieties occasioned by his failure, and the pecuniary losses he had sustained, preyed heavily upon his mind, and he was seized by a fever which carried him off in October, 1781, when only in his 28th year. He was unquestionably a young man of much ingenuity and merit, and had he lived would have achieved high eminence and distinction as an engineer.
210 Boulton to Watt, 21st June, 1781.
211 Watt to Boulton, 21st June, 1781.
212 While Boulton spoke good humouredly to his partner in Cornwall with the object of cheering him up, he privately unbosomed himself to his friend Matthews in London. When requesting him to call at once on the bankers and get the account reduced to an advance of 12,000l., and thus obtain Mr. Watt’s release, he complained of the distress which the communications of the latter had caused him. He thought his conduct ungenerous, taking all the circumstances into account, and considering that the firm were within a year of being tolerably easy in money matters. “When I reflect,” he wrote, “on his situation in 1772 and my own at that time, and compare them with his and mine now, I think I owe him little.... I some time ago gave him a security of all my two-thirds, after paying off L. V. and W. [the bankers], from which you may judge how little reason he has to complain. He talks of his duty to his wife and children; by the same rule I ought not to neglect mine. His wife’s fortune joined to his own did not amount to sixpence: my wife brought me in money and land 28,000l. I advanced him all he wanted without a security, but in return he is not content with an ample security for advancing nothing at all but what he derived from his connexion with me.”—Boulton to Matthews, 28th June, 1781. Boulton MSS.
213 Watt to Boulton, 24th June, 1781.
214 Watt befriended Jabez like the other members of his family, as appears from the following passage in a letter to Boulton (6th September, 1778):—“Capt. Paul has turned Jabez adrift, having for some time taken umbrage at him because he would do his work well and therefore expensively. Jabez has a bad wife, is poor and unhappy. He is very clever, a good engineer, and industrious, though he seems not to have the faculty of conciliating people’s affections. I fear he will go to Holland, and as he can hurt us [there being no patent for the engine secured there] I must try to get him bread here.” Later, Boulton wrote Watt from Redruth (18th November, 1780),—“Old Hornblower has disobliged Mr. Daniel. I have my fears they will not employ him; but when our own business is sealed to-morrow, I will make a push in his favour. That family hath not been successful in conciliating the affections of the people in this neighbourhood.”
215 Watt to Boulton, 16th July, 1781.
216 Watt to Boulton, 19th July, 1781. Boulton MSS.
217 Boulton to Watt, 28th June, 1781. On the 3rd July following he writes,—“The great rotative engine is finished, and I expected the union between it and the little engine would have been performed this evening, but it can’t be till to-morrow. Robert set the elliptic out so true that it had no shake and required no alteration. It goes so much better than the little model made by Joseph that I am now ashamed to send the little one. The great model makes a delightful horizontal foot-lathe. I gave it a few strokes with my foot, and it made 30 revolutions after I withdrew it, and that in a quiet and peaceable manner, which shows how steady and frictionless it is.”
218 Watt to Boulton, 5th July, 1781.
219 “Yesterday I went to Penryn and swore that I had invented ‘certain new methods of applying the vibrating or reciprocating motion of steam or fire engines to produce a continued rotation or circular motion round an axis or centre, and thereby to give motion to the wheels of mills or other machines,’ which affidavit and petition I transmit to Mr. Hadley by this post with directions to get it passed with all due expedition.”—Watt to Boulton, 26th July, 1781.
220 Watt suggested caution as to making use of the cranks. “In relation to Wilkinson’s forges, I wish you would execute them without the double crank. We shall soon have a bad enough lawsuit on our hands without it.”—Watt to Boulton, 19th July, 1781.
221 Watt to Boulton, 28th July, 1781. A few days later Boulton wrote Watt that Dr. Priestley had proceeded with the experiments, and that he had come to the conclusion that “there is nothing to be feared from any of the tribe of gases, which cannot be produced nearly so cheap as steam; and as to steam you know its limits better than any man.”
222 Watt to Boulton, 30th July, 1781. Later he wrote,—“I am tired of making improvements which by some quirk or wresting of the law may be taken from us, as I think has been done in the case of Arkwright, who has been condemned merely because he did not specify quite clearly. This was injustice, because it is plain that he has given this trade a being—has brought his invention into use and made it of great public utility. Wherefore he deserved all the money he has got. In my opinion his patent should not have been invalidated without it had clearly appeared that he did not invent the things in question. I fear we shall be served with the same sauce for the good of the public! and in that case I shall certainly do what he threatens. This you may be assured of, that we are as much envied here as he is at Manchester, and all the bells in Cornwall would be rung at our overthrow.”—Watt to Boulton, 13th August, 1781.
223 Watt to Boulton, 13th November, 1781.
224 Watt to Boulton, 19th November, 1781.
225 Watt to Samuel Ewer, jun., 9th July, 1781. Boulton MSS.
226 Watt to Boulton, 30th August, 1781.
227 Watt to Boulton, 30th August, 1781. In a subsequent letter he explained the invention as follows:—“The method I propose to stop an engine when the pump rods break is by means of an air bellows or forcing pump of a good large diameter fixed in the shaft and having a solid piston in it which is wrought constantly by the engine and quite easily while it goes at its ordinary speed, because there is a large valve open in its bottom or rather top, which suffers the air to pass and repass easily; but whenever the engine attempts to move quick, that valve shuts and all exit from the air is cut off, and it becomes a feather-bed to save the blow of the engine. This is exemplified by turning the valve-hole of a common bellows upwards and stopping the nozzle, then working the bellows first slowly and then quickly. I think this contrivance will be of great use and may prevent damage, especially those bangs which occur in setting on an engine.”—Watt to Boulton, 27th September, 1781.
228 Boulton to Watt, 10th September, 1781. Boulton immediately proceeded with the erection of the new engine as secretly as possible. “The principles of the expansion engine,” said he to Watt, “you had invented before Dr. Small died, as Mr. Keir can testify as well as others. However, it is highly proper to execute every kind of beam that can be devised for the purpose of equalising the power. I have removed the little portions into the wooden house next the smith’s shop, and have blinded the window and barred the door. There is a convenient well that can be filled from the back brook, and the engine may be applied to the raising of water, which is the best sort of load to calculate from.”
229 Watt to Boulton, 20th September, 1781.
230 Watt to Boulton, 18th October, 1781.
231 Watt, in a letter to Boulton, dated the 3rd July, 1782, speaks of it as an old plan of his own “revived and executed by William Murdock;” but we were informed by the late Mr. Josiah Parkes, that at an interview which he had with Mr. Watt at Heathfield, at which Murdock was present, Murdock spoke of the Sun and Planet motion as his invention, which Watt did not contradict. Boulton also attributed the invention to Murdock, as appears from his letter to Henderson, dated 22nd January, 1782; in which he says,—“Mr. Watt’s packet is not ready. I am to wait till his drawings [of the rotatory motion] are completed, which he is executing himself. There was some informality in those sent from Soho. Besides, he has another rotative scheme to add, which I could have told him of long ago, when first invented by William Murdock, but I did not think it a matter of much consequence.”
232 Watt to Boulton, 26th Jan., 1782.
233 “I have some time ago thought,” wrote Watt, “of a new expansive engine—a reciprocating engine with a heavy circular fly moved by a pinion from the end of the beam, so as to make three turns per down-stroke and as many contrariwise per return; so that in the first half of the stroke it may acquire a momentum which will carry it through the last half; and if a weight equal to half the load be put upon the inner end of the beam, and the engine be made to lift it during the return, by making a vacuum above the piston and using a rack instead of a chain, a cylinder of the present size may work to the same depth by half the steam; and I believe the engine will work very sweetly.”—Watt to Boulton, 16th January, 1782.
234 Watt to Boulton, 20th September, 1781.
235 Watt to Boulton, 20th December, 1781.
236 Boulton to Watt, 26th March, 1782. The following was Boulton’s method of dealing with a refractory and drunken workman:—“I told you in my former letters how Jim Taylor had gone on,—that I had talked to him in a friendly way but all to no purpose. He came last Monday evening to the smith’s shop, drank more ale, was sent for, and he became abusive to the men, saying we had nobody could work well but himself, and that we could not do without him. The next morning I went into the shop predetermined to part with him. I stopped the noise of bellows and hammers, and appealed to the jury of the shop for the justice of my determination, and made the best use I could of the example. I sent Taylor off with deserved contempt, and to convince him that we really could do without him. However we are very much behind hand in nozzles.”—Boulton to Watt, 19th April, 1782.
237 “To-day was account day at Wheal Virgin, when there was nothing remarkable, only that Mr. Phillips insisted upon William Murdock being wholly at Wheal Virgin, which I told him could not possibly be complied with, unless I went to Crenver in his place, as I had nobody else to send thither; nevertheless, that William should be here as much as possible. This did not satisfy him, and I know not what to do, as Crenver will be ready to work in three weeks and must not be delayed.... I think my personal attendance should satisfy Wheal Virgin adventurers, but as they seem to have more confidence in William, I will for peace’s sake yield to their will, being satisfied that William will do the business well.”—Watt to Boulton, 15th November, 1781.
238 One of the pleasantest events that occurred to Watt in the course of his stay in Cornwall, was the visit of Wedgwood, who had come to inspect some of the mines in which, on Boulton’s recommendation, he had taken an interest, and at the same time to search for clays for use in his earthenware and porcelain manufacture at Etruria. “Mr. Wedgwood,” he wrote Boulton, “has been in this country some days hunting clays and soap rocks, cobalts, &c. I have had two visits of him at the expense of a day and a half. Nevertheless I don’t grudge that, as I am glad to see a Christian. He has just left me.”—Watt to Boulton, 18th October, 1781.
239 Fothergill died insolvent in 1782. Notwithstanding what he had suffered by the connexion, Boulton acted with great generosity towards Fothergill’s family, providing for his widow and orphan children. “Whatever the conduct of any part of that family towards me may have been,” said he, “their present distresses turn every passion into tender pity. I waited upon Mrs. Fothergill this morning, and administered all the consolation that words could give, but I must do more, or their distresses will be great indeed. I never wished for life and health so fervently as at present; for I consider it my duty to act as a father to that family to the best of my power, and the addition of a widow and seven children is no small one.” Boulton was as good as his promises; and he not only helped the Fothergill family through their difficulties, but he undertook to pay an annual sum (though under no obligation to do so) to a Mrs. Swellingrebel—a widowed lady from whom Fothergill had obtained money which he lost; and who, but for Boulton’s generous help, must have been left destitute.
240 Watt to Boulton, 16th March, 1782.
241 Watt to Boulton, 18th March, 1782.
242 Watt to Boulton, 27th March, 1782.
243 Watt to Boulton, 30th March, 1782.
244 Watt to Boulton, 19th September, 1782.
245 Boulton to Watt, 28th September, 1782.
246 Watt to Boulton, 3rd October, 1782.
247 “On my road to this place (Cosgarne) I stayed two days at Bristol in order to learn the particulars of Hornblower’s new engine erected in that neighbourhood, and I had the satisfaction to find that it is worse than a common engine, although made upon our principles; but from the various evasions introduced it is as bad as need be. Nevertheless I think we should stop it in order to stop the effects of the numerous lies they propagate in this county, and other mischiefs.”—Boulton to Watt, 30th September, 1782.
248 “I don’t know a man in Cornwall amongst the adventurers,” he wrote, “but what would think it patriotism to free the mines from the tribute they pay to us, and thereby divide our rights amongst their own dear selves. Nevertheless, let us keep our tempers, and keep the firm hold we have got; let us do justice, show mercy and walk humbly, and all, I hope, will be right at last.”—Boulton to Watt, 2nd November, 1782.
249 Boulton to Watt, 30th September, 1782.
250 Boulton to Watson of Bristol, 7th November, 1782.
251 Boulton to Wyatt, 16th December, 1782.
252 Boulton to Watt, 7th December, 1782.
253 Watt to Boulton, 28th November, 1782.
254 The above illustration represents the first engine employed at Soho, with the alterations subsequently introduced, for the purpose of producing rotary motion. The old Kinneil engine, “Beelzebub,” as Watt called her, was entirely removed, and replaced by this engine, as explained by Watt in his MS. Memoir of Boulton now before us, wherein he states,—“The first engine of 18 inches cylinder, which was employed in returning the water to Soho mill, was replaced about 1778 or 1779 by a larger engine, the first on the expansive principle, which still remains there.” The engine became known at Soho as “Old Bess,” and she continued in regular work until within the last eight years. The illustration shows the state in which the engine now stands in South Kensington Museum.
A. steam cylinder; B. steam pipe; C. throttle valve; D. steam valve; E. eduction valve; F. eduction pipe; G. valve gearing; H. condenser; I. air pump; K. air pump rod; L. foot valve; M. hand gear tappet rod; N. parallel motion; O. balance weight; P. rocking beam; Q. connecting rod; R. feed pump rod; S. sun wheel; T. planet wheel; U. fly wheel; W. governor; X. feedwater cistern.
255 “We have had a visit to-day from a Mr. Cort of Gosport, who says he has a forge there, and has found out some grand secret in the making of iron, by which he can make double the quantity at the same expense and in the same time as usual. He says he wants some kind of engine, but could not tell what; wants some of us to call on him, and says he had some correspondence with you on the subject. He seems a simple goodnatured man, but not very knowing. He says he has most of the smith-work for the king’s yard, and has a forge, a rolling and slitting mill. I think him a brother projector.”—Watt to Boulton, 14th December, 1782.
256 4th December, 1782.
257 Letter to Thomas Knox, M.P.
[258] With an almost excess of politeness, Boulton wrote long letters to unknown correspondents to set them right about mechanical errors into which they seemed to him to have fallen. Thus a Mr. Knipe of Chelsea, supposing he had discovered a perpetual motion machine, wrote inviting Boulton to join him as a partner. Though the man was without means and evidently foolish, Boulton wrote him several long letters in the kindest spirit, pointing out that his scheme was contrary to reason and science. “It is impossible,” said he, “for inanimate mechanism to produce the least degree of power or to augment the sum total of the primum mobile. Mechanism may communicate or concentrate or economise power, but cannot create or augment it.” Knipe replied at great length, vindicating his invention. His enthusiasm pleased Boulton, who, in the generosity of his nature, sent him a draft for ten guineas on his London bankers to enable the poor inventor to secure his invention if there was really anything in it. But nothing more was heard of Knipe’s Perpetual Motion Machine.
259 No wonder the miners were so urgent for reductions in working expenses, as we find from a communication from Watt to Boulton, of facts to be laid before Parliament against the proposed tax on coal, that Chacewater had sunk 50,000l. in setting the mine to work; Wheal Virgin 28,000l. in ten months, and still unprosperous; Poldice a very large sum, and merely paying expenses; Wheal Chance 35,000l., and only moderately prosperous; Pool 14,000l., without much prospect of recovery; Roskere languishing, and not paying expenses; United Mines, which had been at death’s door, still in a tottering state; Wheal Union stopped, after losing about 8000l.; Dalcoath 500l. spent on timber per month, and a new kibble-rope, of above a ton weight, worn out in a fortnight. [To draw a kibble of ore then, weighing about 3 cwt., took fully fifteen minutes, owing to the great depth of that mine, and two-thirds of the stuff drawn was stones.] To which Watt added, “if we had not furnished the miners with more effectual means of draining the water, almost all the deep mines would have been abandoned before now.”
260 The engine was of 40-horse power. It was erected at the “Black Works,” Etruria, where it continues working with the sun and planet motion,—one of the very few engines of the old construction still remaining in existence.
261 Watt to Boulton, 22nd June, 1784.
262 Watt to Boulton, 30th June, 1784. Boulton MSS.
263 The parallel motion was first put in practice in the engine erected for Mr. Whitbread; Watt informing Boulton (27th October, 1785) that “the parallel motion of Whitbread’s answers admirably.”
264 ‘Lives of Engineers,’ iii. 77.
265 In a letter dated 28th August, 1784, Watt communicated his views to his partner on the subject of locomotive engines at great length. In the course of the letter he says,—
“My original ideas on this subject were prior to my invention of the improved engines, or before the crank or any other rotative motions were thought of. My plan then was to have two inverted cylinders with toothed racks instead of piston rods, which were to be applied to the ratchet wheels on the axletree, and to act alternately; and I am partly of opinion that this method might be applied with advantage yet, because it needs no fly, and has other conveniences.
“From what I have said, and from much more which a little reflection will suggest to you, you will see that without several circumstances turn out more favourable than has been stated, the machine will be clumsy and defective, and that it will cost much time to bring it to any tolerable degree of perfection; and that for me to attempt to interrupt the career of my business to bestow any attention to it, would be imprudent. I even grudge the time I have taken to write these comments on it.”
266 Boulton to Watt, 8th November, 1784. Though Murdock was thus occupied, he did not abandon his idea of making a working locomotive. Two years later we find Watt thus writing Boulton:—
“I am extremely sorry that W. Murdock still busies himself with the steam carriages. In one of my specifications I have secured it, as well as words could do, according to my idea of it, and if to that you add Symington’s and Sadler’s patents, it can scarcely be patentable, even if free of the general specification in the Act of Parliament; for even granting that what I have done cannot secure it, yet it can act as a prior invention against anybody else; and if it cannot be secured by patent, to what purpose should anybody labour at it? I have still the same opinions concerning it that I had, but to prevent as much as possible more fruitless argument about it, I have one of some size under hand, and am resolved to try if God will work a miracle in favour of these carriages. I shall in some future letter send you the words of my specification on that subject. In the mean time I wish William could be brought to do as we do, to mind the business in hand, and let such as Symington and Sadler throw away their time and money in hunting shadows.”—Watt to Boulton, 12th Sept., 1786. In a subsequent letter, Watt expresses himself as much gratified to learn “that William applies to his business.”
267 Boulton to Wilson, 16th December, 1784. Boulton MSS.
268 Watt to Boulton, 31st March, 1785.
269 Watt to Boulton, 21st July, 1785. Writing to Boulton on a later occasion on the subject of these threatened attacks on all patents, he said, “A pursuance of such decisions as have been given lately in several cases must at length drive men of invention to take shelter in countries where their ingenuity will be protected; and the other states of Europe know their interest too well to neglect any opportunity of curbing the insolence and humbling the pride of Britain. If the minister should not think it right to amend and confirm the patent laws, the next best thing would be to make a law totally taking away the king’s power of granting them. I mean, this would be the honest part.”—Watt to Boulton, 19th March, 1786. Boulton himself had equally strong views on the subject of patents, believing that they tended to encourage industrious and ingenious men to labour for the common good. Referring to the decision against Argand’s lamp patent, he wrote De Luc in 1787,—“It was hard, unjust, and impolitic, as it hath (to my knowledge) discouraged a very ingenious French chemist from coming over and establishing in this country an invention of the highest importance to one of our greatest manufactures. Moreover, it tends to destroy the greatest of all stimulants to invention, viz. the idea of enjoying the fruits of one’s own labour. Some late decisions against the validity of certain patents have raised the spirits of the illiberal, sordid, unjust, ungenerous, and inventionless misers, who prey upon the vitals of the ingenious, and make haste to seize upon what their laborious and often costly application has produced. The decisions to which I refer have encouraged a combination in Cornwall to erect engines on Boulton and Watt’s principles, contrary to the Law of Patents and the express provisions of an Act of Parliament; and this they are setting about in order to drive us into a court of law, flattering themselves that it is the present disposition of the judges to set their faces against all patents. Should such a disposition (so contrary to Lord Mansfield’s decisions) continue to prevail, it will produce far greater evils to the manufacturing industry of the kingdom than the gentlemen of the law can have any idea of.”
270 Watt to Boulton, 27th August, 1785.
271 Watt to Boulton, 24th September, 1785.
272 Boulton to Wilkinson, 21st November, 1785.
273 Writing to M. De Luc, the Queen’s Librarian, of what he and his partner had done for Cornwall, Boulton said,—“The copper and tin mines of Cornwall are now sunk to so great a depth that had not Mr. Watt and myself nearly expended our fortunes and hazarded our ruin by neglecting our regular business, and by a long series of expensive experiments in bringing our engine to its present degree of perfection, those mines must inevitably have stopped working, and Cornwall at this time would not have existed as a mining county. The very article of extra coals for common engines would have amounted to more than the entire profits of their working.”—Boulton to De Luc, 31st March, 1787.
274 Two days after this event, when about to set out for Polgooth, a messenger arrived at Boulton’s lodgings, bringing him the sad news of Mr. Phillips’s sudden death. He describes the scene at the funeral, at which Catherine Phillips, though strongly urged by him to stay away, insisted on being present. “She was attended by a widow lady who had lost a good husband last year, and though she had not been accustomed to speak in the congregation of the righteous, yet on this occasion she stood with her hand upon her husband’s coffin and spoke above an hour, delivering one of the most pathetic discourses I ever heard.” A large concourse of people attended the interment, which took place in a garden near Redruth. Boulton, in writing to Mrs. Boulton, said, “I wish I had time to give you the history and character of my departed friend, as you know but little of his excellences. I cannot say but that I feel a gloomy pleasure in dwelling upon the life and death of a good man: it incites to piety and elevates the mind above terrestrial things. Now, let me ask you to hold a silent meeting in your heart for half an hour and then return to your work.”
275 The Albion Mill engine was set to work in 1786. The first rotative with a parallel motion in Scotland, was erected for Mr. Stein, of Kennet Pans near Alloa, in the following year.
276 In a letter to Mr. Matthews (30th April, 1784) Boulton wrote,—“It seems the millers are determined to be masters of us and the public. Putting a stop to fire-engine mills because they come into competition with water-mills, is as absurd as stopping navigable canals would be because they interfere with farmers and waggoners. The argument also applies to wind and tide mills or any other means whereby corn can be ground. So all machines should be stopped whereby men’s labour is saved, because it might be argued that men were thereby deprived of a livelihood. Carry out the argument, and we must annihilate water-mills themselves, and thus go back again to the grinding of corn by hand labour!”
277 Watt, however, continued to adhere to his own views as to the superiority of the plan adopted:—“I am sorry to find,” he observed in his reply to Boulton, “so many things are amiss at Albion Mill, and that you have lost your good opinion of double engines, while my opinion of them is mended. The smoothness of their going depends on the steam regulators being opened a little before the vacuum regulators, and not opened too suddenly, as indeed the others ought not to be. Otherwise the shock comes so violently in the opposite direction that no pins or brasses will stand it. Malcolm has no notion how to make gear work quietly, nor do I think he properly understands it. You must therefore attend to it yourself, and not leave it until it is more perfect.”—Watt to Boulton, 3rd March, 1786.
278 Watt to Boulton, 10th March, 1786.—Boulton MSS.
279 “The Albion Mill,” wrote Watt to Boulton, “requires your close attention and exertions. I look upon it as a weight about our necks that will sink us to the bottom, unless people of real activity and knowledge of business are found to manage it. I would willingly forfeit a considerable sum to be clear of the concern. If anybody will take my share I will cheerfully give him 500l. and reckon myself well quit. My reasons are that none of the parties concerned are men of business, that no attention has been hitherto paid to it by anybody except Mr. W. and ourselves, and that if we go on as expensively in carrying on the business as in the erection, it is impossible but that we should be immense losers, and thus probably our least loss will be to stop where we are. As to our reputation as engineers, I have no doubt but the mill will perform its business, but whether with the quantity of coals and labour is what I cannot say.”—Watt to Boulton, 19th March, 1786.
280 Watt to Boulton, 17th April, 1786.
281 Watt wrote Boulton from London, 1st October, 1789,—“I called on Wyatt (the architect) last night. He says the mill sold above 4000l. worth of flour last week and is doing well.”
282 For further particulars as to the Albion Mill, see Life of Rennie in ‘Lives of the Engineers,’ ii. 137.
283 Watt to Boulton, 23rd September, 1786.
284 He spoke of Goodwyn’s Brewery engine, finished in 1784, as the best that Soho had up to that time turned out—it “performed wonderful well—not the smallest leak and scarce any noise.... The working gear and joints are the best I ever saw.”
285 Watt to Boulton, 24th February, 1786.
286 Boulton to Morris, 2nd November, 1786.
287 “Your mind, my friend, is too active, too powerful for your body, and harasses it beyond its bearing. If this was the case with any other machine under your direction, except that in whose regulation your friends take so much interest, you would soon find out a remedy. For the present permit me to advise a more ample use of the oil of delegation through your whole machinery, and I am persuaded you will soon find some salutary effects from this application. Seriously, I shall conclude in saying to you what Dr. Fothergill desired me to say to Brindley—‘Spare your machine a little, or like others under your direction, it will wear out the sooner by hard and constant usage.’”—Josiah Wedgwood to Watt, December 10, 1782.
288 Watt to his brother-in-law, Gilbert Hamilton, Glasgow, June 18, 1786.
289 “Mr. Watt hath lately remitted all his money to Scotland, and I have lately purchased a considerable quantity of copper at the request of Mr. Williams.... Besides which I have more than 45 tons of copper by me, 20 of which was bought of the Cornish Metal Company, and 20 of the Duke’s at 70l., and not an ounce of either yet used. In short, I shall be in a very few weeks in great want of money, and it is now impossible to borrow in London or this neighbourhood as all confidence is fled.”—Boulton to Wilson, 4th May, 1788.
290 Boulton to Matthews, 22nd December, 1788.
291 Boulton acted with his usual open-handed generosity in his partnership arrangements with Watt. Although the original bargain between them provided that Boulton was to take two-thirds, and Watt one-third profits, Boulton providing the requisite capital and being at the risk and expense of all experiments, he subsequently, at Watt’s request, agreed to the profits being equally divided between them.
292 As early as August, 1768, we find Dr. Small in one of his letters describing Edgeworth to Watt as “a gentleman of fortune, young, mechanical, and indefatigable, who has taken a resolution to move land and water carriages by steam, and has made considerable progress in the short space of time that he has devoted to the study.”
293 Dr. Darwin to Boulton, April 5, 1778. When the Doctor removed to Derby in 1782, he wrote,—“I am here cut off from the milk of science, which flows in such redundant streams from your learned Lunatics, and which, I can assure you, is a very great regret to me.” In another letter he said,—“I hope philosophy and fire-engines continue to go on well. You heard we sent your Society an air-balloon, which was calculated to have fallen in your garden at Soho; but the wicked wind carried it to Sir Edward Littleton’s. Pray give my compliments to your learned Society.” In another letter he wrote,—“I hope Behemoth has strength in his loins. Belial and Ashtaroth are two other devils of consequence, and good names for engines of Fire.” When he heard of the Albion Mill being burnt down, the Doctor wrote,—“The conflagration of the Albion Mill grieved me sincerely, both as it was a grand and successful effort of human art, and also because I fear you were a considerable sufferer by it. I well remember poor old Mr. Seward comparing the Immortality of the Soul (in a devout sermon) to a fire-engine. He might now have made it a type of the mortality of this world, and the conflagration of all things.”
294 In a letter from Priestley to Boulton, dated London, 6th November, 1775, he wrote,—“I shall not quarrel with you on account of our different sentiments in politics. When I tell you what is fact, that the Americans have constructed a cannon on a new principle, by which they can hit a mark at a distance of a mile, you will say their ingenuity has come in aid of their cowardice! I would tell you the principle of it, but that I am afraid it would set your superior ingenuity to improve upon it for the use of their enemies.” From Boulton’s memoranda-books we find that the subject of improved artillery had occupied his attention some ten years before.
295 Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, who had no sympathy for Dr. Priestley’s religious views, nevertheless bears eloquent testimony to the beauty of his character. She speaks of him as “a man of admirable simplicity, gentleness, and kindness of heart, united with great acuteness of intellect. I can never forget,” she says, “the impression produced on me by the serene expression of his countenance. He, indeed, seemed ever present with God by recollection, and with man by cheerfulness.... A sharp and acute intellectual perception, often a pointed, perhaps a playful expression, was combined in him with a most loving heart.... Dr. Priestley always spent part of every day in devotional exercises and contemplation; and unless the railroad has spoilt it, there yet remains at Dawlish a deep and beautiful cavern, since known by the name of “Dr. Priestley’s cavern,” where he was wont to pass an hour every day in solitary retirement.”—‘Life of Mary Ann Schimmelpenninck.’
296 Boulton to Watt, 3rd July, 1781. Dr. Black denominated carbonic acid gas “fixed air” because of his having first discovered it in chalk, marble, &c., wherein it was fixed until the furnace or other means extracted it from its fixture.
297 Boulton to Henderson, 6th September, 1781.
298 Wedgwood to Boulton, Etruria, 10th March, 1781.
299 Boulton to Wedgwood, 30th March, 1781.
300 Watt to Boulton, 26th October, 1782.
301 A common word in the north,—meaning literally putting sense into one.
302 He discovered, in the course of his inquiries at different periods, no fewer than nine new gases,—oxygen, nitrogen (a discovery also claimed by Cavendish and Rutherford), nitric oxide, nitrous oxide, sulphurous acid, muriatic acid (chlorine), volatile ammonia, fluo-silicic acid, and carbonic oxide,—“a tribute to science,” as is truly observed by Dr. Henry, “greatly exceeding in richness and extent that of any contemporary.”
303 We find among the Boulton MSS., a letter from Priestley, dated Calne, 28th September, 1776, introducing Warltire to Boulton as follows:—“As I know you will take pleasure in everything in which the advancement of science is concerned, I take the liberty to recommend to you Mr. Warltire, who has been some time in this part of the country, and who is going to read lectures on the subject of Air at Birmingham. I think him an excellent philosopher, as well as a modest and agreeable man. He is perfectly acquainted with his subject, and has prepared a set of experiments which have given the greatest satisfaction wherever he has been. He has been so obliging as to spend some time with me, and has given me much assistance in my late experiments, of which he can give you some account.”
304 Wilson’s ‘Life of Cavendish,’ p. 60. In this work, the claims of Cavendish are strongly advocated. The case in favour of Watt is alike strongly and ably stated by Mr. Muirhead in his ‘Correspondence of the late James Watt on his Discovery of the Theory of the Composition of Water.’
305 Watt to Boulton, 10th December, 1782.
306 De Luc, Watt’s “ami zélé,” as he described himself, confirms the fact of Cavendish having, in 1782, communicated to Priestley the nature of his experiments as well as his theory of the composition of water, in the following passage:—“Vers la fin de l’année 1782, j’allai à Birmingham, où le Dr. Priestley s’étoit établi depuis quelques années. Il me communiqua alors que M. Cavendish, d’après une rémarque de M. Warltire, qui avoit toujours trouvé de l’eau dans les vases où il avoit brúlé un mélange de l’air inflammable et d’air atmosphérique, s’étoit appliqué à découvrir la source de cette eau, et qu’il avoit trouvé qu’un mélange d’air inflammable et d’air déphlogistique en proportion convenable, étant allumé par l’étincelle électrique, se convertissoit tout entier en eau.—Je fus frappé au plus haut degré de cette découverte.”—‘Idées sur la Météorologie,’ tome 2, 1787, pp. 206–7.
307 Watt to Black, 21st April, 1783.
308 That Watt felt keenly on the subject, is obvious from his letter to Mr. Fry of Bristol (15th May, 1784), wherein he says,—“I have had the honour, like other great men, to have had my ideas pirated. Soon after I wrote my first paper on the subject, Dr. Blagden explained my theory to M. Lavoisier at Paris; and soon after that, M. Lavoisier invented it himself, and read a paper on the subject to the Royal Academy of Sciences. Since that, Mr. Cavendish has read a paper to the Royal Society on the same idea, without making the least mention of me. The one is a French financier; and the other a member of the illustrious house of Cavendish, worth above 100,000l., and does not spend 1000l. a year. Rich men may do mean actions. May you and I always persevere in our integrity, and despise such doings.”
309 Watt to Boulton, 20th September, 1785.
310 Watt to Boulton, 30th December, 1787. Boulton MSS.
311 Mr. W. P. Smith, of the Patent Museum, raised this question at a meeting of the Photographic Society held on the 3rd November, 1863. Certain photographic pictures on metal plates were found in Mr. Boulton’s library at Soho, which, it was supposed, had not been opened for about fifty years: and it was accordingly inferred that these photographs had been the work of Mr. Boulton, or some member of the Lunar Society, about the year 1791. One of them was supposed to be a view of Soho House “before the alterations, which were made previous to 1791.” But the evidence is very defective, as has been clearly shown by M. P. W. Boulton, Esq., the grandson of Mr. Boulton, in his ‘Remarks concerning certain Photographs supposed to be of early Date’ (Bradbury and Evans, 1864). Instead of having been closed for fifty years, the room in which the pictures were found, was in constant use, and the books were freely accessible. It is also very doubtful whether the house represented in one of the pictures is old Soho House; the strong probability being that it is not, but a house still standing at Winson Green. The explanation given by Mr. M. P. W. Boulton seems to be the true one—that the room in question having been used by a Miss Wilkinson, an experimenter in photography after its invention by Niepce, these photographs were merely the results of her first amateur experiments in the art. The late Mr. Murdock, son of William Murdock of Soho, who lived in the immediate neighbourhood, was also a very good photographist, and was accustomed to meet Miss Wilkinson to make experiments in the new art.
There can be no doubt that the Wedgwoods of Etruria, more particularly Josiah’s son Thomas, as well as Humphry Davy, were early engaged in experimenting on the action of light upon nitrate of silver, but they wholly failed in fixing the pictures. A letter, dated “January, 1799,” is quoted in the ‘Photographic Journal’ for Jan. 15, 1864, as from James Watt to Josiah Wedgwood (which must be an error, as Josiah died in 1795), in which the following words occur:—“I thank you for your instructions respecting the silver pictures, about which, when at home, I will make some experiments.” If such experiments were really made, we have been unable to find any record of them.
312 ‘Voyage en Angleterre, en Ecosse, et aux Iles Hébrides.’ Par B. Faujas-Saint-Fond. 2 vols. Paris, 1797.
313 Horner’s ‘Memoirs and Correspondence,’ ii. 2.
314 The word “Brummagem” doubtless originated in the numerous issues of counterfeit money from the Birmingham mints.
315 The punishment for this crime was sometimes of a very brutal character. In March, 1789, a woman, convicted of coining in London, was first strangled by the stool being taken from under her, and then fixed to a stake and burnt before the debtor’s door at Newgate!
316 “I lately received a letter from a Jew about making for him a large quantity of base money, but I should be sorry ever to become so base as to execute such orders. On the contrary I have taken some measures to put a stop to the execution of them by others, and if Mr. Butcher hath any plan of that sort he would do well to guard against me; as I certainly shall endeavour all in my power to prevent the counterfeiting of British or other money—that being the principle on which I am acting.”—Boulton to Matthews, December, 1787.
317 Boulton to Woodman, 13th November, 1789.
318 Watt says Droz “did not know so much on the subject as Boulton himself did,” and being found incompetent, a pretender, and disposed to be quarrelsome and litigious, he was shortly after dismissed with liberal payment.
319 In a letter written by James Lawson to Matthew Robinson Boulton shortly after his father’s death, he observed,—“God only knows the anxiety and unremitting perseverance of your father to accomplish the end; and we all aided and assisted to the best of our powers, without ever considering by whose contrivance anything was brought to bear. Indeed the bringing of everything to bear was by your father’s perseverance, and by his hints and personal attendance; for often he attended and persevered in the experiments till we were all tired.”—Lawson to M. R. Boulton, January 10, 1810. Boulton MSS.
320 We find numerous letters from Boulton to Joseph Harrison relative to the execution of the presses, and the manner in which the various details of the work were to be carried out. On the 16th of January, 1788, he wrote,—“Push forward with the utmost expedition six of the cutting-out presses and one of the coining presses. I have engaged to have six of each kind at work by this day four months.... I shall be obliged to work after the rate of 1500 tons a year. I fear I must have eight presses [eight were eventually erected] in which case I must lengthen the building next the Gate road. Pray push forward, and be silent.” Various details as to the working of the presses and the execution of the coin were given in succeeding letters.
321 To Lord Hawkesbury he wrote (14th April, 1789),—“In the course of my journeys I observe that I receive upon an average two-thirds counterfeit halfpence for change at toll-gates, &c.; and I believe the evil is daily increasing, as the spurious money is carried into circulation by the lowest class of manufacturers, who pay with it the principal part of the wages of the poor people they employ. They purchase from the subterraneous coiners 36 shillings’-worth of copper (in nominal value) for 20 shillings, so that the profit derived from the cheating is very large. The trade is carried on to so great an extent that at a public meeting at Stockport in Cheshire, in January last, the magistrates and inhabitants came to a resolution to take no other halfpence in future than those of the Anglesey Company [also an illegal coinage, though of full weight and value of copper], and this resolution they have published in their newspapers.”
322 Boulton to the Lords of the Privy Council for Trade, 16th December, 1787.
323 In 1787, and again in 1789, we find the merchants, traders, and others in Southwark urgently memorialising the Lords of the Treasury on the subject. The Memorial addressed to them in the latter year was signed by 800 of the principal inhabitants of the Borough, and presented to Mr. Pitt by a deputation, headed by Mr. Barclay, of Thrale’s Brewery. It set forth that the counterfeits of copper coin had become a very serious burden and loss, more especially to poor manufacturers, labourers, and others, many of whom were compelled to take counterfeit copper coin in payment of their commodities and wages; and concluded by stating that, having seen specimens of a new copper coinage made by Mr. Boulton of Birmingham (under order of the Lords of the Privy Council) the Memorialists take leave to represent, that such a coinage, from its greater weight and superior execution, would in their opinion afford to themselves and the public at large a certain remedy for the present grievance, and they therefore strongly recommended its adoption.
324 The coins were: in 1790, a five-sous piece, “Pacte Fédératif;” in 1792, a four sous “Hercule;” and a two sous “Liberté.” Boulton’s reputation as a coiner abroad, brought upon him while at Paris, a host of foreign schemers, one of whom pretended that he had discovered an infallible method of converting copper into gold! The schemer and his wife followed Boulton to Soho, accompanied by a letter of introduction from his friend Baumgarten. After taking measure of the schemer, Boulton replied to Baumgarten as follows:—
“Dear Sir,—Who the devil have you sent me? Is he the angel or the demon Gabriel? Is he a seraphim or a swindler? His propositions appear in such a questionable form, that I know not whether to pronounce him F. or R. or S., which are favourite letters amongst English philosophers.
“Doth he mean to make gold by Alchemy, or after the family receipt by which his mother and brother extracted two hundred guineas from my simplicity when at Paris?
“I am content with the copper coinage, and shall leave the golden one to you and Gabriel. The science of alchemy soars so much above common sense that I never could obtain so much as a peep into its lower regions. This said Gabriel and his angel have, however, condescended to adopt common sense so far as to take up their lodgings in my cottage!
“The worst of all is, I am at this juncture extremely busy and can’t bear interruption; but all that is a trifle when compared with the magnitude of his project, viz. converting 1500l. into 60,000l.! But he says a small experiment may be made in three days and three nights in my laboratory. I must, however, own that I had rather be in Jonah’s situation during that time.
“I wish not to offend this angelic couple, but I should prefer that you had them back again, with all the favours and profits intended for me. However, I cannot help wishing you a better thing; for in spite of your last favour I sincerely desire for you and all that are dear to you, many many happy and prosperous years,
“Ever your faithful and affectionate friend,
“M. Boulton.”
325 The following were the principal provincial halfpenny tokens executed at Soho:—1789, Cronebane and Dundee; 1791, Anglesey, Cornwall, Glasgow, Hornchurch, Southampton; 1793, Leeds, London, Penryn, John Wilkinson’s; 1794, Inverness, Lancaster; 1795, Bishops Stortford; 1800, Enniscorthy.
326 The following medals were also struck by Mr. Boulton at Soho:—Prince and Princess of Wales on their marriage; Marquis Cornwallis on the peace with Tippoo; Earl Howe on his victory of the First of June; Hudson’s Bay Company; Slave Trade abolished; Chareville Forest; General Suwarrow on his successes in Italy; the Empress Catherine of Russia; in commemoration of British Victories; Union with Ireland; on the peace of 1802; Battle of Trafalgar; Manchester and Salford Volunteers; Frogmore Medal; Prince Regent of Portugal; and the Emperor Alexander of Russia. The execution of the Trafalgar Medal furnishes a remarkable illustration of Boulton’s princely munificence. It was struck on the occasion of Lord Nelson’s last victory, and presented by him, with the sanction of government, to every officer and man engaged in the action. He gave an additional value to the present by confining the medal to this purpose only.
327 Boulton to Wilson, 26th February, 1792. Boulton MSS.
328 There was a great deal of graphic vigour in Watt’s correspondence about engines. Thus, in the case of an engine supplied to F. Scott and Co. to drive a hammer, it appears that instead of applying it to the hammer only, they applied it also to blow the bellows. The consequence was, that it worked both badly. They had also increased the weight of the hammer. Watt wrote,—“It was easy to foresee all this; and the only adequate remedy is to have another engine to blow the bellows. It is impossible that a regular blast can be had while the engine works the hammer and bellows, without a regulating belly as big as a church.... They have been for having a pocket bible in large print. If they mean to carry on their work regular, they must have a blowing engine; otherwise they will lose the price of one in a few months.”
329 Watt to Boulton, 27th June, 1790.
330 Boulton to his son, 19th December, 1787.
331 Boulton to Matthews, 25th August, 1788. In a letter dated the preceding day, he wrote—“I have been exceedingly harassed last week, have many letters before me unanswered. I cannot sleep at nights, and the room I write in is so hot by the fire-engine chimney as to relax me, and my head is distracted by the noise of the engine, by the making and riveting of boilers, and by a constant knocking at my door by somebody or other; but I believe and suspect that the separation of my son from me contributes more to the oppression of my spirits than anything else.”
332 “I have sent my son to Mr. Wilkinson’s ironworks at Bersham, in Wales, where he is to study practical book-keeping, geometry, and algebra, at his leisure hours; and three hours in the day he works in a carpenter’s shop. I intend he should stay there a year; what I shall do with him next I know not, but I intend to fit him for some employment not so precarious as my own.”—Watt to Mrs. Campbell, 30th May, 1784.
333 Watt, jun., to Boulton, 4th December, 1789.
334 Mr. Boulton having been absent at Bath, some time elapsed before young Watt’s letter reached him. Receiving no reply, the youth became apprehensive that his letter had fallen into his father’s hands, and wrote a second letter expressing his fears. Thus Boulton replied to both letters at the same time, informing his correspondent for his satisfaction that they had reached him “unopened.” He proceeded—
“I now send agreeably to your request, my draft for 50l.—payable to myself, that I might thereby conceal your name from all persons; and you may tranquillise yourself in respect to your father, as I promise you he shall not know aught of the transaction.
“Although I would not willingly give you pain, yet I must honestly tell you that I am not very sorry you experienced some pain and anxiety by my delay; that you may not only feel how uncomfortable it is to be in debt, but that you may experience ere long how pleasant and how cheerful is independence, which no man can possess who is in that condition.
“It is possible your father’s ideas may be too limited in regard to the quantum necessary for your expenses; but I think it equally probable that yours may be too diffuse, and therefore can’t help wishing it in my power to expand the one and contract the other.
“I know and speak from experience, that the principal articles of expenditure in the generality of young men who live in large towns are such as produce the least additions to their happiness or reputation; for which as well as for some others I know of, I cannot help urging you to cut your coat according to your cloth, as the sure means of preserving the good opinion of your father, and as the most likely to induce him to open his hand more liberally to you.
“It’s a subject I can’t speak to him upon without raising his suspicions, but you may state to him such arguments as may seem meet to yourself in favour of a further allowance, and if he speaks to me upon the subject, I will do the best I can for you.
“I wish you to keep in view that all our great Cornish profits have died away till now they are very small,—that your father is building an expensive house,—and that he is married. For these and other reasons, I wish you to alter the scale of your expenses, as the surest means of securing your credit and your happiness, which I am desirous of promoting or I should not have expressed myself so freely and so unreservedly....
“I remain, dear Watt,
“Your faithful and affectionate friend,
“Matthew Boulton.”
—Boulton to Watt, junr., 26th December, 1789. Boulton MSS.
335 Watt, junr. to Boulton, 26th March, 1789.
336 ‘Life of Mary Ann Schimmelpenninck,’ 3rd ed., 1859, pp. 125–6.
337 Ibid., p. 181.
338 “The address of the Société des Amis de la Constitution de Bourdeaux” to the Revolutionary Society in London, dated the 21st May, 1791, contains the following passage:—“Le jour consacré à porter le deuil de M. Price [the Rev. Dr. Price recently dead,—an ardent admirer of the French Revolution in its early stages], nous avons entendu la lecture du Discours de M. l’Evêque d’Autun sur la Liberté des Cultes: on nous a fait ensuite le rapport des ouvrages de MM. Priestley et Payne qui ont vengé M. Price des ouvrages de M. Burke; et c’est ainsi que nous avons fait son oraison funèbre. Peut-être, Messieurs, apprendrez vous avec quelque intérêt, que nous avons inscrit dans la liste de nos Membres les noms de MM. Payne et Priestley; c’est l’hommage de notre estime, et l’estime d’hommes libres a toujours son prix.”
339 The representation given above of Dr. Priestley’s house is taken from a rare book, entitled ‘Views of the Ruins of the principal Houses destroyed during the Riots at Birmingham, 1791.’ London, 1792.
340 “At midnight,” says Hutton, “I could see from my house the flames of Bordesley Hall rise with dreadful aspect. I learned that after I quitted Birmingham the mob attacked my house there three times. My son bought them off repeatedly; but in the fourth, which began about nine at night, they laboured till eight the next morning, when they had so completely ravaged my dwelling that I write this narrative in a house without furniture, without roof, door, chimneypiece, window, or window-frame.”—‘The Life of William Hutton,’ written by himself. London, 1816.
341 “Though our principles, which are well known, as friends to the established government and enemies of republican principles, should have been our protection from a mob whose watchword was Church and King, yet our safety was principally owing to most of the Dissenters living south of the town; for after the first moments they did not seem over nice in their discrimination of religion and principles. I, among others, was pointed out as a Presbyterian, though I never was in a meeting-house in Birmingham, and Mr. Boulton is well known as a Churchman. We had everything most portable packed up, fearing the worst. However, all is well with us.”—Watt to De Luc, 19th July, 1791.
342 The ‘Discours’ delivered by the MM. Cooper and Watt (1792) may be seen at the British Museum.
343 ‘Life of Southey,’ vi. 209.
344 Watt to Boulton, 16th May, 1794. Boulton MSS.
345 The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended on the 23rd May, 1794.
346 Watt to Boulton, 19th May, 1794. Boulton MSS.
347 Watt to Boulton, 23rd May, 1794. Young Watt continued to sympathise with his political friends; as we find him, some months later, writing Matthew R. Boulton from London as follows:—“The citizens here are all in very high spirits since the late trials; and I had the honour of dining with two of the acquitted felons on Sunday last.” Watt, junr., having remained for some time in London on business connected with the prosecution of Bull and others for infringement of his father’s patent, Boulton, junr., kept up an active correspondence with him on the affairs of the firm. In one letter (19th February, 1795), after discussing various matters of detail relating to the letter-copying machine and engine business, Boulton entreats his friend to send him down a supply of hair-powder. “I have to intrust to your care,” he says, “the execution of an important commission on the part of the ladies and myself. The report of a scarcity of hair-powder has caused great consternation amongst the beaux and belles here, and we beg of you to preserve for us 1 cwt. of that necessary article.” To which Watt, jun. replied,—“Your new order is in train, so that I hope (whatever the poor may suffer by the destruction of so scarce an article of nourishment) your aristocratical vanity will be gratified, with only the additional sacrifice of one guinea per annum to your immaculate friend Mr. Pitt, for the purpose of carrying on this ‘just and necessary war!’ Under the existing circumstances, I am doubtful whether I shall not sacrifice my aristocratical appendage [queues being then the appendages of gentlemen], as it goes much against my inclination to throw away my money at this moment of personal poverty, or to contribute any sum, however small, to the support of measures which I reprobate in toto. On the other hand, however, I do say that, of all the taxes which have ever been imposed within my memory, this is the most politic and the least likely to be burdensome to the poor.”—Boulton MSS.
348 Watt to Boulton, 20th March, 1796.
349 “We have won the cause hollow,” Watt wrote from London. “All the Judges have given their opinions carefully in our favour, and have passed judgment. Some of them made better arguments in our favour than our own counsel, for Rous’s speech was too long and too divergent. I most sincerely give you joy.”—Watt to Boulton, 25th January, 1799.
350 The model was carefully preserved and exhibited with pride by his son, in whose house at Handsworth we saw it in 1857.
351 Watt said to Robert Hart, “When Mr. Murdock introduced the slide valve, I was very much against it, as I did not think it so good as the poppet valve, but I gave in from its simplicity.”—Hart, ‘Reminiscences,’ &c.
352 These several inventions were embodied by him in a patent taken out in 1799.
353 Burning springs, though by no means common in Europe, were not unknown. They were kept burning by natural and spontaneous supplies of carburetted hydrogen gas issuing from fissures in the earth overlying beds of asphalte or coal. The inflammable character of fire-damp and the explosions which it occasioned in coal mines were also familiar to most persons living in the coal-mining districts. In 1658 Mr. Thomas Shirley first communicated to the Royal Society the result of some experiments which he had made on the inflammable gas issuing from a well near Wigan in Lancashire. Some time before 1691 the Rev. Dr. Clayton, Dean of Kildare, made some experiments on what he called the spirit of coal: he distilled some coal in a retort, and, confining the gas produced thereby in a bladder, he amused his friends by burning it as it issued from a pin-hole. In 1721 Dr. Stephen Hales found it was practicable to produce elastic inflammable air from coal and other substances, and that nearly one-third of Newcastle coal was drawn off in vapour, gas, &c., by the action of heat. In 1733 Sir James Lowther communicated to the Royal Society a paper on the subject of the fire-damp issuing from the shaft of a coal mine near Whitehaven, which had been accidentally set fire to and continued to burn for two years. Dr. Watson, Bishop of Landaff, and Dr. Priestley of Birmingham, examined the properties of coal-gas, and made experiments on its inflammable qualities, but pursued the subject no further. Lord Dundonald also had been accustomed, for the amusement of his friends, to set fire to the gas disengaged by the burning of coal in the process of coke-making. The same phenomena must have been observed on a large scale wherever coke was made. Each chamber in which coal was distilled was in point of fact a gas retort. Oil and gas were the products of the distillation; but strange to say, although the oil was collected and used, no heed was taken of the gas. Nor was it until Mr. Murdock’s attention was called to the subject that lighting by gas was proved to be practicable.
354 ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ 1808, pp. 124–132.
355 Many years later (in 1818), when Murdock was at Manchester for the purpose of starting one of Boulton and Watt’s engines, he was invited, with Mr. William Fairbairn, to dine at Medlock Bank, then at some distance from the lighted part of the town. “It was a dark winter’s night,” writes Mr. Fairbairn, our informant, “and how to reach the house over such bad roads was a question not easily solved. Mr. Murdock, however, fruitful in resources, went to the Gas Works, (then established in Manchester), where he filled a bladder which he had with him, and placing it under his arm like a bagpipe, he discharged through the stem of an old tobacco-pipe a stream of gas which enabled us to walk in safety to Medlock Bank.”
356 Watt here alluded to the new machinery and plant erected at Soho under Murdock’s directions, at a cost of about 5000l. for the purpose of manufacturing gas apparatus.
357 The invention of lighting by gas has by some writers been erroneously attributed to Winsor. It will be observed, from the statement in the text, that coal-gas had been in regular use long before the appearance of his scheme, which was one of the most crude and inflated ever brought before the public. “The Patriotic Imperial and National Light and Heat Company,” proposed amongst other things to aid and assist Government with funds in times of emergency, to increase the Sinking-fund for reducing the National Debt, to reward meritorious discoverers, &c. &c. Some idea of the character of the project may be formed from Mr. [Lord] Brougham’s speech in opening the case against the Bill:—“‘The neat annual profits,’ says Mr. Winsor, ’agreeable to the official experiments’ (that is, the experiments of Mr. Accum....) ’amount to 229,353,627l.’... now Mr. Winsor says, that he will allow there may be an error here, for the sake of arguing with those who still have their doubts; and he will admit that the sum should be taken at only one half, or 114,845,294l.; and then giving up, to meet all possible objections, nine-tenths of that sum, still there will remain, to be paid to the subscribers of this Company, a yearly profit of 570l. for every 5l. of deposit! So that upon paying 5l. every subscriber is to receive 570l. a year for ever, and this to the last farthing; it may increase but less it can never be; the clear profit is always to be above 10,000l. per cent. upon the capital! This is pretty well, sir, one would think. There is here estimate and statement enough to captivate the public; but this is not all; for Mr. Winsor has taken out a patent (of which, indeed, he has, according to his custom, enrolled no specification, but, on the contrary, has enrolled a surrender) for the invention of several things, and, among others, one for rendering this gas respirable. It is not enough that this gas (which everybody knows to be not respirable, but as poisonous to the lungs as fixed air) should be capable of giving light; but he thinks it also necessary to prove that it may easily be rendered respirable; in short, that there is no way in which it may not be used, and nothing which may not be made of it.... In another pamphlet.... Mr. Winsor endeavours to prove that this gas is the vital principle; that in which life itself consists. If I had taken the trouble to go through his publications, which I certainly have not done, it is hard to say what I might not have discovered; but I should think the difficulty would rather be, to find one quality which the gas is not stated to possess.”
358 The first application of the “Gas-light and Coke Company” to Parliament in 1809 for an Act proved unsuccessful, but the “London and Westminster Chartered Gas-light and Coke Company” succeeded in the following year. The Company, however, did not succeed commercially, and was on the point of dissolution, when Mr. Clegg, a pupil of Murdock, bred at Soho, undertook the management and introduced new and improved apparatus. Mr. Clegg first lighted with gas Mr. Ackerman’s shop in the Strand in 1810, and it was regarded as a great novelty. One lady of rank was so much delighted with the brilliancy of the gas-lamp fixed on the shop counter, that she asked to be allowed to carry it home in her carriage, and offered any sum for a similar one. Mr. Winsor by his persistent advocacy of gas-lighting, did much to bring it into further notice; but it was Mr. Clegg’s practical ability that mainly led to its general adoption. When Westminster Bridge was first lit up with gas in 1812, the lamplighters were so disgusted with it that they struck work, and Mr. Clegg himself had to act as lamplighter.
359 “It consisted,” says Mr. Buckle, “of a piston working in a cylinder 10 feet diameter in water, with a lift of 12 feet, and raised by forcing in air from a small blowing cylinder 12 inches diameter, 18 inches stroke, which was worked by the gearing in the boring-mill.” Paper read by the late William Buckle at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers at Birmingham, 23rd October, 1850.
360 Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott,’ one vol. edition, p. 500.
361 Mr. Buckle, in the memoir above cited, says,—“So completely was he absorbed at all times with the subject he had in hand, that he was quite regardless of everything else. When in London explaining to the brewers the nature of his substitute for isinglass, he occupied handsome apartments. He, however, little respected the splendour of his drawing-room, and, fancying himself in his laboratory at Soho, he proceeded with his experiments quite careless and unconscious of the mischief he was doing. One morning his landlady calling in to receive his orders, was horrified to see her magnificent paper-hangings covered with wet fish-skins hung up to dry; and he was caught in the act of pinning up a cod’s skin to undergo the same process. Whether the lady fainted or not is not on record, but the immediate ejectment of the gentleman and his fish was the consequence.”
362 The young partners regarded him with a degree of affection and veneration, which often shows itself in their correspondence. Towards the later years of his life Mr. Murdock’s faculties gradually decayed, and he wholly retired from the business of Soho, dying at his house at Sycamore Hill, Handsworth, on the 15th Nov., 1839, in his 85th year.
363 The first piece of iron-toothed gearing ever cast is placed on the lawn in front of Murdock’s villa. The teeth are of somewhat unequal form, and the casting is rough—perhaps it has been exposed to rough usage. It bears the following inscription:—“This Pinton was cast at Carron Ironworks for John Murdock, of Bellow Mill, Ayrshire, A.D. 1760, being the first tooth-gearing ever used in millwork in Great Britain.”
364 The Symingtons, father and son, began at an early period to design improvements on Watt’s pumping-engine, and took out a patent for a fire-engine on a new principle as early as the year 1785. Watt heard of its progress from time to time; but he had no great opinion of the Symingtons, and treated their alleged invention with indifference. On the 28th September, 1787, he wrote Boulton,—“Isaac Perrins [a fitter] is returned from Scotland. He says Symington has invented a new engine, which is to work under 12½ lbs. on the inch and has got a patent for it, which Mr. M[eason] has paid for. By his account it seems to be on the same principle as the Trumpeters. As soon as they can rely fully on the new engine, the old one is to be pulled down, and Symington is to put up one of his in the house, and, on that answering, ours is to be stopped!”
365 This interesting letter, so important as regards the early history of the invention of the steamboat, appeared for the first time in the supplementary volume to the ‘Official Description and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851,’ to which it was contributed by Mr. W. C. Aitkin of Birmingham.
366 ‘The Elevation, Section, Plans, and Views, of a Triple Vessel, and of Wheels, with Explanations of the Figures in the Engraving, and a short Account of the Properties and Advantages of the Invention.’ By Patrick Miller, Esq., of Dalswinton, Edinburgh, 1787.
367 Mr. Miller’s statement to the Royal Society, 20th December, 1787.
368 Boulton to Sir John Dalrymple, 26th March, 1788. The “one purpose” alluded to by Boulton is supposed to have been the Torpedo, then a favourite scheme with French inventors for blowing up English ships.
369 Taylor to Miller, 20th August, 1788. ‘Supplementary Vol. to Official Description and Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibition of 1851,’ p. 1473.
370 Taylor to Miller, 20th August, 1788. ‘Supplementary Vol. to Official Description and Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibition of 1851,’ p. 1473.
371 The following contemporary account of the trial appeared in the ‘Scots Magazine’ for November, 1788:—“On October 14th, a boat was put in motion by a steam-engine upon Mr. Miller of Dalswinton’s piece of water at that place. That gentleman’s improvements in naval affairs are well known to the public. For some time past his attention has been turned to the application of the steam-engine to the purposes of navigation. He has now accomplished, and evidently shown to the world, the practicability of this, by executing it upon a small scale. A vessel, 25 feet long and 7 broad, was, on the above date, driven with two wheels by a small engine. It answered Mr. Miller’s expectations fully, and afforded great pleasure to the spectators. The success of this experiment is no small accession to the public. Its utility in canals, and all inland navigation, points it out to be of the greatest advantage, not only to this island, but to many other nations of the world. The engine used is Mr. Symington’s new patent engine.”
372 From a memorandum found amongst Mr. Boulton’s papers, we learn that the following were the details of Symington’s engine:—“Engine hath two cylinders of 18 inches diameter each and 2 feet stroke. The rods of each piston are connected to a circular barrel of cast iron by means of chains, so that whilst one piston moves down the other ascends, and so gives the barrel a reciprocating motion. Upon the axis of the barrel is an arm or lever which works the plug and working gear. Each of the cylinders hath 2 pistons, one at top and the other at bottom; the 2 bottom pistons have their rods moving in stuffing-boxes and are connected together by a beam. The steam is admitted into the cylinder at its side, between the 2 pistons, and moves the one up and the other down; but the motion of the upper is greater than the under. When the upper piston is got to the top and the under one to the bottom, the steam valve is shut and the exhaustion one opened; by which the steam is admitted into the bottom of the cylinder, and is in its way met by a jet of cold water, which condenses it, and then it is squeezed out by the under piston, which in fact makes the bottom of the cylinder an air-pump. Whilst this condensation is going forward in the one cylinder, the steam is operating in the other, and vice versâ.”
373 “I am now satisfied,” he said, “that Mr. Symington’s steam-engine is the most improper of all steam-engines for giving motion to a vessel, and that he does not know how to calculate frictions or mechanical powers. By means of a new well-constructed valve-wheel, and the pinion being doubled in diameter, I doubt not that the velocity of the vessel’s motion will be increased; but, do as you will, a great deal of power of the engine must be lost in friction. I remember well that when the small engine was wrought in the boat at Dalswinton, I had formed the same idea, and that I told you so; but not having studied the subject, I gave up my own common sense. This is now past remedy. As the engine cannot be of use to me now, I hope, with the aid of Mr. Tibbets and Mr. Stainton, you will get it sold before you leave Carron.”—Miller to Taylor, 7th December, 1789.
374 J. Watt to R. Cullen, 24th April, 1790, ‘Supplementary Volume to Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibition of 1851,’ p. 1475.
375 One day in March, 1802, on the occasion of a strong west wind blowing, when the canal-boats could with difficulty be moved to windward, the steamer took in tow two laden sloops, the ‘Active’ and ‘Euphemia,’ of seventy tons each, from Lock 20 to Port Dundas, Glasgow, a distance of 19½ miles, in six hours.
376 ‘A sketch of the Origin and Progress of Steam Navigation.’ By Bennet Woodcroft. London, 1848.
377 Symington continued to struggle for many years under the burden of debt which he had incurred by his experiments; and though a sum of 100l. was granted him from the Privy Purse in 1824, and 50l. a year or two afterwards, he remained in a state of poverty during the rest of his life. He died on the 22nd March, 1831, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Botolph, Aldgate, London.
378 The following deposition was made on oath by Robert Weir of Kincardine, before Robert Dundas J. P. for the county of Perth, at Blair Castle, on the 23rd October, 1824:—“That, in the year 1801, he remembers of Mr. Symington erecting a boat, and fitting a steam-engine into it, and dragging two vessels along the Forth and Clyde Canal by means of the said steamboat. That the deponent was employed as engine-fireman on board of the said boat. Deposes that the following persons, now living, were also on board, viz., Alexander Hart and John Allen, ship-builders, Grangemouth, and John Esplin and William Gow, shipmasters there. That some time after the first experiment, while the boat was lying upon the canal at Lock 16, it was visited by a stranger, who requested to see the boat worked. That the said William Symington desired the deponent to light the furnace, which was done, and the stranger was carried about four miles along the canal, and brought back. That this stranger made inquiries both as to the mode of constructing and of working the boat, and took notes of the information given him by the said William Symington. That the deponent heard the stranger say his name was Fulton, and that he was a native of the United States of America. That the deponent remembers Mr. Symington remarking that the progress of the boat was much impeded by the narrowness of the canal, to which Mr. Fulton answered that the objection would not apply to the large rivers of North America, where he thought the boat might be used to great advantage.”—From copies of affidavits in the ‘Biography of William Symington.’ By J. and W. R. Rankin, Engineers, Falkirk, 1862.
379 In one of his letters, Bell says—“Fulton came at different times to the country and stopped with me for some time.”—‘Life of Henry Bell,’ p. 74.
380 Cited in Muirhead’s ‘Life of James Watt,’ 2nd ed. p. 426.
381 Boulton to Lord Hawkesbury, 22nd August, 1803. Boulton MSS.
382 It is stated in the ‘Life of Henry Bell,’ that he applied to Mr. Watt in the year 1801, for his advice as to a suitable engine for a steamboat; but Watt gave him no encouragement to proceed with his design. “How many noblemen, gentlemen, and engineers,” he wrote to Bell, “have puzzled their brains, and spent their thousands of pounds, and none of these, nor yourself, have been able to bring the power of steam in navigation to a successful issue.”—‘Life of Bell.’ By E. Morris, Glasgow, 1844, p. 30.
383 The starting of the ‘Comet’ naturally excited great interest along the Clyde. In the evenings, thousands of spectators lined the banks as far as Govan to see her pass up from Greenock. The masters of the old sailing craft, however, regarded the ‘Comet’ with apprehension and dismay. The old Highland gabert men were especially hostile, denouncing the new vessel as being impelled by the “teevil’s wun” (devil’s wind). The story is told of the steamer one day coming up with a fly boat tacking against the tide, when the crew began to jeer the skipper of the fly, calling upon him to come along with his lazy craft. “Get oot o’ my sight,” he cried, in reply, “I’m just gaun as it pleases the breath o’ the Almichty, and I’ll ne’er fash my thumb how fast ye gang wi’ your blasted deevil’s reek.”
384 Boulton to Dumergue, 25th December, 1800.
385 Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott.’ 8vo. ed. p. 457. One of Scott’s visits to Soho was made in company with his wife in the spring of 1803. Boulton was so pleased with the visit, that he urged Scott, or at least his wife, to repeat it, which produced the following letter, dated London, 13th May, 1803:—
“My dear Sir,—He was a wise man who said ‘Trust not thy wife with a man of fair tongue.’ Now as I have very little wisdom of my own, I am content to gather all I can get at second hand, and therefore, upon the faith of the sage whom I have quoted, I should be guilty of great imprudence were I to permit Charlotte to wait upon you on her return, or even to answer your kind letter to Mr. Dumergue. That task I therefore take upon myself, and you must receive my thanks along with hers, for your very kind and flattering invitation to Soho. But independent of my just suspicion of a beau who writes such flattering love-letters to my wife, our time here (owing to the sitting of our Courts of Justice, which I must necessarily attend), lays us under an indispensable necessity of returning to Scotland as speedily as possible, and by the nearest road. We can therefore only express our joint and most sincere regret that we cannot upon this occasion have the honour and satisfaction of visiting Soho and its hospitable inhabitants. Mrs. Nicolson, Mr. and Miss Dumergue join Charlotte and me in the most sincere good wishes to Miss Boulton, to you, and to all your friends; and I suspect so foolish a letter will make you believe you have escaped a very idle visitor in,
“Dear Sir,
“Your very faithful servant,
“Walter Scott.”
386 Watt to M. Robinson Boulton, 9th September, 1799.
387 Watt to M. Robinson Boulton, 26th September, 1799.
388 Boulton to Watt, 10th October, 1802. One of Boulton’s objects in making his contemplated journey to Paris, was to undertake the erection of coining machinery for the French Government, who were about to recoin the whole of their gold, silver, and copper money. With their imperfect machinery, he calculated that it would take them nearly twenty years to accomplish this; whereas with his new machinery he could undertake to turn out a thousand million of pieces in three years. He communicated to Watt, that he had been making experiments as to the maximum speed of his coining machines, worked by the steam-engine, and found that he could regularly strike fifty-three of his copper pieces or fifty-six English crown-pieces per minute, while he could with one press in collars also regularly strike India copper pieces of half the diameter at the rate of 106 to 112 per minute, or from 6360 to 6720 pieces per hour; but when pieces of half an inch diameter were wanted he had recourse to his new small press, with which he could strike from 150 to 200 pieces per minute! “My presses,” said he, “are far more exact and more durable, and my means of working them are now infinitely beyond anything they (the French coiners) have ever thought of, and my mint is now in far better order than ever.”
389 Watt to Boulton, 23rd November, 1802.
390 Robison to Watt, 3rd February, 1797.
391 Cited in Muirhead’s ‘Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt,’ ii. 264
392 Lord Cockburn’s ‘Memorials,’ 51.
393 It is a remarkable fact that Dr. Priestley was regarded with as much suspicion in America as he had been in England. The American government looked upon him as a spy in the interest of France; and he had great difficulty in forming a Unitarian congregation. The horror of the French Revolution, which had extended to America, was the cause of the hostile feeling displayed towards him. “The change that has taken place,” he said, in a letter dated 6th September, 1798, “is indeed hardly credible, as I have done nothing to provoke resentment; but, being a citizen of France, and a friend to the Revolution, is sufficient. I asked one of the more moderate of the party whether he thought, if Dr. Price, the great friend of their own Revolution, were alive, he would now be allowed to come into this country. He said, he believed he would not!”—In 1801 Dr. Priestley, by deed of trust, appointed Matthew Boulton, Samuel Galton, and Wm. Vaughan, Esqrs., trustees for Mrs. Finch (his daughter) and her children, in respect of 1200l. invested for their benefit in public securities.
394 Beattie’s ‘Life of Campbell,’ i. 112.
395 Letter to M. R. Morehead, 7th May, 1796.
396 Paris’s ‘Life of Davy,’ i. 48–9.
397 ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ xcix. 279.
398 J. Watt, jun., to M. R. Boulton, 8th June, 1804.
399 Watt to Boulton, Sidmouth, 14th October, 1804.
400 Watt to Boulton, Exeter, 22nd October, 1804.
401 Paris’s ‘Life of Davy,’ i. 198–200.
402 Cited in Muirhead’s ‘Mechanical Inventions of James Watt,—Correspondence,’ ii. 269.
403 One of these, thrown out in a letter to Watt, may be mentioned—a speculation since revived by the late Dr. S. Brown of Edinburgh,—the transmutation of bodies. “These are wonderful steps,” said he, “which are every day making in chemical analysis. The analysis of the alkalis and alkaline earths by Guyton, by Henry, and others, will presently lead, I think, to the doctrine of a reciprocal convertibility of all things into all. It brings to mind a minister lecturing on the first chapter of one of the Gospels, when, after reading, ‘Adam begat Abel, and Abel begat,’ &c.,—to save himself the trouble of so many cramp names, he said, ‘and so they all begat one another to the 15th verse.’ I expect to see alchemy revive, and be as universally studied as ever.”
404 Watt to Boulton, 13th May, 1804.
405 Watt to Boulton, 14th October, 1804.
406 De Luc to Boulton, Windsor Castle, 25th January, 1807. It had been arranged that George III., the Queen, and the Princesses, should pay a visit to Soho in 1805, though the King had by that time become quite blind. When told of Boulton’s illness, and that he was confined to bed, his Majesty replied, “Then I will visit Mr. Boulton in his sick-chamber” (MS. Memoir by Mr. Keir). The royal visit was eventually put off, the Council advising that the King should go direct to Weymouth and nowhere else.
407 The following is the inscription on the mural monument erected to his memory in the side aisle of Handsworth Church, in the composition of which James Watt assisted:—
Sacred to the Memory of
Matthew Boulton, F.R.S.
By the skilful exertion of a mind turned to Philosophy and Mechanics,
The application of a taste correct and refined,
And an ardent spirit of enterprize, he improved, embellished, and extended
The Arts and Manufactures of his country,
Leaving his Establishment of Soho a noble monument of his
Genius, industry, and success.
The character his talents had raised, his virtues adorned and exalted.
Active to discern merit, and prompt to relieve distress,
His encouragement was liberal, his benevolence unwearied.
Honoured and admired at home and abroad,
He closed a life eminently useful, the 17th of August, 1809, Aged 81,
Esteemed, loved, and lamented.
408 The monument to Boulton is on the left hand of the altar in the above illustration; that of Murdock is opposite to it, on the right.
409 Isaac Perrins was one of the most noted among the fighters of Soho. Mr. Scale, a partner in the hardware business, wrote to Mr. Boulton, then at Cosgarne (15th October, 1782),—“Perrins has had a battle with the famous Jemmy Sargent for a hundred guineas, in which Perrins came off conqueror without a fall or hurt: in 13 rounds he knocked down his antagonist 13 times. They had it out at Colemore on our Wake Monday. The Sohoites all returned with blue cockades.” Mrs. Watt, in a gossipy letter to Mr. Boulton of the same date, says “1500l. was betted against Perrins at Birmingham, and lost.” Perrins’s success led him to turn “professional bruiser” for a time, and he left his place in the smith’s shop. But either not succeeding in his new business, or finding the work harder than that of the smithy, he came back to Soho, and, being a good workman, he was taken on again and remained in Boulton’s employment till the close of his life, leaving sons to succeed him in the same department.
410 Boulton to De Luc, 20th October, 1787.
411 The MS. memoir is dated Glasgow the 17th September, 1809, at which period Watt was in his 73rd year. It had evidently been written at the request of M. Robinson Boulton, Esq., shortly after his father’s death. We find various testimony to the same effect as the above in the Soho papers. Thus Mr. Peter Ewart, C.E., speaks of Mr. Boulton’s remarkable quickness in selecting objects to which machinery might be applied with advantage, and of his great promptitude and determination in carrying his plans into effect. He also describes the contagiousness of his example, which strengthened the weak and inspired the timid. “He possessed,” says Mr. Ewart, “above all other men I have ever known, the faculty of inspiring others with a portion of that ardent zeal with which he himself pursued every important object he had in view; and it was impossible to be near him without becoming warmly interested in the success of his enterprises. The urbanity of his manners, and his great kindness to young people in particular, never failed to leave the most agreeable impression on the minds of all around him; and most truly may it be said that he reigned in the hearts of those that were in his employment.”—Boulton MSS.
412 Boulton to M. Vanlinder, Rotterdam, 24th April, 1788.
413 “Though I was in some measure prepared,” he wrote, “yet I had hoped that he might have recovered from this fit, as he has done from other severe ones. Such wishes, however, were selfish; for in respect to himself, none of his friends could rationally have desired the prolongation of a life which has long been passed in torture, without hope of relief. May he therefore rest in peace; and when our end approaches, may we have as little to reproach us and as much to console us as he had.”—Mr. Watt to his son, 22nd August, 1809. Boulton MSS.
414 Watt to M. Robinson Boulton, 23rd August, 1809.
415 Lord Brougham’s ‘Lives of Philosophers of the Time of George III.’ The Friday Club of Edinburgh was so called because of the evening of the week on which it met and supped. It numbered amongst its members Professor Playfair, Walter Scott, Henry Brougham, Francis Jeffrey, Leonard Horner, Lord Corehouse, Sir W. Drummond, and others known to fame. Watt was a regular attender of the Club during his Edinburgh visits.
416 In March, 1811, he wrote Dr. P. Wilson as follows:—“For want of other news I must now say a little upon my late invention, with which Dr. Herschel seemed much pleased. It continues to succeed, and I have realised some more of my ideas on the subject. I have executed several small busts in alabaster, not being strong enough to work in marble. I had a difficulty in getting the several segments which form the surface of the bust to meet, but have now accomplished it. It requires a very accurate construction of the machine, and a very accurate adjustment of the tools, so that their axes may be always equally distant from each other, as the axes of the pattern and that of the stone to be cut are. I have also made some improvements in the tools for cutting marble and other hard stones. The things you saw were done by the tool and the guide-point, moving in parallel lines, straight or circular, and very near one another; (an illustration of Euclid’s position, that the motion of a point generates a line, and the motion of a line generates a surface). I have now contrived, though not executed, that the two points, the guide and the cutting point, may move in any line, whether straight or crooked, square or diagonal, so that an inscription might be cut in stone from a drawing on paper.”—Cited in Muirhead’s ‘Mechanical Inventions of James Watt,’ ii. 329–30.
417 Cited in Muirhead’s ‘Mechanical Inventions,’ &c., ii. 340–1. These drawings must be in existence, and of great interest, as showing the vigour of Watt’s inventive faculty at this late period of his life.
418 In 1808 Mr. Watt made over 300l. to the College by Deed of Gift, for the purpose of founding a prize for students in Natural Science, as some acknowledgment of “the many favours” which the College had conferred upon him.—In 1816 he gave to the Town of Greenock 100l. for the purpose of purchasing books for the Mathematical School. “My intention in this donation,” he observed in his letter to Mr. Anderson of Greenock, “is to form the beginning of a scientific library, for the instruction of the youth of Greenock; and I hope it will prompt others to add to it, and to render my townsmen as eminent for their knowledge as they are for their spirit of enterprise.” Watt’s idea has since been carried out by his townsmen, and the Watt Library is now one of the most valuable institutions of Greenock. It ought to be added, that the erection of the building was mainly due to the munificence of Mr. Watt’s son, the late James Watt, Esq., of Aston Hall, near Birmingham. A marble statue of Watt, by Chantrey, is placed in the Library, with an inscription from the pen of Lord Jeffrey.
419 Answer by the author of ‘Waverley’ to the Epistle Dedicatory of ‘The Monastery.’
420 ‘Autobiography of Mrs. Schimmelpenninck,’ 3rd ed. 35.
421 The following anecdote is told by Mrs. Schimmelpenninck:—“During the peace of Amiens, Mr. Watt visited Paris. It so happened that while going through one of the palaces, I believe the Tuileries, a French housemaid appeared much perplexed concerning some bright English stoves which had just been received, and which she did not know how to clean. An English gentleman was standing by, to whom she appealed for information. This was Charles James Fox. He could give no help; “But,” said he, “here is a fellow-countryman of mine who will tell you all about it.” This was Mr. Watt, to whom he was at the moment talking; and who proceeded to give the housemaid full instructions as to the best mode of cleaning her grate. This anecdote I have often heard Mrs. Watt tell with great diversion.”
422 Lord Brougham says, “His voice was deep and low, and if somewhat monotonous, it yet seemed in harmony with the weight and the beauty of his discourse, through which, however, there also ran a current of a lighter kind; for he was mirthful, temperately jocular, nor could anything to more advantage set off the living anecdotes of men and things, with which the grave texture of his talk was interwoven, than his sly and quiet humour, both of mind and look, in recounting them.”—‘Lives of Philosophers of the Time of George III.’
423 “I remember, as a young girl,” she says, “the pleasant dinners and people I have seen at Soho. I remember being present one day when Bertrand de Moleville, the exiled minister of Louis XVI., left the dinner-table to make an omelette, which was, of course, pronounced ‘excellent.’ That man then gave me a lifelong lesson,—of the power of enjoyment and of giving pleasure by his cheerful bright manner and conversation, under such sad circumstances as exile and poverty. I looked at him with great admiration, and I have his face distinct before me now, though I saw him only that once.”
424 The following is the inscription:—
not to perpetuate a name
which must endure while the peaceful arts flourish,
but to show
that mankind have learned to honour those
who best deserve their gratitude,
the King,
his ministers, and many of the nobles
and commoners of the realm,
raised this monument to
JAMES WATT,
who directing the force of an original genius
early exercised in philosophic research
to the improvement of
the Steam-engine,
enlarged the resources of his country,
increased the power of man,
and rose to an eminent place
among the most illustrious followers of science,
and the real benefactors of the world.
Born at Greenock, 1736.
Died at Heathfield, in Staffordshire, 1819.
425 E. M. Bataille, ‘Traité des Machines à Vapeur.’ Paris, 1847–9.
426 What the steam-engine has done for the West is well known. What is yet expected from it in the East may be gathered from the few pregnant words lately uttered by Hassan Ali Khan, Persian Ambassador at the Court of France, at the recent celebration in Paris of a national festival instituted nineteen centuries before the birth of Christ. Having recalled the minds of his hearers to the early fire worship of his country, which sprang from the primeval idolatry, he proceeded to say that it was still to Fire that he fondly looked for the regeneration of Persia. Fire had changed the face of Europe. In the steam-engine, the railroad, the electric spark, the screw or paddle ship, far more than in gunpowder or rifled cannon, fire was the great benefactor that would bless one day the land of his forefathers, who had instinctively worshipped that element in secret anticipation of what was to come.
24:
By Tho. Savory, Gent. London,
By Tho. Savery, Gent. London,
32:
a large, A, A, and a
a large, A, and a
224:
19th November, 1791.
19th November, 1781.
361:
substitute for isinglas, he occupied
substitute for isinglass, he occupied