James Watt

Start with what James Watt did not do. He did not invent the steam engine. Thomas Newcomen’s atmospheric engines had been pumping water out of mines since the early 1700s. And the story of the boy Watt watching the lid of a kettle rattle is a legend, not history.

What Watt did was make the steam engine efficient. Then, with Matthew Boulton, he made it pay. That took him from Glasgow to Birmingham, and it took the better part of a lifetime.

From Greenock to Glasgow

Watt was born in Greenock on the Clyde on 19 January 1736. His father, James Watt senior, was a merchant and ship-owner who traded sugar and tobacco with the Caribbean and North America. The young Watt trained as a mathematical instrument maker in London in 1755–56 (a letter of 31 March 1756 mentions the press gang), and then worked at Glasgow University.

There he was asked to repair the university’s model Newcomen engine. It wasted steam and fuel. Watt’s answer, which the Library of Birmingham dates to 1765, was the separate condenser: condense the steam in a vessel of its own, away from the working cylinder. In 1769 he patented “A New Invented Method of Lessening the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire Engines”.

The family firm and Frederick

The Watt family fortune is part of this story, and it has to be told straight. James Watt senior’s papers, now in the Library of Birmingham, record dealings in enslaved people: in 1739 a return cargo of “Rum, Molasses, Salt & Negroes”, and in 1741 “a negroe man to be sold on James Watts account”. His father paid for Watt’s London training and his tools.

In 1762 the family firm moved a Black child, named in a clothing list as “Fridrick”, from Greenock to Glasgow, to be sent on to Lady Spynie near Forres. On 3 October 1762 James Brodie wrote to “James Watt junior merchant in Greenock” asking after “my Black boy” and what he had cost. The historian Stephen Mullen argues that this was the engineer himself, since Watt’s own son was not born until 1769, and that Watt had taken over the account from his brother John. Mullen concludes that Watt was “directly complicit in Atlantic slavery whilst resident in the west of Scotland”. Nobody knows what became of Frederick.

All of this happened before Watt came to Birmingham.

Coming to Soho

In 1767 Dr William Small showed Watt round Boulton’s works at Soho. Watt came to Birmingham in 1774, and his experimental engine came to Soho with him. In 1775 Parliament extended his patent to 1800, and the partnership of Boulton & Watt began.

The first proof came at a Black Country pit. A newspaper report of March 1776 announced that “On Friday last a steam engine constructed upon Mr. Watts’s new principles, was set to work at Bloomfield Colliery, near Dudley” (Chester Chronicle, 14 March 1776). That Friday was 8 March. The engine had a 50-inch cylinder. Today an orange plaque, unveiled in 2019, marks the spot at Bloomfield Road, Tipton.

Harper’s Hill

From 1777 until June 1790 Watt lived at Harper’s Hill, now Regent Place in the Jewellery Quarter. The house has gone, but a listed building at 13A Regent Place may be its rear wing or stables, and a blue plaque of 2003 marks the street.

These were the years of hard graft. Engines were improved to turn wheels as well as pump. Rotary motion came in 1781, using the sun-and-planet gear — patented in Watt’s name, but invented, says the Library of Birmingham, by Boulton & Watt’s engineer William Murdoch. The double-acting engine followed in 1782, and later the centrifugal governor. Watt devised the horsepower measure used to rate his engines. In 1785 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

He invented an office machine too. On 24 July 1778 he told his friend Joseph Black that he had “lately discovered a method of copying [letters] instantaneously”. He took Boulton and James Keir as partners in James Watt & Co., and the presses went on sale in 1780. The firm kept selling them until 1840.

Watt was a full member of the Lunar Society. One of his surviving letters, of 1781, sets out for Erasmus Darwin the topics for the next meeting. Priestley wrote to him at Harper’s Hill in 1783, when Watt was working on the composition of water — a question whose credit was argued over with Henry Cavendish and Antoine Lavoisier.

Planters, petitions and a letter to Nantes

In Birmingham, Watt’s position on slavery was divided. He gave technical details in 1783 for a steam prospectus for a Jamaican estate, and in 1786 the planter Richard Pennant asked to meet him “on the subject of steam engine for Jamaica”. Yet in 1788 Wedgwood wrote to him, “I take it for granted that you & I are on the same side of the question respecting the slave trade”, and Watt’s cash book records subscriptions of a guinea to “the negro bill” in 1788 and 1789.

In October 1791 the firm suspended an engine order for Saint-Domingue after the revolution of the enslaved there. Watt wrote to the Nantes merchants: “we heartily pray that the system of slavery so disgraceful to humanity were abolished by prudent though progressive measures.” Historians read it with care. The firm had accepted an order for a slave colony, the “unhappy sufferers” it condoled with were the planters, Watt asked only for gradual abolition, and the letter was private, written to French merchants. Even so, the words are on the record.

Heathfield and the garret

In June 1790 the Watts moved to Heathfield, a new house in Handsworth designed, according to the Library of Birmingham, by Samuel Wyatt. It cost £900. Watt confessed to Black on 5 December 1790 that it “has cost me much more money than I think I had a right to lay out”.

Watt retired in 1800, as the patent expired and the business passed to the sons. But he kept working, up in a garret workshop at the top of the house, from about 1790 until his death. He died at Heathfield on 25 August 1819 and was buried at St Mary’s Church, Handsworth. In 1826 Thomas Rickman added a chapel to the church as a mausoleum for him, holding Francis Chantrey’s white marble statue of Watt, made in 1825.

The garret was left almost untouched for a century. In 1924 its contents — more than 8,000 objects, with the door, window, skylight and floorboards — went to the Science Museum in London, where the workshop was redisplayed in 2011. Heathfield itself was demolished in 1927–28. Its lodge survives at 33 Radnor Road, with a blue plaque put up in 2019 for the bicentenary of Watt’s death.