James Watt as Musical Organ Maker

This chapter examines Watt’s work in Glasgow between 1756-1744 when he struggled to make a living from mathematical instruments and also resorted to making and selling musical instruments. He made stringed instruments, including viole da gamba and guitars, plus flutes and organs. There are no complete stringed or wind instruments extant, although tools and parts are held in the London Science Museum. Watt also collaborated with Charles Clagget, an accomplished viol de gamba player and innovator in musical instrument technology, including the first trumpet valves. Watt’s accounts books make clear that he made or repaired barrel, chamber and finger organs and the chapter examines the evidence for these organs including the James Watt Organ in the Glasgow Museums’ Service collection. Its potential links to the great man are considered, to try to uncover the boundaries between myth and reality in regards to the provenance of this instrument.

Introduction

2019 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of James Watt, the scientist and engineer. This chapter introduces the ways in which he has been portrayed in public art, such as William Bloye’s gilded statue of Watt, Matthew Boulton and William Murdock in Birmingham. The Introduction also looks at how Watt as a scientist, engineer and individual has been represented by writers and historians since his death. His depiction as a great man began in his obituary by Francis Jeffrey and continued in the first biographies by François Arago and James Patrick Muirhead. The projection of Watt as a national hero was substantially due to his son, James Watt junior’s filial project to celebrate his father in publications, monuments, paintings and medals. History and popular writing in the twentieth century focused attention on Watt as a steam engineer, which is the way in which he is largely perceived today. The Introduction draws attention to the ways in which writers in this volume have broadened our understanding of Watt in the twenty-first century.

The Papers of James Watt and Family

This chapter describes the provenance and acquisition of the James Watt and Family Papers by Archives and Collections, Library of Birmingham. It describes the arrangement of the Papers and gives some indication of their importance to eighteenth and early nineteenth-century history. It provides information on the very wide ranging content of the records.

Catalysing Chemical Correspondence

James Watt has already been established as a competent eighteenth-century chemist. His role as a chemical correspondent, however, has not been examined adequately. This chapter argues that through well-timed letters Watt circulated vital knowledge between two contemporary chemists, Joseph Black and James Keir. Two case studies in industrial chemistry—the production of alkali and the separation of plated metals—reveal Watt to be an active letter writer who initiated collaboration between business partners and communicated processes promptly. No mere passive conduit of information, Watt was a confidant who encouraged propriety in the manner of correspondence. He was a lynchpin between Black and Keir when the former was fearful of writing the latter, and he censured ill-timed disclosure of industrial secrets. This chapter concludes that future study of Watt’s epistolary exchanges with other chemists will establish more firmly his mediating role in chemical correspondence in the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters.

The Rise of James Watt

This chapter offers a re-appraisal of the life of James Watt (1736–1819) in Greenock and Glasgow in the formative period of his career. In the mid-eighteenth century, Greenock developed into a major seaport connecting Scotland to the Americas via the river Clyde. Upriver, Glasgow received imports of North American tobacco and Caribbean sugar. Travelling to Glasgow in 1754, Watt worked in a burgh on the cusp of industrialisation fuelled by commerce and enabled by the application of enlightened ideas. His embryonic career was ignited by his appointment as mathematical instrument maker to the University of Glasgow before leaving for Birmingham in 1774. This chapter uncovers the Watt family’s connections with transatlantic commerce and chattel slavery concluding the profits were instrumental in Watt’s rise. Through an Atlantic world lens, this chapter re-assesses Watt’s formative years which laid the foundations for one of the greatest careers of the industrial revolution.

James Watt and the Steam Engine

This chapter investigates the role of non-conformist religious belief in James Watt’s up-bringing in Greenock, Scotland. Calvinism, it is suggested, facilitated ‘outside the box’ thinking and enabled absorption of the knowledge advances made during the Scientific Revolution. In the case of Watt the Calvinist outlook combined with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Glasgow and Birmingham to foster the development of technologies that significantly improved the efficiency of the Newcomen steam engine.

The Watt Family, Thomas Beddoes, Davies Giddy, Humphry Davy, and the Medical Pneumatic Institution, Bristol

This essay, eschewing the use of meta-narratives such as Enlightenment, Romanticism or Industrialisation, examines in detail the role that the Watt family (James senior and his sons James junior and Gregory) played, first, in establishing the Medical Pneumatic Institution (MPI) in Bristol and, second, in securing the employment of the nineteen-year old Humphry Davy to be the Institution’s Superintendent. The radical physician Thomas Beddoes wanted to investigate, using an apparatus developed by Watt senior, the possible therapeutic effects of gases discovered during the eighteenth century. To facilitate developing pneumatic medicine Beddoes organised a national fund-raising campaign to establish the MPI. In doing this he was supported (including financially) by the Watt family and by others such as Tom Wedgwood. By the middle of 1798 sufficient funds had been obtained and Beddoes began looking for a Superintendent to run the MPI. Davies Giddy and Gregory Watt successfully recommended Davy to Beddoes, who appointed him in October 1798. Davy spent two and a half years at the MPI, during which he discovered the physiological effects of nitrous oxide and undertook his earliest electrical researches. Understanding the course of these events at the level of detail used here suggests the limited explanatory value of meta-narratives.

James Watt’s Workshop

The workshop of engineer James Watt is a jewel in the collections of the Science Museum, London. Containing over eight thousand objects, it is a complete physical record of Watt’s working life and interests. Watt is best known for his work on the steam engine but, rather than being filled with steam components, the workshop is full of sculpture, chemistry, instrument-making, antiquity, and much else besides. This chapter will use Watt’s workshop as a lens through which we can explore the knowledge economy underpinning Britain’s industrial revolution and question the kind of knowledge which counted in that economy.

James Watt and the Business of Natural Philosophy

This chapter re-evaluates the place of natural philosophical inquiry in Watt’s life and work, and its relationship to his practical projects. It examines how family, education and working life opened up natural philosophical inquiry for him, and shaped his orientation towards it. Watt’s bursts of experimentation on steam and on the nature of airs are described, which led to his claim to have discovered the compound nature of water, and to his work in pneumatic medicine. It is argued that Watt developed a coherent chemistry of heat that has not been fully appreciated and that informed his steam engine improvements in fundamental but indirect ways, providing a framework for understanding its internal processes. Finally, the varied sites of Watt’s inquiries beyond the laboratory are considered, as is his problematic relationship with the community of natural philosophers, showing that the business of natural philosophy was his primary concern.

James Watt’s Paine

James Watt was deeply alarmed by the promotion of republicanism and democracy in the industrial Enlightenment. In an age of the mob this was not entirely unusual but, near the end of the century, riot and republicanism became a heady mixture. In France, the breach of the Bastille was a symbol not simply of liberty but of the wider collapse of authority. If Watt needed any reminder, it was surely in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France which predicted the decay of social cohesion. Watt’s fears were soon reflected in the Priestley riots, and especially in the apparent spread of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. His reaction was also clearly personal along with Watt’s well-known worries over James, junior, who dabbled in dangerous democratic alliances in Manchester and Paris. Watt senior determined he should act by secretly revealing much about local circumstances to the law officers of the Crown.