Two drawbacks—waste of steam and waste of fuel—had been the ruin of former inventions.
“Ye need not fash yourself about that, man,” Watt said to a friend, answering some objection that he had made, “I have now made an engine that shall not waste a particle of steam.”
And so, though it was but the beginning, though years of weary labour and disappointment and discouragement waited him before the end was reached, the Condensing Steam Engine, as we have it now, first sprang into being that spring afternoon on the Green in Glasgow.
And now the young inventor set himself with eager enthusiasm to make a model. There were no skilled workmen to be had, no self-acting tools, as in our day, and so the first model was only partly successful. But not a whit discouraged, he went on.
“My whole thoughts are bent on this machine,” he said. “I can think of nothing else.”
And now there remains but to tell in a few words—for it is the record of his manhood—the “ups and downs” just beginning, the disappointments, the failures, the hopes and fears that waited on this offspring of his brain. He was poor, and money was the first thing that was needed. Who would risk thousands on such a vague and shadowy thing?
Meantime the pot had to be kept boiling! He looked into the future, and he saw great things steam might yet be made to do, but there was bread and butter needed for the present. So he went bravely in for surveying, though there was little enough to be made by that. He had still ill-health to struggle against. “I am still plagued with headaches,” he wrote about this time, “and sometimes heartaches.”
But after a time a gleam of hope shone through the clouds. After failures and difficulties he at last succeeded in finding someone willing to risk his money. So in 1769 he patented his engine, and began to build it. In six months it was finished, and as it neared completion Watt could hardly sleep. Then, and for long still in the future, he was to suffer from bad, incapable workmen, and this accounted for his partial failure.
“It was,” he said, “a clumsy job.” Watt grew depressed.
In 1770 he wrote: “I enter on my thirty-fifth year, and I think I have hardly yet done thirty-five pence worth of good in the world.”