A friend, seeing him cast down and unhappy, advised him to give up inventing. As well might he have advised the sun not to shine or living man to cease from breathing. Meantime the years went on. Watt was often, as he said, “heart-sick.” Long years after, remembering this weary time, he said, “The public only look at my success.” He stinted himself in everything but bare necessaries, for as yet his engine had paid him nothing and cost enormously. But light again arose in the darkness when he got as a partner Boulton, of Birmingham, and from that day onwards matters mended. Six of the fourteen years’ patent were gone, but he succeeded in getting a renewal of it for twenty-four years by Act of Parliament, in spite of grumbling discontent of men who wanted to steal the fruit of his brain, and were thus prevented.
Now he set to work in earnest. His first engine was made to blow the bellows of ironworks. His second to pump water out of the mines in Cornwall. In 1776 this was set up, and worked perfectly. “There it was, ‘forking water’ as never engine before had been known ‘to fork.’”
“All the world are agape,” he said, “to see what it can do.”
And it did well. And now the “voice of the country was in its favour.” So the first step was taken. The others followed in quick succession. The partners worked together perfectly. Watt understood engines, but not men. He grew impatient, irritable, peevish if a workman were inefficient, and would have dismissed him on the spot. Boulton was wiser, and never failed to oil the wheels. Watt was despondent, easily cast down; Boulton was his “backbone.”
There came then into Watt’s mind the idea of an engine that would produce rotary motion. This he patented in 1781. All round and about, ready to pounce on it, were a perfect swarm of pirates.
“One’s thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them,” he said. And again, “All mankind seem to be resolved to rob us.”
In 1782 the first rotary machine worked. After long waiting there was a brilliant result. It was made to drive a corn-mill. In our day it would be hard to say what Watt’s rotary machine is not made to do. It is made for corn-mills and for cotton-mills, for sugar-mills and iron-mills. It drives our steamers and rolls our hammer-iron and coins our money and prints our books.
And now the great inventor had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. In 1790 he had an interview with the King, who asked about his engines.
But he had not landed at the topmost round of the ladder without much painful climbing and many weary steps. His life had been all through shadowed by ill-health, and an anxious, worrying mind that refused to be calm. He had a shrinking distaste to business, and a fearful habit of looking on the dark side of things. Often would he have sunk in depression and despair had it not been for his cheery partner. It was only in the late years of his life that he came to know anything like peace. His mind all along had been too active for his body.
But though as an old man he retired from public life and from business, he could not altogether retire from invention. He invented a letter-copying machine, and one for copying statuary. In his old age he lived very quietly in his comfortable house near Birmingham, furnishing what he called his Garret, a room where he might be alone and still invent, don again, as in boyhood, the leather apron, cook his own food, and ponder anew the details of those wonderful inventions he had given to the world.