Figure 11.—Richards high-speed engine indicator of 1861, showing application of the Watt straight-line linkage. (USNM 307515; Smithsonian photo 46570).
In considering the order of synthetic ability required to design the straight-line linkage and to combine it with a pantograph, it should be kept in mind that this was the first one of a long line of such mechanisms.[24] Once the idea was abroad, it was only to be expected that many variations and alternative solutions should appear. One wonders, however, what direction the subsequent work would have taken if Watt had not so clearly pointed the way.
[ [24] At least one earlier straight-line linkage, an arrangement later ascribed to Richard Roberts, had been depicted before Watt's patent (Pierre Patte, Mémoirs sur les objets les plus importants de l'architecture, Paris, 1769, p. 229 and pl. 11). However, this linkage (reproduced here in figure 18) had no detectable influence on Watt or on subsequent practice.
In 1827 John Farey, in his exhaustive study of the steam engine, wrote perhaps the best contemporary view of Watt's work. Farey as a young man had several times talked with the aging Watt, and he had reflected upon the nature of the intellect that had caused Watt to be recognized as a genius, even within his own lifetime. In attempting to explain Watt's genius, Farey set down some observations that are pertinent not only to kinematic synthesis but to the currently fashionable term "creativity."
In Farey's opinion Watt's inventive faculty was far superior to that of any of his contemporaries; but his many and various ideas would have been of little use if he had not possessed a very high order of judgment, that "faculty of distinguishing between ideas; decomposing compound ideas into more simple elements; arranging them into classes, and comparing them together...."
Farey was of the opinion that while a mind like Watt's could produce brilliant new ideas, still the "common stock of ideas which are current amongst communities and professions, will generally prove to be of a better quality than the average of those new ideas, which can be produced by any individual from the operation of his own mind, without assistance from others." Farey concluded with the observation that "the most useful additions to that common stock, usually proceed from the individuals who are well acquainted with the whole series."[25]
[ [25] Farey, op. cit. (footnote 6), pp. 651, 652.
[To Draw a Straight Line]
During most of the century after James Watt had produced his parallel motion, the problem of devising a linkage, one point of which would describe a straight line, was one that tickled the fancies of mathematicians, of ingenious mechanics, and of gentlemanly dabblers in ideas. The quest for a straight-line mechanism more accurate than that of Watt far outlasted the pressing practical need for such a device. Large metal planing machines were well known by 1830, and by midcentury crossheads and crosshead guides were used on both sides of the Atlantic in engines with and without working beams.
By 1819 John Farey had observed quite accurately that, in England at least, many other schemes had been tried and found wanting and that "no methods have been found so good as the original engine; and we accordingly find, that all the most established and experienced manufacturers make engines which are not altered in any great feature from Mr. Watt's original engine...."[26]