A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine

by Robert Henry Thurston

The action of chlorine in bleaching organic coloring-matters, by (as since shown) decomposing them and combining with their hydrogen, was made known to Watt by M. Berthollet, the distinguished French chemist, and the former immediately introduced its use into Great Britain, by inducing his father-in-law, Mr. Macgregor, to make a trial of it.

The copartnership of Boulton & Watt terminated by limitation, and with the expiration of the patents under which they had been working, in the first year of the present century; and both partners, now old and feeble, withdrew from active business, leaving their sons to renew the agreement and to carry on the business under the same firm-style.

Boulton, however, still interested himself in some branches of manufacture, especially in his mint, where he had coined many years and for several nations.

Watt retired, a little later, to Heathfield, where he passed the remainder of his life in peaceful enjoyment of the society of his friends, in studies of all current matters of interest in science, as well as in engineering. One by one his old friends died—Black in 1799, Priestley, an exile to America, in 1803, and Robison a little later. Boulton died, at the age of eighty-one, August 17, 1809, and even the loss of this nearest and dearest of his friends outside the family was a less severe blow than that of his son Gregory, who died in 1804.

Yet the great engineer and inventor was not depressed by the loneliness which was gradually coming upon him. He wrote: “I know that all men must die, and I submit to the decrees of Nature, I hope, with due reverence to the Disposer of events;” and neglected no opportunity to secure amusement or instruction, and kept body and mind constantly occupied. He still attended the weekly meetings of the club, meeting Rennie and Telford, and other distinguished men of his own and the succeeding generation. He lost nothing of his fondness for invention, and spent many months in devising a machine for copying statuary, which he had not perfected to his own satisfaction at the time of his death, ten years later. This machine was a kind of pentagraph, which could be worked in any plane, and in which the marking-pencil gave place to a cutting-tool. The tracing-point followed the surface of the pattern, while the cutting-point, following its motion precisely, formed a fac-simile in the material operated upon.

In the year 1800 he invented the water-main which was laid down by the Glasgow Water-Works Company across the Clyde. The joints were spherical and articulated, like those of the lobster’s tail.

His workshop, of which a [sketch] is hereafter given, as drawn by the artist Skelton, was in the garret of his house, and was well supplied with tools and all kinds of laboratory material. His lathe and his copying-machine were placed before the window, and his writing-desk in the corner. Here he spent the greater part of his leisure time, often even taking his meals in the little shop, rather than go to the table for them. Even when very old, he occasionally made a journey to London or Glasgow, calling on his old friends and studying the latest engineering devices and inspecting public works, and was everywhere welcomed by young and old as the greatest living engineer, or as the kind and wise friend of earlier days.

He died August 19, 1819, in the eighty-third year of his age, and was buried in Handsworth Church. The sculptor Chantrey was employed to place a fitting monument above his grave, and the nation erected a statue of the great man in Westminster Abbey.

This sketch of the greatest of all the inventors of the steam-engine has been given no greater length than its subject justifies. Whether we consider Watt as the inventor of the standard steam-engine of the nineteenth century, as the scientific investigator of the physical principles upon which the invention is based, or as the builder and introducer of the most powerful known instrument by which the “great sources of power in Nature are converted, adapted, and applied for the use and convenience of man,” he is fully entitled to preëminence. His character as a man was no less admirable than as an engineer.