Fig. 35.—James Watt’s Workshop.
(From Smiles’s “Lives of Boulton and Watt.”)
Smiles, Watt’s most conscientious and indefatigable biographer, writes:[41]
“Some months since, we visited the little garret at Heathfield in which Watt pursued the investigations of his later years. The room had been carefully locked up since his death, and had only once been swept out. Everything lay very much as he left it. The piece of iron which he was last employed in turning, lay on the lathe. The ashes of the last fire were in the grate; the last bit of coal was in the scuttle. The Dutch oven was in its place over the stove, and the frying-pan in which he cooked his meals was hanging on its accustomed nail. Many objects lay about or in the drawers, indicating the pursuits which had been interrupted by death—busts, medallions, and figures, waiting to be copied by the copying-machine—many medallion-moulds, a store of plaster-of-Paris, and a box of plaster casts from London, the contents of which do not seem to have been disturbed. Here are Watt’s ladles for melting lead, his foot-rule, his glue-pot, his hammer. Reflecting mirrors, an extemporized camera with the lenses mounted on pasteboard, and many camera-glasses laid about, indicate interrupted experiments in optics. There are quadrant-glasses, compasses, scales, weights, and sundry boxes of mathematical instruments, once doubtless highly prized. In one place a model of the governor, in another of the parallel-motion, and in a little box, fitted with wooden cylinders mounted with paper and covered with figures, is what we suppose to be a model of his calculating-machine. On the shelves are minerals and chemicals in pots and jars, on which the dust of nearly half a century has settled. The moist substances have long since dried up; the putty has been turned to stone, and the paste to dust. On one shelf we come upon a dish in which lies a withered bunch of grapes. On the floor, in a corner, near to where Watt sat and worked, is a hair-trunk—a touching memorial of a long-past love and a long-dead sorrow. It contains all poor Gregory’s school-books, his first attempts at writing, his boy’s drawings of battles, his first school-exercises down to his college-themes, his delectuses, his grammars, his dictionaries, and his class-books—brought into this retired room, where the father’s eye could rest upon them. Near at hand is the sculpture-machine, on which he continued working to the last. Its wooden frame is worm-eaten, and dropping into dust, like the hands that made it. But though the great workman is gone to rest, with all his griefs and cares, and his handiwork is fast crumbling to decay, the spirit of his work, the thought which he put into his inventions, still survives, and will probably continue to influence the destinies of his race for all time to come.”
The visitor to Westminster Abbey will find neither monarch, nor warrior, nor statesman, nor poet, honored with a nobler epitaph than that which is inscribed on the pedestal of Chantrey’s monument to Watt:
Not to perpetuate a Name,
WHICH MUST ENDURE WHILE THE PEACEFUL ARTS FLOURISH,
BUT TO SHOW
THAT MANKIND HAVE LEARNT TO HONOR THOSE WHO BEST DESERVE THEIR
GRATITUDE,
THE KING,
HIS MINISTERS, AND MANY OF THE NOBLES AND COMMONERS OF THE REALM,
RAISED THIS MONUMENT TO
JAMES WATT,
WHO, DIRECTING THE FORCE OF AN ORIGINAL GENIUS,
EARLY EXERCISED IN PHILOSOPHIC RESEARCH,
TO THE IMPROVEMENT OF
THE STEAM-ENGINE,
ENLARGED THE RESOURCES OF HIS COUNTRY, INCREASED THE POWER OF MAN,
AND ROSE TO AN EMINENT PLACE
AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS FOLLOWERS OF SCIENCE AND THE REAL
BENEFACTORS OF THE WORLD.
Born at Greenock, MDCCXXXVI.
Died at Heathfield, in Staffordshire, MDCCCXIX.
Tomb of James Watt.