Yours rejoicing,
James Watt.”
[ [177] Watt wrote Boulton, 2nd July, 1778,—“On the subject of Mr. Hall I should not have been so earnest had I not been urged on by the prospect of impending ruin, which may be much accelerated by a wicked or careless servant in his place.” Later, on the 6th August, Watt wrote, “I look upon Hall as a very great blunderer, and very inattentive to everything that has hitherto been committed to his care; but I think that our present necessities will oblige us to employ him.”—Boulton MSS.
[ [178] Watt to Boulton, 11th August, 1779.
[ [179] Watt to Boulton, 4th October, 1779.
[ [180] Watt to Boulton, 28th October, 1779.
[ [181] Watt told Sir Walter Scott that though hundreds probably of his northern countrymen had sought employment at his establishment, he never could get one of them to become a first-rate mechanic. “Many of them,” said he, “were too good for that, and rose to be valuable clerks and bookkeepers; but those incapable of this sort of advancement had always the same insuperable aversion to toiling so long at any one point of mechanism as to gain the highest wages among the workmen.”—Note to Lockhart’s ‘Life of Scott.’ The fact, we suppose was, that the Scotch mechanics were only as yet in course of training,—the English having had a long start of them. Though Watt’s statement that Scotchmen were incapable of being first-class mechanics may have been true in his day, it is so no longer, as the workshops of the Clyde can prove; some of the most highly finished steam-engines of modern times having been turned out of Glasgow workshops.
[ [182] The above anecdotes, of Murdock’s introduction to Soho, and the fight with the captains, were communicated by his son, the late Mr. Murdock of Sycamore Hill near Birmingham. He also informed us that Murdock fought a duel with Captain Trevithick (father of the Trevithick of Locomotive celebrity), in consequence of a quarrel between him and Watt, in which Murdock conceived his master to have been unfairly and harshly treated.
[ [183] Watt to Boulton, from Chacewater, 16th October, 1779. Boulton MSS.
[ [184] It appears from a statement prepared by Zaccheus Walker, the accountant of Boulton and Fothergill, that on an invested capital of about 20,000l., the excess of losses over profits during the eighteen years ending 1780, had been upwards of 11,000l.; and that but for the capital and credit of Matthew Boulton, that concern must have broken down.