No stage-coach then ran between Glasgow and London; so it was determined that young Watt should proceed on horseback, then the most convenient and speedy mode of travelling. His chest was sent by sea. Old Mr. Watt’s memorandum-book at Heathfield contains the following entry, under date the 6th June, 1755:—

“To send James Watt’s chist to the care of Mr. William Oman, Ventener in Leith, to be shypt for London to ye care of Captain William Watson, at the Hermitage, London.

The “plaster and pomet” may possibly have been provided in view of the long journey on horseback and its contingencies. It was arranged that the youth should travel in the company of a relative, Mr. Marr, a sea-captain, who was on his way to join his ship, then lying in the Thames. They set out on the 7th of June, travelling by way of Coldstream and Newcastle, where they joined the great north road, then comparatively practicable to the south of Durham. They reached London safely on the 19th, having been about a fortnight on the road.

Mr. Marr immediately proceeded to make inquiries for a mathematical instrument maker with whom to place his young friend. But it was found that a serious obstacle presented itself in the rules of the trade, which prescribed that those employed must either be apprentices serving under a seven years’ apprenticeship, or, if journeymen, that they should have served for that term. Watt, however, had no intention of binding himself to serve for so long a period, and he had no pretensions to rank as a journeyman. His object was to learn the business in the shortest possible time, and then return to Glasgow and set up for himself. The two went about from shop to shop, but only met with rebuffs. “I have not yet got a master,” Watt wrote to his father about a fortnight after his arrival; “we have tried several, but they all made some objection or other. I find that, if any of them agree with me at all, it will not be for less than a year; and even for that time they will be expecting some money.”

Mr. Marr continued to exert himself on behalf of the youth. Anxious to be employed in any way rather than not at all, Watt offered his services gratuitously to a watchmaker named Neale, with whom Mr. Marr did business, and he was allowed to occupy himself in his shop for a time, cutting letters and figures in metal. At length a situation of a more permanent character was obtained for him; and he entered the shop of Mr. John Morgan, a respectable mathematical instrument maker in Cornhill, on the terms of receiving a year’s instruction in return for a fee of twenty guineas and the proceeds of his labour during that time. He soon proved himself a ready learner and skilful workman. That division of labour, the result of an extensive trade, which causes the best London carriages to be superior to any of provincial construction, was even then applied to mathematical instruments. “Very few here,” wrote Watt, “know any more than how to make a rule, others a pair of dividers, and such like.” His first employment was in making brass scales, rules, parallels, and the brass-work of quadrants; and by the end of a month he was able to finish a Hadley’s quadrant in better style than any apprentice in the shop. From rule and quadrant making he proceeded to azimuth compasses, brass sectors, theodolites, and the more delicate kinds of instruments. At the end of the year he wrote home to his father that he had made “a brass sector with a French joint, which is reckoned as nice a piece of framing-work as is in the trade;” and he expressed the hope that he would soon be able to work for himself, and earn his bread by his own industry.

Up to this time he had necessarily been maintained by his father, on whom he drew from time to time. Mr. Watt’s memorandum-books show that on the 27th of June he remitted him 10l.; on the 24th of August following he enters: “Sent George Anderson by post 8l. to buy a bill of 7l. or 8l. to send Wheytbread and Gifferd, and ballance of my son’s bill, 2l. 2s. 3d., for which ame to remite him more;” and on the 11th September following, the balance was forwarded through the same channel. On the 24th October, 4l. 10s. was in like manner sent to George Anderson “on son James’s second bill;” and on the 31st December, 10l. was remitted, “to be put to the credit of son James’s last bill.” To relieve his father as much as possible for the cost of his maintenance in London, Watt lived in a very frugal style, avoiding all unnecessary expenses. His living cost him only eight shillings a week; and he could not reduce it below that, he wrote to his father, “without pinching his belly.” He also sought for some remunerative work on his own account; and when he could obtain it he sat up at night to execute it.

During Watt’s stay in London he was in a great measure prevented from stirring abroad by the hot press for sailors which was then going on. As many as forty pressgangs were at work, seizing all able-bodied men they could lay hands on. In one night they took not fewer than a thousand men. Nor were the kidnappers idle. These were the agents of the East India Company, who had crimping-houses in different parts of the city for receiving the men whom they had seized upon for service in the Indian army. Even when the demand for soldiers abated, the kidnappers continued their trade, and sold their unhappy victims to the planters in Pennsylvania and other North American colonies. Sometimes severe fights took place between the pressgangs and the kidnappers for possession of those who had been seized, the law and police being apparently powerless to protect them. “They now press anybody they can get,” Watt wrote in the spring of 1756, “landsmen as well as seamen, except it be in the liberties of the city, where they are obliged to carry them before the Lord Mayor first; and unless one be either a prentice or a creditable tradesman, there is scarce any getting off again. And if I was carried before my Lord Mayor, I durst not avow that I wrought in the city, it being against their laws for any unfreeman to work even as a journeyman within the liberties.”[64] What a curious glimpse does this give us into the practice of man-hunting in London in the eighteenth century!

Watt’s enforced confinement, together with his sedentary habits and unremitting labour, soon told upon his weak frame. When he hurried to his lodgings at night, his body was wearied, and his nerves exhausted, so that his hands shook like those of an old man; yet he persevered with the extra work which he imposed upon himself, in order to earn a little honest money to help to pay for his living. His seat in Mr. Morgan’s shop being placed close to the door, which was often opened and shut in the course of the day, he caught a severe cold in the course of the winter; and he was afflicted by a racking cough and severe rheumatic pains, from the effects of which he long continued to suffer. Distressed by a gnawing pain in his back, and greatly depressed in spirits, he at length, with his father’s sanction, determined to return to Greenock, to seek for renewal of health in his native air. His father made him a further remittance to enable him to purchase some of the tools required for his trade, together with materials for making others, and a copy of Bion’s work on the construction and use of Mathematical Instruments. Having secured these, he set out on his return journey for Scotland, and reached Greenock in safety in the autumn of 1756. There his health soon became sufficiently restored to enable him to return to work; and with the concurrence and help of his father, he shortly after proceeded to Glasgow, in his twentieth year, to begin business on his own account.

In endeavouring to establish himself in his trade, Watt encountered the same obstacle which in London had almost prevented his learning it. Although there were no mathematical instrument makers in Glasgow, and it must have been a public advantage to have so skilled a mechanic settled in the place, Watt was opposed by the corporation of hammermen on the ground that he was neither the son of a burgess nor had served an apprenticeship within the borough.[65] Failing in his endeavours to open a place of business, he next tried to prevail on the corporation to allow him to make use of a small workshop wherein to make experiments; but this also was peremptorily refused. The hammermen were doubtless acting in a very narrow spirit, in thus excluding the young mechanic from the privileges of citizenship; but such was the custom of the times,—those who were within the favoured circles usually putting their shoulders together to exclude those who were without. Watt had, however, already been employed by Dr. Dick, Professor of Natural Philosophy, to repair some mathematical instruments which had been bequeathed to the University by a gentleman in the West Indies; and the professors, having an absolute authority within the area occupied by the college buildings, determined to give him an asylum there, and thus free him from the incubus of the guilds.