Boulton acted on his partner’s advice, and declined the proposed connexion. The Navy Board were placed in a dilemma by this decision. They then referred the matter to Mr. Smeaton, and requested him to report to them as to the most suitable plan of a flour-mill, and the steam-engine best calculated to drive it. To the great surprise of Watt as well as Washborough, Smeaton reported that both their engines were alike unsuited for such a purpose. “I apprehend,” he said, “that no motion communicated from the reciprocating lever of a fire-engine can ever produce a perfect circular motion, like the regular efflux of water in turning a water-wheel!” This report relieved the Commissioners. They abandoned their scheme, and the order for Washborough’s engine was at once countermanded.[209]
So soon as Watt had got fairly settled at Cosgarne, in the summer of 1781, he proceeded to work out the plan of a rotary-working engine. Boulton was making experiments with the same object at Soho, communicating to him the results from day to day. He was stimulated to prosecute the inquiry by the applications which he received from many quarters for steam-engines suitable for driving mills. He therefore urged Watt to complete the invention, and to prepare the drawings and specification, declaring his readiness at any time to provide the money requisite for taking out a patent. “The people in London, Manchester, and Birmingham,” said he, “are steam-mill mad. I don’t mean to hurry you, but I think that in the course of a month or two we should determine to take out a patent for certain methods of producing rotative motion from the vibrating or reciprocating motion of the fire-engine,—remembering that we have four months in which to describe the particulars of the invention.”[210]
Watt proceeded to put his ideas in a definite shape as fast as his bad health and low spirits would allow. Every now and then a fit of despair came upon him about his liability to the bankers, and so long as it lasted he was unmanned, and could do nothing. At the very time that Boulton was writing the letter last quoted, Watt was thus bewailing his unhappy lot:—
“When I executed the mortgage,” said he, “my sensations were such as were not to be envied by any man who goes to death in a just cause; nor has time lessened the acuteness of my feelings.... I thought I was resigning in one hour the fruits of the labour of my whole life,—and that if any accident befell you or me, I should have left a wife and children destitute of the means of subsistence, by throwing away the only jewel Fortune had presented me with.... These transactions have been such a burden upon my mind that I have become in a manner indifferent to all other things, and can take pleasure in nothing until my mind is relieved from them; and perhaps, from so long a disuse of entertaining pleasing ideas, never may be capable of receiving them any more.”[211]
Boulton made haste to console his partner, and promised to take immediate steps to relieve his mind of the anxiety that weighed so heavy upon it; and he was as good as his word. At the same time he told Watt that he must not suppose he was the only man in the world who had cares and troubles to endure. Boulton himself had, perhaps, more than his share, but he tried to bear them as lightly as he could. With his heavy business engagements to meet, his large concerns to keep going, he was not a man much to be envied; yet he continued to receive his visitors as usual at Soho, and to put on a cheerful countenance. “I am obliged,” he wrote, “to smile, to laugh, to be good-humoured, sometimes to be merry, and even go to the play! Oh, that I were at the Land’s End!” Such was his playful way of reminding Watt of the necessity of cheerfulness to enable one to get through work pleasantly.[212] But Watt’s temperament was wholly different. His philosophy never rose to the height of taking things easy. He could not cast his cares behind him, nor lose sight of them; but carried them about with him by day, and took them to bed with him at night; thus making life a sort of prolonged vexation—a daily and nightly misery.
But a new and still more alarming source of anxiety occurred to disturb the mind of poor Watt, and occasion him many more sleepless nights. The movement to abolish the patent by repeal of the Act of Parliament having broken down, attempts were now made in many quarters to evade it by ingenious imitations, in which the principle of Watt’s engine was adopted in variously disguised forms. But to do this successfully would have required an inventive faculty almost as potent as that of Watt himself; and he had drawn the specification of his patent too carefully to be easily broken through by the clumsy imitators who made the attempt. It was, however, only natural that the success of the new engine should draw the attention of ingenious mechanics to the same subject. Watt had drawn a great prize, and why should not they? though they little knew the burden of sorrow which his prize had brought upon him. They only knew of the large annual dues—probably exaggerated by the tongue of rumour—which were being paid to the patentees for the use of their engines; and they not unnaturally sought to share in the good fortune. There might possibly be other mechanical methods by which the same objects were to be accomplished, without borrowing from Watt; at all events it was worth trying. Hence the number of mechanical schemers who made their appearance almost simultaneously in all parts of the country, and the number of new methods of various kinds contrived by them for the production of motive power.
Watt was very soon informed of the schemes which were on foot in his immediate neighbourhood—much too soon for his peace of mind. He at once wrote to his partner: “Some Camborne gentlemen (supposed to be Bonze and Trevithick) have invented a new engine which they say beats ours two-thirds, and one of the partners has gone to London to procure a patent for it. A Mr. Vice says he has also invented a new engine, and that they have stolen his and compounded it with ours; he intends to take out a caveat against them.”[213] Though Bonze was an excellent engineer, and elicited the admiration of Watt himself, it turned out that he had no concern with the new invention. Its projectors proved to be the Hornblowers, also engineers of considerable local repute. Watt had befriended the family, and employed them in erecting his engines, by which means they became perfectly familiar with their construction and mode of action. Jonathan Hornblower had a large family of sons, of whom Jabez, Jesse, Jethro, and Jonathan were engineers, like their father. Jabez, one of the cleverest, had spent some time in Holland, from whence he had returned with some grand scheme in his head for carrying out an extensive system of drainage in that country. Like his father and the other sons, he was employed in erecting Watt’s engines,[214] which had the effect of directing his attention to the invention of a new power which should supersede that of his employer.
It was for some time doubtful what was the precise character of the new engine. Indeed the Hornblowers themselves long remained undecided about its actual form, being still in the throes of invention. They knew that they must copy discreetly, so as not to lay themselves too open to attack; and though they urged the superiority of their engine so strongly as to induce several of the mining companies to believe in them, and even to withhold orders from Boulton and Watt, they refrained as yet from publishing their invention. Watt wrote to his partner that he understood the Hornblowers’ engine was on some new principle, and the only novelty he could think of was a caloric air-engine. He therefore asked Boulton to make all the inquiries he could as to the respective bulks and prices per 1000 feet of all possible kinds of air in their most expanded states. “I am much vexed,” he continued, “by this affair. Jabez does not want abilities: the rest are fools. If they have really found a prize, it will ruin us.... Bankruptcy might ensue to both. But I don’t fear getting my bread independent of engines, though much easier with them.”[215] Watt was, however, in error as to the nature of the Hornblowers’ engine, which he discovered three days later, when he wrote Boulton,—
“The matter is this: Ever since the ungrateful, idle, insolent Hornblowers knew anything about our engines, they have laboured to evade our Act, and for that purpose have long been possessed of a copy of our specification. They made an attempt at Wheal Maid two years ago, by connecting two cylinders together and injecting into one of them, which did not succeed, although they had gathered together numbers of their friends in order to make a great exhibition. Since that, Jonathan the coppersmith, who, like Alexander of the like trade, hath done me much evil, has laboured close at some more successful evasion, which he says he has now completed and taken a patent for,—concerning which I hear as follows from public reports, propagated by Jethro’s confidants:—1st. That Jonathan Hornblower is the inventor and patentee; that Winwood, Jones and Company, of Bristol, are his partners and supporters with money (that Winwood was lately in this country on a sleeveless errand is certain); that they have made their model work to 14 lbs. on the inch, and expect it will work to 18 lbs. 2ndly. That they press the piston down by steam, and maintain they have a right to do so, because, say they, it can be proved that such was done before my patent. I suppose by this they allude to Gainsborough’s bauble, which, by-the-by, was after the patent. If they do not mean this I am at a loss, as I now declare that I do not know of any one having done it before the patent except myself. However, it behoves us to inquire into this, and if the exhibition was not a public one it avails not. 3rdly. That they pretend to condense the steam in the cylinder; but I have heard that they do it in a separate vessel within the cylinder, or close to it. 4thly. That they do not use an air or water pump, from which I conjecture that they let the hot water down the shaft by a pipe more than 30 feet long, as you know I proposed but had several objections to. You will remember, and I dare say Joseph and Peploe also do, that we made the 18-inch Soho cylinder work by blowing the hot water out of the eduction-pipe and used no air-pump, but found a waste of steam by so doing. There is also some confused report about a wheel being employed on their engine, which makes me suspect that M. Washborough may be the Bristol man concerned with them.”[216]
Two days later Watt wrote,—“My principal hope is that almighty Nature will prove Lord Chancellor, and put a negative on their scheme. Amen, so be it! I abhor lawsuits, and reckon a cause half lost that is litigated.”