Towards the end of 1786 the press of orders increased at Soho. A rotative engine of forty-horse power was ordered by the Plate Glass Company to grind glass. A powerful pumping-engine was in hand for the Oxford Canal Company. Two engines, one of twenty and the other of ten horse power, were ordered for Scotch distilleries, and another order was shortly expected from the same quarter. The engine supplied for the Hull paper-mill having been found to answer admirably, more orders for engines for the same purpose were promised. At the same time pumping-engines were in hand for the great French waterworks at Marli. “In short,” said Watt, “I foresee I shall be driven almost mad in finding men for the engines ordered here and coming in.” Watt was necessarily kept very full of work by these orders, and we gather from his letters that he was equally full of headaches. He continued to give his personal attention to the preparation of the drawings of the engines, even to the minutest detail. On an engine being ordered by Mr. Morris, of Bristol, for the purpose of driving a tilt-hammer, Boulton wrote to him,—“Mr. Watt can never be prevailed upon to begin any piece of machinery until the plan of the whole is settled, as it often happens that a change in one thing puts many others wrong. However, he has now settled the whole of yours, but waits answers to certain questions before the drawings for the founder can be issued.”[286]
At an early period his friend Wedgwood had strongly urged upon Watt that he should work less with his own head and hands, and more through the heads and hands of others.[287] Watt’s brain was too active for his body, and needed rest; but rest he would not take, and persisted in executing all the plans of the new engines himself. Thus in his fragile, nervous, dyspeptic state, every increase of business was to him increase of brain-work and increase of pain; until it seemed as if not only his health, but the very foundations of his reason must give way. At the very time when Soho was beginning to bask in the sunshine of prosperity, and the financial troubles of the firm seemed coming to an end, Watt wrote the following profoundly melancholy letter to a friend:—
“I have been effete and listless, neither daring to face business, nor capable of it, my head and memory failing me much; my stable of hobby-horses pulled down, and the horses given to the dogs for carrion.... I have had serious thoughts of laying down the burden I find myself unable to carry, and perhaps, if other sentiments had not been stronger, should have thought of throwing off the mortal coil; but, if matters do not grow worse, I may perhaps stagger on. Solomon said that in the increase of knowledge there is increase of sorrow; if he had substituted business for knowledge, it would have been perfectly true.”[288]
As might be expected, from the large number of engines sold by the firm to this time, and the increasing amounts yearly payable as dues, their income from the business was becoming considerable, and promised, before many years had passed, to be very large. Down to the year 1785, however, the outlay upon new foundries, workshops, and machinery had been so great, and the large increase of business had so completely absorbed the capital of the firm, that Watt continued to be paid his household expenses, at the rate of so much a year, out of the hardware business, and no division of profits upon the engines sold and at work had as yet been made, because none had accrued. After the lapse of two more years, matters had completely changed; and after long waiting, and indescribable distress of mind and body, Watt’s invention at length began to be productive to him. During the early part of his career, though his income had been small, his wants were few, and easily satisfied. Though Boulton had liberally provided for these from the time of his settling at Birmingham, Watt continued to feel oppressed by the thought of the debt to the bankers for which he and his partner were jointly liable. In his own little business he had been accustomed to deal with such small sums, that the idea of being responsible for the repayment of thousands of pounds appalled and unnerved him; and he had no peace of mind until the debt was discharged. Now at last he was free, and in the happy position of having a balance at his bankers. On the 7th of December, 1787, Boulton wrote to Matthews, the London agent,—“As Mr. Watt is now at Mr. Macgregor’s, in Glasgow, I wish you would write him a line to say that you have transferred 4000l. to his own account, that you have paid for him another 1000l. to the Albion Mill, and that about Christmas you suppose you shall transfer 2007l. more to him, to balance.”
But while Watt’s argosies were coming into port richly laden, Boulton’s were still at sea. Though the latter had risked, and often lost, capital in his various undertakings, he continued as venturesome, as enterprising as ever. When any project was started calculated to bring the steam-engine into notice, he was immediately ready with his subscription. Thus he embarked 6000l. in the Albion Mill, a luckless adventure in itself, though productive in other respects. But he sadly missed the money, and as late as 1789, feelingly said to Matthews, “Oh that I had my Albion Mill capital back again!” When any mining adventure was started in Cornwall for which a new engine was wanted, Boulton would write, “If you want a stopgap, put me down as an adventurer;” and too often the adventure proved a failure. Then, to encourage the Cornish Copper Mining Company, he bought large quantities of copper, and had it sent down to Birmingham, where it lay long on his hands without a purchaser. At the same time we find him expending 5000l. in building and rebuilding two mills and a warehouse at Soho, and an equal amount in “preparing for the coinage.” These large investments had the effect of crippling his resources for years to come; and when the commercial convulsion of 1788 occurred, he felt himself in a state of the most distressing embarrassment. The circumstances of the partners being thus in a measure reversed, Boulton fell back upon Watt for temporary help; but, more cautious than his partner, Watt had already invested his profits elsewhere, and could not help him.[289] He had got together his store of gains with too much difficulty to part with them easily; and he was unwilling to let them float away in what he regarded as an unknown sea of speculation.
To add to his distresses, Boulton’s health began to fail him. To have seen the two men, no one would have thought that Boulton would have been the first to break down; but so it was. Though Watt’s sufferings from headaches, and afterwards from asthma, seem to have been almost continuous, he struggled on, and even grew in strength and spirits. His fragile frame bent before disease, as the reed bends to the storm, and rose erect again; but it was different with Boulton. He had toiled too unsparingly, and was now feeling the effects. The strain upon him had throughout been greater than upon Watt, whose headache had acted as a sort of safety-valve by disabling him from pursuing further study until it had gone off. Boulton, on the other hand, was kept in a state of constant anxiety by business that could not possibly be postponed. He had to provide the means for carrying on his many businesses, to sustain his partner against despondency, and to keep the whole organisation of the firm in working order. While engaged in bearing his gigantic burden, disease came upon him. In 1784 we find him writing to his wine-merchant, with a cheque in payment of his account,—“We have had a visit from a new acquaintance—the gout.” The visitor returned, and four years later we find him complaining of violent pain from gravel and stone, to which he continued a martyr to the close of his life. “I am very unwell indeed,” he wrote to Matthews in London; “I can get no sleep; and yet I have been obliged to wear a cheerful face, and attend all this week on M. l’Abbé de Callone and his friend Brunelle.”[290] He felt as if life was drawing to an end with him: he asked his friend for a continuance of his sympathy, and promised to exert himself, “otherwise,” said he, “I will lay me down and die.” He was distressed, above all things, at the prospect of leaving his family unprovided for, notwithstanding all the labours, anxieties, and risks he had undergone. “When I reflect,” he said, “that I have given up my extra advantage of one-third on all the engines we are now making and are likely to make,[291]—when I think of my children, now upon the verge of that time of life when they are naturally entitled to expect a portion of their patrimony,—when I feel the consciousness of being unable to restore to them the property which their mother intrusted to me,—when I see all whom I am connected with growing rich, whilst I am groaning under a load of debt and annuities that would sink me into the grave if my anxieties for my children did not sustain me,—I say, when I consider all these things, it behoves me to struggle through the small remaining fragment of my life (being now in my 60th year), and do my children all the justice in my power by wiping away as many of my incumbrances as possible.”
It was seldom that Boulton wrote in so desponding a strain as this; but it was his “darkest hour,” and happily it proved the one “nearest the dawn.” Yet, we shortly after find him applying his energies, apparently unabated, in an entirely new direction—that of coining money—which, next to the introduction of the steam-engine, was the greatest enterprise of his life.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Friends of Boulton and Watt—The Lunar Society.
As men are known by the friends they make and the books they read, as well as by the recreations and pursuits of their leisure hours, it will help us to an appreciation of the characters of Boulton and Watt if we glance briefly at the social life of Soho during the period we have thus rapidly passed under review.