There are few places in our country where human enterprise has effected
such vast and marvellous changes within the century as the country
traversed by the river Clyde. Where Glasgow now stretches far and wide,
with its miles of swarming streets, its countless mills, and warehouses,
and foundries, its busy ship-building yards, its harbour thronged with
vessels of every size and clime, and its large and wealthy population,
there was to be seen, a hundred years ago, only an insignificant little
burgh, as dull and quiet as any rural market-town of our own day. There
was a little quay at the Broomielaw, seldom used, and partly overgrown
with broom. No boat over six tons' burden could get so high up the
river, and the appearance of a masted vessel was almost an event.
Tobacco was the chief trade of the town; and the tobacco merchants might
be seen strutting about at the Cross in their scarlet cloaks, and
looking down on the rest of the inhabitants, who got their livelihood,
for the most part, by dealing in grindstones, coals, and fish--"Glasgow
magistrates," as herrings are popularly called, being in as great repute
then as now. There were but scanty means of intercourse with other
places, and what did exist were little used, except for goods, which
were conveyed on the backs of pack-horses. The caravan then took two
days to go to Edinburgh--you can run through now between the two cities
in little more than an hour. There is hardly any trade that Glasgow does
not prosecute vigorously and successfully. You may see any day you walk
down to the Broomielaw, vessels of a thousand tons' burden at anchor
there, and the custom duties which were in 1796 little over L100, have
now reached an amount exceeding one million!
Glasgow is indebted, in a great part, for the gigantic strides which it
has made, to the genius, patience, and perseverance of a man who, in his
boyhood, rather more than a hundred years ago, used to be scolded by his
aunt for wasting his time, taking off the lid of the kettle, putting it
on again, holding now a cup, now a silver spoon over the steam as it
rose from the spout, and catching and counting the drops of water it
fell into. James Watt was then taking his first elementary lessons in
that science, his practical application of which in after life was to
revolutionize the whole system of mechanical movement, and place an
almost unlimited power at the disposal of the industrial classes.
When a boy, James Watt was delicate and sickly, and so shy and sensitive
that his school-days were a misery to him, and he profited but little by
his attendance. At home, though, he was a great reader, and picked up a
great deal of knowledge for himself, rarely possessed by those of his
years. One day a friend was urging his father to send James to school,
and not allow him to trifle away his time at home. "Look how the boy is
occupied," said his father, "before you condemn him." Though only six
years old, he was trying to solve a geometrical problem on the floor
with a bit of chalk. As he grew older he took to the study of optics and
astronomy, his curiosity being excited by the quadrants and other
instruments in his father's shop. By the age of fifteen he had twice
gone through De Gravesande's Elements of Natural Philosophy, and he was
also well versed in physiology, botany, mineralogy, and antiquarian
lore. He was further an expert hand in using the tools in his father's
workshop, and could do both carpentry and metal work. After a brief stay
with an old mechanic in Glasgow, who, though he dignified himself with
the name of "optician," never rose beyond mending spectacles, tuning
spinets, and making fiddles and fishing tackle, Watt went at the age of
eighteen to London, where he worked so hard, and lived so sparingly in
order to relieve his father from the burden of maintaining him, that his
health suffered, and he had to recruit it by a return to his native air.
During the year spent in the metropolis, however, he managed to learn
nearly all that the members of the trade there could teach, and soon
showed himself a quick and skilful workman.
In 1757 we find the sign of "James Watt, Mathematical Instrument Maker
to the College," stuck up over the entrance to one of the stairs in the
quadrangle of Glasgow College. But though under the patronage of the
University, his trade was so poor, that thrifty and frugal as he was, he
had a hard struggle to live by it. He was ready, however, for any work
that came to hand, and would never let a job go past him. To execute an
order for an organ which he accepted, he studied harmonics diligently,
and though without any ear for music, turned out a capital instrument,
with several improvements of his own in its action; and he also
undertook the manufacture of guitars, violins, and flutes. All this
while he was laying up vast stores of knowledge on all sorts of
subjects, civil and military engineering, natural history, languages,
literature, and art; and among the professors and students who dropped
into his little shop to have a chat with him, he soon came to be
regarded as one of the ablest men about the college, while his modesty,
candour, and obliging disposition gained him many good friends.
[Illustration: JAMES WATT. Page 67.]
Among his multifarious pursuits, Watt had experimented a little in the
powers of steam; but it was not till the winter of 1763-4, when a model
of Newcomen's engine was put into his hands for repair, that he took up
the matter in earnest. Newcomen's engine was then about the most
complete invention of its kind; but its only value was its power of
producing a ready vacuum, by rapid condensation on the application of
cold; and for practical purposes was neither cheaper nor quicker than
animal power. Watt, having repaired the model, found, on setting it
agoing, that it would not work satisfactorily. Had it been only a little
less clumsy and imperfect, Watt might never have regarded it as more
than the "fine plaything," for which he at first took it; but now the
difficulties of the task roused him to further efforts. He consulted all
the books he could get on the subject, to ascertain how the defects
could be remedied; and that source of information exhausted, he
commenced a series of experiments, and resolved to work out the problem
for himself. Among other experiments, he constructed a boiler which
showed by inspection the quantity of water evaporated in a given time,
and thereby ascertained the quantity of steam used in every stroke of
the engine. He found, to his astonishment, that a small quantity of
water in the form of steam heated a large quantity of water injected
into the cylinder for the purpose of cooling it; and upon further
examination, he ascertained the steam heated six times its weight of
well water up to the temperature of the steam itself (212 deg.). After
various ineffectual schemes, Watt was forced to the conclusion that, to
make a perfect steam engine, two apparently incompatible conditions must
be fulfilled--the cylinder must always be as hot as the steam that came
rushing into it, and yet, at each descent of the piston, the cylinder
must become sufficiently cold to condense the steam. He was at his wit's
end how to accomplish this task, when, as he was taking a walk one
afternoon, the idea flashed across his mind that, as steam was an
elastic vapour, it would expand and rush into a previously exhausted
place; and that, therefore, all he had to do to meet the conditions he
had laid down, was to produce a vacuum in a separate vessel, and open a
communication between this vessel and the cylinder of the steam-engine
at the moment when the piston was required to descend, and the steam
would disseminate itself and become divided between the cylinder and the
adjoining vessel. But as this vessel would be kept cold by an injection
of water, the steam would be annihilated as fast as it entered, which
would cause a fresh outflow of the remaining steam in the cylinder, till
nearly the whole of it was condensed, without the cylinder itself being
chilled in the operation. Here was the great key to the problem; and
when once the idea of separate condensation was started, many other
subordinate improvements, as he said himself, "followed as corollaries
in rapid succession, so that in the course of one or two days the
invention was thus far complete in his mind."
It cost him ten long weary years of patient speculation and experiment,
to carry out the idea, with little hope to buoy him up, for to the last
he used to say "his fear was always equal to his hope,"--and with all
the cares and embarrassments of his precarious trade to perplex and
burden him. Even when he had his working model fairly completed, his
worst difficulties--the difficulties which most distressed and harassed
the shy, sensitive, and retiring Watt--seemed only to have commenced. To
give the invention a fair practical trial required an outlay of at least
L1000; and one capitalist, who had agreed to join him in the
undertaking, had to give it up through some business losses. Still Watt
toiled on, always keeping the great object in view,--earning bread for
his family (for he was married by this time), by adding land-surveying
to his mechanical labours, and, in short, turning his willing hand to
any honest job that offered.
He got a patent in 1769, and began building a large engine; but the
workmen were new to the task, and when completed, its action was
spasmodic and unsatisfactory. "It is a sad thing," he then wrote, "for a
man to have his all hanging by a single string. If I had wherewithal to
pay for the loss, I don't think I should so much fear a failure; but I
cannot bear the thought of other people becoming losers by my scheme,
and I have the happy disposition of always painting the worst." And just
then, to make matters still more gloomy, he learned that some rascally
linen-draper in London was plagiarizing the great invention he had
brought forth in such sore and protracted travail. "Of all things in
the world," cried poor Watt, sick with hope deferred, and pressed with
little carking cares on every side, "there is nothing so foolish as
inventing."
When nearly giving way to despair, and on the point of abandoning his
invention, Watt was fortunate enough to fall in with Matthew Boulton,
one of the great manufacturing potentates of Birmingham, an energetic,
far-seeing man, who threw himself into the enterprise with all his
spirit; and the fortune of the invention was made. An engine, on the new
principle, was set up at Soho; and there Boulton and Watt sold, as the
former said to Boswell, "what all the world desires to have,
POWER;"--the infinite power that animates those mighty engines, which--
"England's arms of conquest are,
The trophies of her bloodless war:
Brave weapons these.
Victorious over wave and soil,
With these she sails, she weaves, she tills,
Pierces the everlasting hills,
And spans the seas."
Watt's engine, once fairly started, was not long in making its way into
general use. The first steam-engine used in Manchester was erected in
1790; and now it is estimated that in that district, within a radius of
ten miles, there are in constant work more than fifty thousand boilers,
giving a total power of upwards of one million horses. And the united
steam power of Great Britain is considered equal to the manual labour of
upwards of four hundred millions of men, or more than double the number
of males on the face of the earth. From the factory at Soho, Watt's
improved engines were dispersed all over the country, especially in
Cornwall--the firm receiving the value of a third part of the coal saved
by the use of the new machine. In one mine, where there were three pumps
at work, the proprietors thought it worth while, it is said, to purchase
the rights of the inventors, at the price of L2500 yearly for each
engine. The saving, therefore, on the three engines, in fuel alone, must
have been at least L7500 a year.
In the first year of the present century, Watt withdrew himself entirely
from business; but though he lived in retirement, he did not let his
busy mind get rusty or sluggish for want of exercise. At one time he
took it into his head that his faculties were declining, and though
upwards of seventy years of age, he resolved to test his mental powers
by taking up some new subject of study. It was no easy matter to find
one quite new to him, so wide and comprehensive had been his range of
study; but at length the Anglo-Saxon tongue occurred to him, and he
immediately applied himself to master it, the facility with which he did
so, dispelling all doubt as to the failing of his stupendous intellect.
He thus busied himself in various useful and entertaining pursuits, till
close upon his death, which took place in 1819.
Extraordinary as was Watt's inventive genius, his wide range of
knowledge, theoretic and practical, was equally so. Great as is the
"idea" with which his name is chiefly associated, he was not a man of
one idea, but of a thousand. There was hardly a subject which came under
his notice which he did not master; and, as was said of him, "it seemed
as if every subject casually started by him had been that he had been
occupied in studying." He had no doubt a rapid faculty of acquiring
knowledge; but he owed the versatility and copiousness of his
attainments above all to his unwearied industry. He was always at work
on something or other, and he may truly be called one of those who--
"Could Time's hour-glass fall,
Would, as for seed of stars, stoop for the sand,
And by incessant labour gather all."
In a recent volume of memoirs by Mrs. Schimmel Pennick, we find the
following graphic sketch of this extraordinary man:--"He was one of the
most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was
generally bent forward or leaning on his hand in meditation, his
shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in, his limbs lank and
unmuscular, and his complexion sallow. His utterance was slow and
impassioned, deep and low in tone, with a broad Scotch accent; his
manners gentle, modest, and unassuming. In a company where he was not
known, unless spoken to, he might have tranquilly passed the whole time
in pursuing his own meditations. When he entered the room, men of
letters, men of science, many military men, artists, ladies, and even
little children, thronged around him. I remember a celebrated Swedish
artist being instructed by him that rat's whiskers made the most pliant
painting-brushes; ladies would appeal to him on the best modes of
devising grates, curing smoking chimneys, warming their houses, and
obtaining fast colours."
His reading was singularly extensive and diversified. He perused almost
every work that came in his way, and used to say that he never opened a
book, no matter what its subject or worth, without learning something
from it. He had a vivid imagination, was passionately fond of fiction,
and was a very gifted story-teller himself. When a boy, staying with his
aunt in Glasgow, he used every night to enthral the attention of the
little circle with some exciting narrative, which they would not go to
bed till they had heard the end of; and kept them in such a state of
tremor and excitement, that his aunt used to threaten to send him away.
Since Watt's time, innumerable patents have been taken out for
improvements in the steam engine; but his great invention forms the
basis of nearly all of them, and the alterations refer rather to details
than principles of action. The application of steam to locomotive
purposes, however, led to the construction of the high pressure engine,
in which the cumbrous condensing apparatus is dispensed with, and motion
imparted to the piston by the elastic power of the steam being greater
than that of the atmosphere.
The Manufacture of Cotton.
I.--KAY AND HARGREAVES.
II.--SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.
III.--SAMUEL CROMPTON.
IV.--DR. CARTWRIGHT.
V.--SIR ROBERT PEEL.
The Manufacture of Cotton.
"Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men who walk
daily among us, clothing us, warming us, feeding us, walk
shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men."--CARLYLE.