Chapter X: Watt, the Inventor and Discoverer

In the foregoing pages an effort has been made to follow and describe Watt's work in detail as it was performed, but we believe our readers will thank us for presenting the opinions of a few of the highest scientific and legal authorities upon what Watt really did. Lord Brougham has this to say of Watt:

One of the most astonishing circumstances in this truly great
man was the versatility of his talents. His accomplishments were
so various, the powers of his mind were so vast, and yet of such
universal application, that it was hard to say whether we should
most admire the extraordinary grasp of his understanding, or the
accuracy of nice research with which he could bring it to bear
upon the most minute objects of investigation. I forget of whom
it was said, that his mind resembled the trunk of an elephant,
which can pick up straws and tear up trees by the roots. Mr.
Watt in some sort resembled the greatest and most celebrated of
his own inventions; of which we are at a loss whether most to
wonder at the power of grappling with the mightiest objects, or
of handling the most minute; so that while nothing seems too
large for its grasp, nothing seems too small for the delicacy of
its touch; which can cleave rocks and pour forth rivers from the
bowels of the earth, and with perfect exactness, though not with
greater ease, fashion the head of a pin, or strike the impress
of some curious die. Now those who knew Mr. Watt, had to
contemplate a man whose genius could create such an engine, and
indulge in the most abstruse speculations of philosophy, and
could at once pass from the most sublime researches of geology
and physical astronomy, the formation of our globe, and the
structure of the universe, to the manufacture of a needle or a
nail; who could discuss in the same conversation, and with equal
accuracy, if not with the same consummate skill, the most
forbidding details of art, and the elegances of classical
literature; the most abstruse branches of science, and the
niceties of verbal criticism.

There was one quality in Mr. Watt which most honorably
distinguished him from too many inventors, and was worthy of all
imitation; he was not only entirely free from jealousy, but he
exercised a careful and scrupulous self-denial, and was anxious
not to appear, even by accident, as appropriating to himself
that which he thought belonged in part to others. I have heard
him refuse the honor universally ascribed to him, of being
inventor of the steam-engine, and call himself simply its
improver; though, in my mind, to doubt his right to that honor
would be as inaccurate as to question Sir Isaac Newton's claim
to his greatest discoveries, because Descartes in mathematics,
and Galileo in astronomy and mechanics, had preceded him; or to
deny the merits of his illustrious successor, because galvanism
was not his discovery, though before his time it had remained as
useless to science as the instrument called a steam-engine was
to the arts before Mr. Watt. The only jealousy I have known him
betray was with respect to others, in the nice adjustment he was
fond of giving to the claims of inventors. Justly prizing
scientific discovery above all other possessions, he deemed the
title to it so sacred, that you might hear him arguing by the
hour to settle disputed rights; and if you ever perceived his
temper ruffled, it was when one man's invention was claimed by,
or given to, another; or when a clumsy adulation pressed upon
himself that which he knew to be not his own.

Sir Humphrey Davy says:

I consider it as a duty incumbent on me to endeavor to set forth
his peculiar and exalted merits, which live in the recollection
of his contemporaries and will transmit his name with immortal
glory to posterity. Those who consider James Watt only as a
great practical mechanic form a very erroneous idea of his
character; he was equally distinguished as a natural philosopher
and a chemist, and his inventions demonstrate his profound
knowledge of those sciences, and that peculiar characteristic of
genius, the union of them for practical application. The steam
engine before his time was a rude machine, the result of simple
experiments on the compression of the atmosphere, and the
condensation of steam. Mr. Watt's improvements were not produced
by accidental circumstances or by a single ingenious thought;
they were founded on delicate and refined experiments, connected
with the discoveries of Dr. Black. He had to investigate the
cause of the cold produced by evaporation, of the heat
occasioned by the condensation of steam--to determine the source
of the air appearing when water was acted upon by an exhausting
power; the ratio of the volume of steam to its generating water,
and the law by which the elasticity of steam increased with the
temperature; labor, time, numerous and difficult experiments,
were required for the ultimate result; and when his principle
was obtained, the application of it to produce the movement of
machinery demanded a new species of intellectual and
experimental labor.

The Archimedes of the ancient world by his mechanical inventions
arrested the course of the Romans, and stayed for a time the
downfall of his country. How much more has our modern Archimedes
done? He has permanently elevated the strength and wealth of his
great empire: and, during the last long war, his inventions; and
their application were amongst the great means which enabled
Britain to display power and resources so infinitely above what
might have been expected from the numerical strength of her
population. Archimedes valued principally abstract science;
James Watt, on the contrary, brought every principle to some
practical use; and, as it were, made science descend from heaven
to earth. The great inventions of the Syracusan died with
him--those of our philosopher live, and their utility and
importance are daily more felt; they are among the grand results
which place civilised above savage man--which secure the triumph
of intellect, and exalt genius and moral force over mere brutal
strength, courage and numbers.

Sir James Mackintosh says:

It may be presumptuous in me to add anything in my own words to
such just and exalted praise. Let me rather borrow the language
in which the great father of modern philosophy, Lord Bacon
himself, has spoken of inventors in the arts of life. In a
beautiful, though not very generally read fragment of his,
called the New Atlantis, a voyage to an imaginary island, he has
imagined a university, or rather royal society, under the name
of Solomon's House, or the College of the Six Days' Works; and
among the various buildings appropriated to this institution, he
describes a gallery destined to contain the statues of
inventors. He does not disdain to place in it not only the
inventor of one of the greatest instruments of science, but the
discoverer of the use of the silkworm, and of other still more
humble contrivances for the comfort of man. What place would
Lord Bacon have assigned in such a gallery to the statue of Mr.
Watt? Is it too much to say, that, considering the magnitude of
the discoveries, the genius and science necessary to make them,
and the benefits arising from them to the world, that statue
must have been placed at the head of those of all inventors in
all ages and nations. In another part of his writings the same
great man illustrates the dignity of useful inventions by one of
those happy allusions to the beautiful mythology of the
ancients, which he often employs to illuminate as well as to
decorate reason. "The dignity," says he, "of this end of
endowment of man's life with new commodity appeareth, by the
estimation that antiquity made of such as guided thereunto; for
whereas founders of states, lawgivers, extirpators of tyrants,
fathers of the people, were honored but with the titles of
demigods, inventors were ever consecrated amongst the gods
themselves."

The Earl of Aberdeen says:

It would ill become me to attempt to add to the eulogy which you
have already heard on the distinguished individual whose genius
and talents we have met this day to acknowledge. That eulogy has
been pronounced by those whose praises are well calculated to
confer honor, even upon him whose name does honor to his
country. I feel in common with them, although I can but ill
express that intense admiration which the bare recollection of
those discoveries must excite, which have rendered us familiar
with a power before nearly unknown, and which have taught us to
wield, almost at will, perhaps the mightiest instrument ever
intrusted to the hands of man. I feel, too, that in erecting a
monument to his memory, placed, as it may be, among the
memorials of kings, and heroes, and statesmen, and philosophers,
that it will be then in its proper place; and most in its proper
place, if in the midst of those who have been most distinguished
by their usefulness to mankind, and by the spotless integrity of
their lives.

Lord Jeffrey says:

This name fortunately needs no commemoration of ours; for he
that bore it survived to see it crowned with undisputed and
unenvied honors; and many generations will probably pass away,
before it shall have gathered "all its fame." We have said that
Mr. Watt was the great _improver_ of the steam engine; but, in
truth, as to all that is admirable in its structure, or vast in
its utility, he should rather be described as its _inventor_. It
was by his inventions that its action was so regulated, as to
make it capable of being applied to the finest and most delicate
manufactures, and its power so increased, as to set weight and
solidity at defiance. By his admirable contrivance, it has
become a thing stupendous alike for its force and its
flexibility, for the prodigious power which it can exert, and
the ease, and precision, and ductility, with which it can be
varied, distributed, and applied. The trunk of an elephant, that
can pick up a pin or rend an oak, is as nothing to it. It can
engrave a seal, and crush masses of obdurate metal before it;
draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and
lift a ship of war like a bauble in the air. It can embroider
muslin and forge anchors, cut steel into ribbons, and impel
loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves.

It would be difficult to estimate the value of the benefits
which these inventions have conferred upon this country. There
is no branch of industry that has not been indebted to them;
and, in all the most material, they have not only widened most
magnificently the field of its exertions, but multiplied a
thousandfold the amount of its productions. It is our improved
steam engine that has fought the battles of Europe, and exalted
and sustained, through the late tremendous contest, the
political greatness of our land. It is the same great power
which now enables us to pay the interest of our debt, and to
maintain the arduous struggle in which we are still engaged
(1819), with the skill and capital of countries less oppressed
with taxation. But these are poor and narrow views of its
importance. It has increased indefinitely the mass of human
comforts and enjoyments, and rendered cheap and accessible, all
over the world, the materials of wealth and prosperity. It has
armed the feeble hand of man, in short, with a power to which no
limits can be assigned; completed the dominion of mind over the
most refractory qualities of matter; and laid a sure foundation
for all those future miracles of mechanical power which are to
aid and reward the labors of after generations. It is to the
genius of one man, too, that all this is mainly owing; and
certainly no man ever bestowed such a gift on his kind. The
blessing is not only universal, but unbounded; and the fabled
inventors of the plough and the loom, who were deified by the
erring gratitude of their rude contemporaries, conferred less
important benefits on mankind than the inventor of our present
steam engine.

This will be the fame of Watt with future generations; and it is
sufficient for his race and his country. But to those to whom he
more immediately belonged, who lived in his society and enjoyed
his conversation, it is not, perhaps, the character in which he
will be most frequently recalled--most deeply lamented--or even
most highly admired.

We shall end by quoting the greatest living authority, Lord Kelvin, now Lord Chancellor of Glasgow University, which Watt and he have done so much to render famous:

Precisely that single-acting, high-pressure, syringe-engine,
made and experimented on by James Watt one hundred and forty
years ago in his Glasgow College workshop, now in 1901, with the
addition of a surface-condenser cooled by air to receive the
waste steam, and a pump to return the water thence to the
boiler, constitutes the common-road motor, which, in the opinion
of many good judges, is the most successful of all the different
motors which have been made and tried within the last few years.
Without a condenser, Watt's high-pressure, single-acting engine
of 1761, only needs the cylinder-cover with piston-rod passing
steam-tight through it (as introduced by Watt himself in
subsequent developments), and the valves proper for admitting
steam on both sides of the piston and for working expansively,
to make it the very engine, which, during the whole of the past
century, has done practically all the steam work of the world,
and is doing it still, except on the sea or lakes or rivers,
where there is plenty of condensing water. Even the double and
triple and quadruple expansion engines, by which the highest
modern economy for power and steam engines has been obtained,
are splendid mechanical developments of the principle of
expansion, discovered and published by Watt, and used, though to
a comparatively limited extent, in his own engines.

* * * * *

Thus during the five years from 1761-66 Watt had worked out all
the principles and invented all that was essential in the
details for realising them in the most perfect steam engines of
the present day.

So passes Watt from view as the discoverer and inventor of the "most powerful instrument in the hands of man to alter the face of the physical world." He takes his place "at the head of all inventors of all ages and all nations."