JAMES WATT

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 29, 4 February 1925, Page 11

JAMES WATT

WORKSHOP RECONSTRUCTED

PRODUCTIVE "INDOLENCE."

We are far on in the age of machinery now. Our railways are to celebrate their centenary i a 1525. There is in the Science Museum a Newcomen engine which pumped water out of a mine for much more than a-hunted; -years... It was nmdo in 1191, and was still at work.in 1918.- The inventor T of the modern condensing steam engine, James Wat, was honoured by an exhibition on the centenary, of his death in 1919. Ihe. Science Museum has now been enriched by a gift of the contents of Sri 11'0 f° P-° f,' Tl" at HeathEeld .Hall. There, late m life, he atted up a garret with tools, a lathe, and various! apparatus, and, being an excellent mechanic worked out his numerous ideas himself! lhese-things have been preserved much in' the state in which he left them, and it is the intention of the .-Museum "authorities" to construct a room which shall "resemble as closely as possible the attic- workshop .\\atts greatest inventions were not made there. Ho. was a man in middle life when he forsook Scotland and civil engineering and came to Birmingham to build steam W« '^f fiS* fruitful i^a, which made the old Newcomen engine swift, powerful and efficient, had been patented years before.

„.£? i % nJ\?° man 9f business, and until he found Matthew Boulton, of tho vpnrn u CSI h°.e°t npthinpf from his inbut disappointment Boulton manufactured "toys,» such things as shoe buckles and sword-hilts, but he was a man of shrewd judgment, onterprise, and ambition. Ho saw that there was a futuro for the steam engine which this ehy sickly gloomy Scot had devised; and h e s4t him! sen to mate-.a financial success of'it for his factory. J amo3 Watt darin d .- f Mom mvenfon, wa.-timid and helpless in business Boulton had to provide not only he capital but tho courage of the partner 7 ship.. He told Walt ;U) pray morning and evening the Scottish prayer. "Lord, grant us a gudo conceit of ourselves." Watt »as slow to learn confidence "I would an £T ? * lo? dcH Cannon tuan settl ° an account or make a bargain," ho wrote. In short I f,,,d myself out of my sphere md ■• hay°_anytl"ng.to do with.mankind Yot Scott found him in hi s old ago tlio best of company, wilh ""taloiits and fancy overflowing on every subject," _buccess mellowed him, but did not make him idle though, to bo sure, ho always accused himself of indolence. This man who had given industry that magical power, an efficient steam engine, who in. thn' mid.* of his ondlcw labours to improve it Uirow off as a moro diversion the invention of the copying press which every office use. still, who beguiled his last years in tho attic at HandsworUi, after he hud passed tho span of mortal life, by devising machines for copying sculpture, must havo had an austore notion of indolence It is not probable that ho understood how wcafc a change in England and in tho world his steam cngmes wero to make. His foresight did not match his inventive genius He saw nothing worth pains in the del velopmont of gas-hghtmg. When, in Iho last, years of his life, people began to talk ot a sleam locomotive lie would not listen J-hey say ho put a ckuse in tho lease of Ins house that no sleam carriage should be allowed to come nonr. Such is tho human