JAMES WATT.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 11 February 1925, Page 9

JAMES WATT.

WORKSHOP RECONSTRUCTED. PRODUCTIVE ‘ ‘INDOLENCE. ’’ Wo aro far on in the age of machinery now. Our railways are to celebrate their centenary this year. There is in the Science Museum a Newcomen engine which pumped water out of a mine for much more than 100 years. It was made in 1791, and was still at work in 1918. The inventor of the modern condensing steam engine, Janies Watt, was honoured by an exhibition on the centenary of his death in 1919. The Science Museum has now been enriched by a gilt of the contents of the attic workshop of Watt at Heathfield Hall. There, late in life, he fitted up a garret with tools, a. lathe, and various apparatus, and, being an excellent mechanic. worked out his numerous ideas himself. These 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. Watt’s greatest inventions were not made there. He was a man in middle life when he forsook Scotland and civil engineering and came to Birmingham to build steam engines. His first fruitful idea, which made the old Newcomen engine swift, powerful, and efficient, had been patented years before.

But Watt was no man of business, and until he found Matthew Boulton, of the Soho Works, he got nothing from his invention hut disappointment. Boulton manufactured “toys,” such things as shoe-buckles and sword-hilts, but he was a man of shrewd judgment, enterprise, and ambition. He saw that, there was a future for the steam engine which this shy, sickly, gloomy Scot had devised, and ‘he set himself to make a. financial success of it for his factory. •Jams Watt, during and fertile in invention, was timid and helpless in business. Boulton had to provide not only the capital but the courage of the partnership. He told AVatt to pray morning and evening the Scottish prayer. “Lord grafit us a gude conceit of ourselves.” AVatt was slow to learn confidence. “I would rather face a loaded cannon than settle an account or make a bargain.” he wrote. “In short, I find myself out of my sphere when I have anything to do with mankind.” Vet Scott found him in his old age the best of company, with “talents and fancy, overflowing on every subject.” Success mellowed him, hut did not make him idle, though, to be sure, he always accused himself of indolence. This man who had given industry that magical power, an efficient steam engine. who in the midst of his endless labours to improve it threw oil as a mere diversion the invention of the conving nrcss which every office uses still, who beguiled his last years in the attic at Handsworth, after he had passed the span of mortal life, by devising machines for copying s'mlpt'iye, must have had an austere notion of indolence. Tt is not nrohahle that he understood how great a change in England and in the world hi® steam engines were to make. His foresight did not match his inventive genius. Ffe saw nothing worth pains in the development of gas-lighting. AVhen. in the last vears of his life, people began to talk of a steam locomotive, he would not Isiten. Thev sav he nut a clause in the lease of his houip that no steam carriage should he allowed to come near. Such is the human mind.