The Boyhood of Great Inventors Part 9

"James Watt, I never saw such an idle boy as you are. For the last hour you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam, watching how it rises from the spout, catching and counting the drops it falls into."

For change of air the boy was sometimes sent to Glasgow, the great commercial capital being then no larger than a country market-town.

Mightily astonished were his relatives, and, according to their own account, not a little scared, when of an evening his tongue was loosed, and he would launch into tales, wonderful things that held them entranced for hours, and sent them wakeful to bed. Was this time prophetic of those later years when he would hold men and women fascinated by the charm of his conversation?

And now young James was sent to the Greenock Grammar School, but he made no great mark there, except in mathematics, in which he easily headed the cla.s.s. But Latin and Greek are not a boy's only education. At home he was learning other things, from his parents' talk, from the pages of books. And then there were the long golden hours when he put on a leather ap.r.o.n like his father, and installed himself in his father's workshop with a small forge and a small bench all his own, and with his boyish fingers handled the tools so deftly and so cleverly that the workmen watching him exclaimed--

"Little Jamie has gotten a fortune at his fingers' ends."

But while he worked his mind was not idle. He read eagerly and precociously, as a delicate child sometimes does, devouring all such books as he could lay hands on. Solid enough reading they will seem to boys to-day.

_The Cloud of Witnesses_, Henry the Rymer's _Life of Wallace_, Boston, Bunyan.

Added to this was his parents' talk, that fell on his young ears and stamped itself on his young mind, and the picturesque surroundings of his home, for he loved nature's beauties--the hills, the stars, the trees. The mountains and the plains about his home were made romantic by memories and a.s.sociations of Covenanting times, told him by his father, and his boyish rambles were made beautiful by wild flowers, and again there were long delightful days of fis.h.i.+ng to add to these.

But in the midst of all this struggling in the boy's mind was that strong leaning to mechanical invention longing for an outlet. It peeped out here and there--for instance, in being unable to see an instrument without wis.h.i.+ng to discover all its uses. And so well did he show himself able even then to fas.h.i.+on delicate things like compa.s.ses and quadrants--an instrument in shape like the fourth of a circle--that his father, after much thought, made up his mind that James should learn the trade of a mathematical instrument maker.

So in 1754 James came out from the shelter of home and launched himself on the great world, rather more of an ordeal to the shy, timid boy than it would have been to one more robust and enterprising. This was practically the last of Greenock. The peaceful fis.h.i.+ng-village was never again to be his home. Naturally he turned his steps to Glasgow. We can picture the great event in the quiet household. The boy getting ready, his modest baggage, his clothes (his mother's tender care), a leather ap.r.o.n, some carpenter's tools, and a quadrant.

But he was destined to go yet farther afield. No mathematical instrument-maker was to be found in Glasgow. A professor to whom James was introduced advised him to go to London. "To London" is an easy enough journey to-day--then it was a mighty undertaking. No trains--no steamers. One could only go by slow coach or on horseback. James chose the latter. His trunk was sent by sea from Leith, and he along with a friend set off on his long journey. He left on the 7th day of June, and travelling by Coldstream and Newcastle, he arrived in the great metropolis after a ride of twelve days!

Most likely, although there might have been fear in the boyish heart, it also beat high with hope. Again and again has London made fair promises to boys such as he. But disappointment was to meet him on the very threshold. He found that apprentices who intended to serve a term of seven years were only accepted. This was very far from James's thoughts.

What he wanted was to learn the trade, start off home again, and set up in Glasgow for himself as soon as possible. After many failures, however, he at last found a man willing to take him on for a year on his promise to pay twenty guineas with the results of his work during that time.

And now began a time of stern work and self-denial. He took poor lodgings. He scrimped himself in everything but the bare necessaries of life. He spent on himself exactly eight s.h.i.+llings a week. He could not, he wrote, do with less. He sc.r.a.ped and pinched, remembering how ill his father could afford his keep.

When he could get extra work he took it home at nights to his poor rooms and sat up late over it, often ill and weary. In a month he could make a quadrant better than any of the other apprentices. And so he struggled on against loneliness and headache and depression. It was rarely safe to venture out at night at that time in London, for sailor press-gangs were abroad. No able-bodied man was spared. In one night they took as many as 1,000 men. Sitting as he did close to the shop door when at work, he was often exposed to cold, and caught rheumatic pains which did not leave him for many a day. After a year of this he went home to Greenock, in his possession some tools and instruments, and in his hands and brain a mighty store of skill and knowledge.

Revived by his native air he set out again to seek his fortune--again to Glasgow. Again to be met with disappointment! He had not learned his trade in Glasgow, and therefore Glasgow would have none of him. Not so much as a workshop would it give him. It seemed almost as if there were no place open for the boy.

But his friend the professor came to the front again. If Watt could find no place in the city, then the University should shelter him. And so they gave him a workshop twenty feet square in the old College grounds, and a room in which to sell his instruments, and he was at last fairly launched.

But business progressed but slowly. He lived, to be sure, in an atmosphere that must have delighted him. The professors and the students found him out. They came and came again. He seemed always to have something original to say. He was a man who read much and thought much--humble as a child about his own attainments--eager with the generosity of the great man to give others their due--yes, even more than their due. They found out that he knew all about engineering, and not a little about natural history, art, languages--and then the trick of observation was so strong with him that nothing escaped him. In time it came to be the general opinion that the young instrument-maker was one of the ablest men about the University. But gratifying as was the making of these friends, they did not bring Watt in any money. Somehow his instruments did not sell well. He was too far from the town. Indeed, his business was so poor he sometimes thought of giving it up. It may have been there was a want of practical "push" in him, a quality he never gained all through his life. Somewhat discouraged he took to making fiddles and flutes and guitars and even organs,--but he was yet very far from making that fortune he had come out to seek.

There are crises, turning-points in the lives of most people. They are seldom noisy. Sometimes, indeed, they come so quietly as to be hardly noticed. And now Watt was gradually nearing his.

About this time his thoughts began to turn to steam. It may be that had he been busy and successful as an organ-maker, his great invention might never have seen the light.

People had, of course, known for long that there was a power in water exposed to heat. Now in 1759, when Watt was twenty-three, his attention was drawn to the Steam Engine. He pondered it. After he had pondered it he set to work. His first model was a failure. But the idea had silently and firmly lodged in his brain. He went on with his everyday business, but ever in his leisure back sprang his mind to that subject that was to be his all-absorbing life-work. He read eagerly what other men had done. He got a model of another man's engine and he studied it. He found what he thought defects. He groped steadily on--now seeing a light--again thrown into darkness--now following what turned out to be a will-o'-the-wisp--again getting hold of an idea that seemed to him a gem.

There came to him gradually dawning thoughts. First, that of Latent Heat. Again, that a small quant.i.ty of water in the shape of steam heats a large quant.i.ty of cold water. Yet, again, that at 212 water is elastic, and that steam heats six times the weight of cold water to a temperature of 212, the temperature of steam.

And so he went on step by step, till one day the thing burst on him, full-fledged, as it were--complete, dazzling, a perfect inspiration.

It was a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1765. He was taking a stroll in a quiet part of Glasgow, now a paved and busy thoroughfare called the Green. A Sunday calm brooded over what was on weekdays a scene of busy life--of was.h.i.+ng and drying clothes. His thoughts, as usual, hovered about his beloved theme. It inspired him with a very pa.s.sion as a child of his own. The key to his engine--long sought--suddenly flashed before his mind's eye. The thing had been waiting incomplete for want of it. It came to him then--the idea of a Separate Condenser.

A great uprising of his mind followed. In his solitary walk the flas.h.i.+ng thought filled the man with rapture.

Two drawbacks--waste of steam and waste of fuel--had been the ruin of former inventions.

"Ye need not fash yourself about that, man," Watt said to a friend, answering some objection that he had made, "I have now made an engine that shall not waste a particle of steam."

And so, though it was but the beginning, though years of weary labour and disappointment and discouragement waited him before the end was reached, the Condensing Steam Engine, as we have it now, first sprang into being that spring afternoon on the Green in Glasgow.

And now the young inventor set himself with eager enthusiasm to make a model. There were no skilled workmen to be had, no self-acting tools, as in our day, and so the first model was only partly successful. But not a whit discouraged, he went on.

"My whole thoughts are bent on this machine," he said. "I can think of nothing else."

And now there remains but to tell in a few words--for it is the record of his manhood--the "ups and downs" just beginning, the disappointments, the failures, the hopes and fears that waited on this offspring of his brain. He was poor, and money was the first thing that was needed. Who would risk thousands on such a vague and shadowy thing?

Meantime the pot had to be kept boiling! He looked into the future, and he saw great things steam might yet be made to do, but there was bread and b.u.t.ter needed for the present. So he went bravely in for surveying, though there was little enough to be made by that. He had still ill-health to struggle against. "I am still plagued with headaches," he wrote about this time, "and sometimes heartaches."

But after a time a gleam of hope shone through the clouds. After failures and difficulties he at last succeeded in finding someone willing to risk his money. So in 1769 he patented his engine, and began to build it. In six months it was finished, and as it neared completion Watt could hardly sleep. Then, and for long still in the future, he was to suffer from bad, incapable workmen, and this accounted for his partial failure.

"It was," he said, "a clumsy job." Watt grew depressed.

In 1770 he wrote: "I enter on my thirty-fifth year, and I think I have hardly yet done thirty-five pence worth of good in the world."

A friend, seeing him cast down and unhappy, advised him to give up inventing. As well might he have advised the sun not to s.h.i.+ne or living man to cease from breathing. Meantime the years went on. Watt was often, as he said, "heart-sick." Long years after, remembering this weary time, he said, "The public only look at my success." He stinted himself in everything but bare necessaries, for as yet his engine had paid him nothing and cost enormously. But light again arose in the darkness when he got as a partner Boulton, of Birmingham, and from that day onwards matters mended. Six of the fourteen years' patent were gone, but he succeeded in getting a renewal of it for twenty-four years by Act of Parliament, in spite of grumbling discontent of men who wanted to steal the fruit of his brain, and were thus prevented.

Now he set to work in earnest. His first engine was made to blow the bellows of ironworks. His second to pump water out of the mines in Cornwall. In 1776 this was set up, and worked perfectly. "There it was, 'forking water' as never engine before had been known 'to fork.'"

"All the world are agape," he said, "to see what it can do."

And it did well. And now the "voice of the country was in its favour."

So the first step was taken. The others followed in quick succession.

The partners worked together perfectly. Watt understood engines, but not men. He grew impatient, irritable, peevish if a workman were inefficient, and would have dismissed him on the spot. Boulton was wiser, and never failed to oil the wheels. Watt was despondent, easily cast down; Boulton was his "backbone."

There came then into Watt's mind the idea of an engine that would produce _rotary_ motion. This he patented in 1781. All round and about, ready to pounce on it, were a perfect swarm of pirates.

"One's thoughts seem to be stolen before one speaks them," he said. And again, "All mankind seem to be resolved to rob us."

In 1782 the first rotary machine worked. After long waiting there was a brilliant result. It was made to drive a corn-mill. In our day it would be hard to say what Watt's rotary machine is not made to do. It is made for corn-mills and for cotton-mills, for sugar-mills and iron-mills. It drives our steamers and rolls our hammer-iron and coins our money and prints our books.

And now the great inventor had reached the highest pinnacle of fame. In 1790 he had an interview with the King, who asked about his engines.

But he had not landed at the topmost round of the ladder without much painful climbing and many weary steps. His life had been all through shadowed by ill-health, and an anxious, worrying mind that refused to be calm. He had a shrinking distaste to business, and a fearful habit of looking on the dark side of things. Often would he have sunk in depression and despair had it not been for his cheery partner. It was only in the late years of his life that he came to know anything like peace. His mind all along had been too active for his body.

But though as an old man he retired from public life and from business, he could not altogether retire from invention. He invented a letter-copying machine, and one for copying statuary. In his old age he lived very quietly in his comfortable house near Birmingham, furnis.h.i.+ng what he called his Garret, a room where he might be alone and still invent, don again, as in boyhood, the leather ap.r.o.n, cook his own food, and ponder anew the details of those wonderful inventions he had given to the world.

Friends admitted there found "the great Mr. Watt" simple, modest, careless of display--much as he had been as a boy--his voice low and kindly, with still its broad, homely Scottish accent. The world would have liked to draw him from his seclusion, to caress him, to make much of him. It offered him a baronetcy, but his simple tastes lay not at all in the direction of such honours, and he refused it.

In 1819, when he was eighty-three, the end came. "I feel," said the great man with a calm in strange contrast to the fearfulness and timidity that had accompanied him through life, "I feel that I am now come to my last illness." He pa.s.sed away quietly and without suffering.

They buried him in Handsworth Church--near to his partner, Boulton--and erected an imposing statue in Westminster Abbey, and beneath it Lord Brougham wrote his famous epitaph.

To us his life has much of pathos. Men have called him "the greatest inventor in all ages," "the most extraordinary man that the world has ever seen," but the long years of struggle and labour and waiting, the weakness of body and the oft depression of spirit, are to us not a little sad, specially when we remember how patiently he endured, how uncomplainingly he suffered, that we might profit, that he might, as Lord Brougham has it, "increase the power of man."