About this ebook
James Watt: The Engine of Industry is the story of how a sickly boy from Greenock, trained to make quadrants and compasses, became the man who made power cheap. His answer — the separate condenser, keeping the cylinder forever hot and the condenser forever cold — cut the fuel bill of an engine by three-quarters at a stroke. But the idea was only the beginning. Watt survived a partner's bankruptcy, gambled everything on a second partner, the Birmingham showman Matthew Boulton, and persuaded Parliament to extend his patent to 1800. Boulton & Watt then sold power itself: their royalties were a third of the fuel each engine saved, measured stroke by stroke in the Cornish mines.
Inside, you will meet the full cast the lone-genius myth left out: John Roebuck, whose money started it and whose ruin nearly ended it; John Wilkinson, whose boring mill finally made cylinders true; and William Murdoch, the brilliant employee whose gear turned the engines rotary and whose steam carriage Watt himself discouraged. You will see the rotative engine and the parallel motion Watt prized above all his works, the invention of "horsepower" as a salesman's unit, and the bitter patent wars of the 1790s — told from both sides, the inventor defending his bread and the young engineers, Trevithick among them, chafing to build the high-pressure future Watt feared.
Drawing on the full sweep of the age, this biography separates the man from the monument: the headaches and hypochondria, the grief, the garret workshop he tinkered in until death, and the strange afterlife that put his name on every light bulb on Earth. He did not invent the steam engine. He made it efficient, measurable, and sellable — and that turned a machine into an age.
From Bedtime Biographies — history's most fascinating lives, told for modern readers.
