Watt's Perfect Engine: Steam and the Age of Invention (review)

To start at the end—which is generally the direction from which James Watt is approached—Ben Marsden's defining final chapter, marked by a skillful turn of phrase, considers the inventor's reinvention as a genius and eponymous unit of power. The spin doctors were at work on his image, romanticizing and canonizing, even before Watt's death in 1819, and partly at his own instigation. Faced with versions of his life and achievements that awarded what he considered undue credit to the work of others (but seem in fact to have been sensibly balanced), Watt produced his own account of events, one of questionable accuracy. The culture that shaped Watt, and the culture he came to shape, is a central preoccupation of this neat book titled Watt's Perfect Engine.

The innovator-turned-draconian-patentee, whose defense of his own rights stifles innovation, is another of Marsden's recurring themes. Watt is exposed as not above a little piracy of his own: in his Glasgow years he apparently produced musical instruments with fake Parisian labels to maximize their sale value. Marsden describes the breadth of his work, in precision instruments and canal engineering—far from the "giant with one idea" which Coleridge saw in Watt's engine. He is also excellent on the social, technical, and scientific context of Watt's life, emphasizing how experiences in the University of Glasgow, contacts in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and other colleagues—notably the "speculative innovator" John Roebuck and the engine erector William Murdock—married the scientific and technological for Watt. Marsden also sorts out issues of precedence and priority, and includes useful diagrams and simple explanations of the engines' workings. Nor are the blind alleys and failures overlooked, despite Watt's own efforts to airbrush these from the record. And yes, Watt did have "a trusty tea kettle," though he needed Joseph Black to explain to him his newly minted theory of latent heat.

It was the patent of a competitor, James Pickard, that obliged Watt to think outside the box and come up with the sun-and-planet rotary motion, and then parallel motion, which he himself considered the greatest achievement of all. His partner Matthew Boulton, described here as "the big-thinking buckle-maker," handled the patents, and the two lived well off patent royalties, mainly from Cornish mines, for years before they started making complete engines in 1796. The partners' sons were at this point dispatched to become patent enforcers in Cornwall, the erstwhile collaborator John Wilkinson was recast as a pirate, and Boulton and Watt were transformed into "technological conservatives." While this is not uncommon among successful innovators, it is interesting to see how explicitly Watt admitted ceasing to attempt to invent, fearing for his fortune and reputation. Marsden is evenhanded in his summary of Watt: certainly not a lone genius, far from an untutored philistine, and a man whose work had a long-reaching influence on nineteenth-century thermodynamics and other sciences growing from the new technologies of the steam age.

Watt's Perfect Engine is written with a light touch and presumably is aimed at the readership usually described as "intelligent general." It has neither footnotes nor index, though there is a useful glossary and a bibliography divided by topic. While the strong narrative does not patronize, some may quibble at the use of anachronistic terms—"brain drain" and "head hunting" could be justified as accessible language, or may be a step too far toward overpopularization. There are one or two surprising lapses. Brunel's view on patents is not a matter of significance, as he was born after Watt's glory days. Likewise, Dickens's Hard Times and the planned village of Saltaire long postdated Watt and hardly amount to social or industrial context; New Lanark, maybe. But aside from a slightly simplistic picture of industrialization, which may have been better presented as a re-skilling rather than de-skilling...