LIFE OF WATT. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION—INVENTORS AND THEIR HISTORY-LINEAGE OF JAMES WATT-HIS GREAT-GRANDFATHER-HIS GRANDFATHER THOMAS WATT-BURGH OF CRAWFORDSDYKE-BURGH OF GREENOCK-LIFE AND PURSUITS OF THOMAS WATT-HIS MARRIAGE AND DEATH. THE fame of James Watt, great as it unquestionably became in the course of his long and honoured life, has increased since his death in a degree that may, perhaps, be termed unprecedented, being co-ordinate with nothing less than the unlimited development of his own manifold inventions. The respect which in all ages and countries has ever been paid to inventors seems, indeed, to rest on something more profound than mere gratitude for the benefits which they have been the means of conferring on mankind; and to imply, if it does not express, a consciousness that by the grand and original conceptions of their minds they approach somewhat more nearly than their fellows to the qualities and pre-eminence of a higher order of being. "The dignity," says Lord Bacon, "of this end of endowment of man's life with new commodity appeareth by the estimation that antiquity made of such as guided thereunto; for whereas founders of states, lawgivers, extirpators of tyrants, fathers of the people, were honoured but with the titles of demigods, inventors were ever consecrated among the gods themselves." * Of all the inventions which the ingenuity of man has * Fragments of Valerius Terminus, on the Interpretation of Nature; Works of Bacon, by Basil Montagu, 1825, vol. i., p. 266. devised, that of the modern steam-engine is, whether we regard its own mechanism and mode of performing its operations, or the operations themselves, perhaps the most wonderful, and certainly the most useful. "We must confess," says Belidor, "that this is the most marvellous of all machines, and that there are none of which the mechanism has so much analogy to that of animals. Heat is the principle of its motion; in its different pipes there takes place a circulation like that of the blood in the veins, having valves which open and shut themselves at right times; it feeds itself, performs its evacuations at regular intervals, and draws from its own work all that is needful for its subsistence." * So, Wordsworth and Coleridge, when on a tour in Scotland, “passed,” says Dr. Wordsworth, "a steam-engine, and Wordsworth made some observation to the effect that it was scarcely possible to divest oneself of the impression, on seeing it, that it had life and volition. 'Yes,' replied Coleridge, 'it is a giant with one idea.""† In proportion to the estimate which men have formed of the importance of the inventor's work is generally the desire they feel to learn the history of its origin and progress; and of the development of the mind of its contriver. It will be seen from the following pages, that the life of the creator of the modern steamengine was one, as has been justly remarked, of patriarchal simplicity, "devoted to labor, to study, to meditation ;" and that in a humble condition, and a career of virtuous industry and patient thought, "projects were elaborated, which were destined to raise the British nation to an unheard-of height of power." The first of the paternal ancestors of James Watt, of whom any notices have been preserved, is his great-grandfather; the minute details of whose personal history, however, have shared nearly the same oblivion in which even his Christian name is sunk. It is only known, from the traditions of his family, that he lived in Aberdeenshire in the earlier half of the seventeenth century, and followed the business of a farmer, whether of his * Belidor, Archit. Hydraul., vol. ii., pp. 324, 325, ed. 1739. BURGH OF GREENOCK. 3 own land or not we can only conjecture; that his peaceful pursuits did not exempt him, in "the troubles" of that period, from a rude summons to arms, and an early death in battle; that he perished in one of the wars of Montrose, fighting, in all likelihood, for the cause of the Covenant; that his property was confiscated; and that his orphan son, Thomas, was educated by the care of some distant relations. Thomas was born, according to one account, in 1639, according to another in 1642, and was at all events soon removed from Aberdeenshire. He settled, early in life, in the little burgh of barony of Crawfordsdyke, or Cartsdyke, situated in the barony of Cartsburn, in the close vicinity of the town of Greenock in Renfrewshire. He was a "teacher of navigation;" or, as he is styled on his tombstone, "Professor of the Mathematicks;" a vocation for the exercise of which it appears that neither Cartsdyke nor Greenock could, previous to that time, have afforded any very wide scope. Even so late as April 1700, in an enquiry for settling the amount of taxation to be made in respect of their trade, it was given in evidence that the whole shipping of the two burghs together consisted of but one ship belonging wholly to Greenock; three ships having part-owners in Glasgow; and two barks and a traveller-boat, said to belong to Greenock. In this estimate there can be no doubt that the open or half-decked boats employed in the herring or other fisheries were not included. The population of Crawfordsdyke and of Greenock must, at the time of Thomas Watt's settlement there, have been small; for we learn that nearly a century later it amounted to no more than four thousand one hundred souls in the whole parish. We may reasonably wonder at any teacher of mathematics whose practice was limited to so narrow a field, being able to derive even a sufficient subsistence from his erudite labours. Yet not only did he maintain himself and his family, in respectability and comfort, on the limited earnings of such humble but honourable toil, but he also accumulated funds sufficient to enable him to purchase the house in Crawfordsdyke in which he lived, with a garden attached, and afterwards a house in Greenock. He seems to have been highly esteemed among his worthy brother-citizens of the burgh; over which he was made chief magistrate, or "Baillie of the Barony;" he also became an Elder of the Parish and Presbytery, as well as Treasurer and Clerk to the Kirk-Session, ecclesiastical dignities which must be supposed to bear witness to the integrity of his life; and proofs remain of the nature of his dealings with men and things in each of those capacities, which demonstrate the rigidity of the rule he maintained over the minds and morals of the little community. Repairing the church,-widening the bridge,-trying by mathematical standards the weights and measures used in the burgh,-are associated, in the records of the court in which he presided, with his infliction of penalties for assault and battery of the lieges, his threatening with "the pain of fourtie shillings Scots, toties quoties," "several of the young ones who does upon that night called Hallowin night abuse several yards in drawing of kail," his statuting and ordaining that "in all time comeing, if any persons keip hens, and they doe prejudice to any neighbour, that the owner sall mak up the damnage attour lyable in fourtie shilling toties quoties. This act extends to all sorts of taim fonles; and many other instances of discipline, equally minute, equally solemn, and, doubtless, equally salutary Sitting in and haunting taverns, on Friday and Saturday nights, was, under the reign of his exemplary censorship, to be "abstained from after nine of the clock, at which time the bell of the kirk is allowed to be rung, to give advertisement to all to repair to their own house, except in case of necessity;"-offending skippers were made "to acknowledge their guilt" in "loosing their ships and taking them to seaward on the Sabbath Day," and were then held to be cheaply let off by being "censured with a sessional rebuke, and admonished to carry more tenderly on the Lord's Day for the future." But the greatest eruption of the volcano, of vice which then threatened to overwhelm Carsdyke, with its torrent of moral lava, DEATH OF THOMAS WATT. LO 5 probably occurred when "the Minister informed the Session that mountebanks having come to the place, had erected a stage for a stage-play to be acted thereon, and proposed "—(i. e. the Minister,—not the mountebanks !)" they should fall on some effectual method for suppressing the same.” And "the Session, considering the thing to be unlawful, and inductive of much sin and looseness, appointed some of their number, to wit, James Crawford, John Clark, and Thomas Watt, to go to the Doctor (not the minister but the quack-mountebank), in name of the session, and discharge him to use rope-dancing, and men simulating themselves fools, or women exposing themselves to public [gaze] by dancing on the stage, or any indecent behaviour, allowing him only to expose his drugs or medicines to public sale." The name of Thomas Watt's wife was Margaret Sherrer; by her he had six children, of whom Margaret, Catherine, and Thomas, all died in infancy, and Doritie,-so the name is spelt,at the age of eighteen. Thomas Watt died on the 27th of February, 1734, "aged about 95 years," and his widow on the 21st of March, 1735, "aged 84 years," as stated in the Register of burials of the Old or West parish of Greenock; or 92 and 79 years respectively, as engraved on the tomb-stone of Thomas Watt and his family, in the church-yard of the same parish. : |