fresh steam admitted for the following stroke of the machine was wasted in restoring the temperature. This radical defect being thus obvious, the inventive mind of Mr Watt required only a little time and experience to discover a remedy. He first thought of having a wooden cylinder instead of a metal one; but many physical difficulties caused him almost immediately to abandon that plan, and he soon hit on the happy idea of letting the steam pass into a separate vessel, where it should be condensed by the jet of water; by which means the cylinder would never be cooled, and consequently no steam would be lost in restoring its tempe rature. Amongst Mr Watt's acquaintances at this time was Dr Roebuck, a man of considerable merit, and possessed of some property. This gentleman saw the value of the discovery, andassociated himself with the discoverer, for the purpose of bringing it to perfection; but it was not till the year 1769, that he reduced it to practice, at Kinniel, near Borrowstounness, where the Doctor then resided, and took out letters-patent for his "Method of lessening the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire Engines." But Dr Roebuck's losses in other concerns causing a suspension of proceedings, Mr Boulton, in the year 1773, became acquainted with the business. His knowledge of mechanics enabled him to appreciate the invention; and the spirit of enterprise, together with the fortune he possess ed, induced him to engage in it with ardour. Dr Roebuck was reimbursed with interest; and Mr Watt, having lost his wife, removed to Birmingham, where he was indefatigable in bringing to perfection the engine that he had invented. At the expence of about L.20,000, a manufactory was built, on a barren spot at Soho, near Birmingham, merely because a stream of water could there be obtained to turn a mill. Yet one of the improved engines, which does not cost above L.500, would turn more machinery than the brook, to obtain the advantage of which Mr Boulton expended more than L.10,000. After Mr Watt had found the advantage of condensing the steam under the piston in a separate vessel, he considered that the cylinder was still cooled by the air when the piston descended. To avoid this, he shut up the top of the cylinder, and instead of letting the piston be pressed down by the weight of the atmosphere, he pressed it down by the force of steam, and restored the equilibrium by opening a communication between the upper and lower side of the piston. This was a second and great improvement; and all that was done afterwards in the reciprocating steam-engine, was only to render the construction more perfect and the management easier. There was no departure from this principle; but it may be proper to observe, that the steam employed by Mr Watt to depress the piston was never above one-tenth stronger than the atmosphere. What are now termed highpressure engines, were not at all in use; and Mr Watt, at that time, disapproved highly of working with steam much above the strength of the atmosphere. The terms on which the engine was offered to the proprietors of mines, were advantageous and well imagined. A set of trials, or experiments, were made with Newcomen's old engine and Mr Watt's new one, to ascertain the saving in the fuel consumed; and Messrs Boulton and Watt were only to be paid onethird of the value of the coals saved. That saving was estimated according to the number of strokes and the size of the cylinder; and a counter being placed on the top of the beam or lever, to tell the number of strokes, the quantity of coal saved was thus ascertained; and, according to the price of coals at the place, Messrs Boulton and Watt were paid. One of the greatest obstacles to the introduction of a new and expen. sive invention, is, that those who have laid out large sums on machinery are not willing to incur a fresh expense; but this obstacle was overcome by the great liberality of Messrs Boulton and Watt, who, at first, used to take the materials of the old engine in part payment at a price far beyond their value, and gave credit for the remainder, till the advantage should be felt. With such difficulties had two great men to struggle, who, in the end, acquired great fortunes for themselves, enriched their country, and, in some measure, enabled it to sustain a war of more than twenty years against nearly the whole of the civilized world. Mr Watt came to settle at Birmingham in 1773, but it was 1778 before the invention began to be appreciated. In 1789 the Perriers of Paris applied for an engine to raise water for that city; and the steamengine at Challiot was made at Birmingham, and sent over in parts, to be put together there. Yet, though this public transaction ought to make all who know any thing of the improved steam-engine acknowledge that it is of English origin, the French have been at great pains to conceal it; and the matter was carried so far, that M. Riche de Prony, a respectable mathematician, and chief of the school of roads and bridges in France, has written a quarto volume, giving an account of the improved steam-engine, without once naming the real inventor! We presume the same worthy person would have written a treatise on Vaccination without introducing the name of Jenner, or a history of the discovery of Universal Gravitation, or of the Method of Fluxions, without ever recollecting the existence of Newton! The steam-engine, as invented by Newcomen, and improved by Mr Watt, had only been employed as a reciprocrating power for drawing water; and, indeed, until it was improved by Mr Watt, it was too expensive for any purpose where another power could be obtained. But when Mr Watt had overcome the difficulties as to the reciprocating engine, and had rendered it less expensive, he thought of various methods of converting the reciprocating power into a rotative one. It appears, however, that to inventors the most complicated mode of accomplishing a purpose generally occurs first, and that simplicity is obtained by length of time and experience. The spinning-wheel, with its crank and fly, indicates the plan that ought to have been imitated; but Mr Watt, though he meant to employ the crank, wished to make an improvement, by having on a second axle a flywheel, with a heavy side, to revolve twice whilst the engine made a stroke; the heavy side being intended to be always in the act of descending, when the piston was at the top or the bottom of the cylinder, that is to say, while the power of the engine was not acting. But had Mr Watt considered that a heavy fly is a reservoir of power, which renders the motion of any machine with which it is connected regular, he would never have attempted the two revolutions for each stroke, nor thought of the necessity of a heavy side to the fly Mr Watt, in his usual way, gave directions for making a model on this plan; but it was not done under his own eye; and, unfortunately, the workmen employed made known the inflexible bar of iron. Now, as the end of the beam moves in a portion of a circle, the pull or push could not be in a perpendicular direction, which it was absolutely necessary it should be.. By means which any one may understand by looking at one of his engines, Mr Watt contrived, with admirable skill, to make the connex invention to a Mr Rickard, who took out a patent for Mr Watt's invention before even his model was completed. The consequence of this theft was, that Mr Watt was obliged to find another mode of supplying the place of the crank; for, as to the useless invention of the double revolving wheel with the heavy side, that was soon appreciated as it deserved. In this Mr Watt's inexion between the beam and the piston haustible ingenuity enabled him to succeed, though not without expense and loss of time. The plan, however, was so good, that it is yet doubtful whether it is not equal to the crank. But there yet remained one invention necessary for giving perfection to the rotative motion. Though a single bar of iron, or beam of wood, will do perfectly well to connect the beam of the engine with the crank, yet, at the other end, where the cylinder and the moving force are placed, it was necessary to have a chain moving on a circular head or end, that the pull might be always in a direction accurately perpendicular. Before a rotative motion was added, this answered every purpose, because the piston and the beam, pulling alternately, there was never any pushing. The piston pulled down the beam when the vacuum was made under it, and the weight at the opposite end pulled up the piston when the equilibrium was restored. But when a circular or rotative motion, with a fly-wheel, was connected with the beam, the fly-wheel became the moving power at the moment that the piston was at the highest or the lowest. In that case the beam did not always pull, but required to push the piston, the impelling power being for a moment at the other end of the beam or lever. A chain therefore could not answer, it being necessary to connect the piston-rod with the beam by an exactly what was required. Without this beautiful invention, which connects in a solid manner the moving force and the object moved, the applications of the steam-engine, instead of being nearly unlimited, would have been extremely confined and circumscribed. Mr Watt was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1784, of the Royal Society of London in 1785, and a corresponding member of the Batavian Society in 1817. In 1806 the University of Glasgow conferred on him the honorary degree of LL.D.; and in 1808 he was chosen, first corresponding, and afterwards foreign member of the National Institute of France. The following character of this truly illustrious man, who, had he lived in the early ages of society, would have received divine honours, is from the pen of the same eloquent writer, who so happily sketched that of Professor Playfair: "Death is still busy in our high places; and it is with great pain that we find ourselves called upon, so soon after the loss of Mr Playfair, to record the decease of another of our illustrious countrymen, and one to whom mankind has been still more largely indebted. Mr James Watt, the great improver of the steam-engine, died on the 25th ult., at his seat of Heathfield, near Birmingham, in the 84th year of his age. "This name, fortunately, needs no commemoration of ours; for he that bore it survived to see it crowned with undisputed and unenvied honours; and many generations will probably pass away before it shall have gathered all its fame." We have said that Mr Watt was the great improver of the steam-engine; but, in truth, as to all that is admirable in its structure, or vast in its utility, he should rather be described as its inventor. It was by his inventions that its action was so regulated as to make it capable of being applied to the finest and most delicate manufactures, and its power so increased as to set weight and solidity at defiance. By his admirable contrivances, it has become a thing stupendous alike for its force and its flexibility; for the prodigious power which it can exert, and the ease, and precision, and ductility, with which they can be varied, distributed, and applied. The trunk of an elephant that can pick up a pin or rend an oak is nothing to it. It can engrave a seal, and crush masses of obdurate metal like wax before it, draw out, without breaking, a thread as fine as gossamer, and lift a ship of war like a bauble in the air. It can embroider muslin and forge anchors, cut steel into ribands, and impel loaded vessels against the fury of the winds and waves. It would be difficult to estimate the value of the benefits which these inventions have conferred upon the country. There is no branch of industry that has not been indebted to them; and in all the most material, they have not only widened most magnificently the field of its exertions, but multiplied a thousandfold the amount of its productions. It is our improved steam-engine that has fought the battles of Europe, and exalted and sustained, through the late tremendous contest, the political greatness of our land. It is the same great power which now enables us to pay the interest of our debt, and to maintain the arduous struggle in which we are still engaged, with the skill and capital of countries less oppressed with taxation. But these are poor and narrow views of its importance. It has increased indefinitely the mass of human comforts and enjoyments, and rendered cheap and accessible all over the world the materials of wealth and prosperity. It has armed the feeble hand of man, in short, with a power to which no limits can be assigned, completed the dominion of mind over the most refractory qualities of matter, and laid a sure foundation for all those future miracles of mechanic power which are to aid and reward the labours of after generations. It is to the genius of one man too that all this is mainly owing; and certainly no man ever before bestowed such a gift on his kind. The blessing is not only universal, but unbounded; and the fabled in. ventors of the plough and the loom, who were deified by the erring gratitude of their rude contemporaries, conferred less important benefits on mankind than the inventor of our present steam engine. "This will be the fame of Watt with future generations; and it is sufficient for his race and his country. But to those to whom he more immediately belonged, who lived in his society and enjoyed his conversation, it is not perhaps the character in which he will be most frequently recalled-most deeply lamentedor even most highly admired. Independently of his great attainments in mechanics, Mr Watt was an extraordinary, and in many respects a wonderful man. Perhaps no individual in his age possessed so much and such varied and exact information, --had read so much, or remembered what he had read so accurately and so well. He had infinite rejecting, as it were instinctively, whatever was worthless or immaterial. Every conception that was suggested to his mind seemed instantly to take its place among its other rich furniture, and to be condensed into the smallest and most convenient form. He never appeared, therefore, to be at all encumbered or perplexed with the verbiage of the dull books he perused, or the idle talk to which he listened; but to have at once extracted, by a kind of intellectual alchemy, all that was worthy of attention, and to have reduced it, for his own use, to its true value and to its simplest form. And thus it often happened that a great deal more was learned from his brief and vigorous account of the theories and arguments of tedious writers, than an ordinary student could ever have derived from the most faithful study of the originals; and that er quickness of apprehension, a prodigious memory, and a certain rectifying and methodising power of understanding, which extracted something precious out of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous knowledge were immense, and yet less astonishing than the command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every subject that was casually started in conversation with him had been that which he had been last occupied in study ing and exhausting; such was the copiousness, the precision, and the admirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it without effort or hesitation. Nor was this promptitude and compass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies connected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and in most of the branches of phy-rors and absurdities became manifest sical science, might perhaps have been conjectured; but it could not have been inferred from his usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, metaphysics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the details of architecture, music, and law. He was well acquainted too with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of the German poetry. "His astonishing memory was aided, no doubt, in a great measure, by a still higher and rarer faculty-by his power of digesting and arranging in its proper place all the information he received, and of casting aside and from the mere clearness and plainness of his statement of them, which might have deluded and perplexed most of his hearers without that invaluable assistance. "It is needless to say, that with those vast resourses, his conversation was at all times rich and instructive in no ordinary degree; but it was, if possible, still more pleasing than wise, and had all the charms of familiarity, with all the substantial treasures of knowledge. No man could be more social in his spirit, less assuming or fastidious in his manners, or more kind and indulgent towards all who approached him. He rather liked to talk, at least in his latter years; but though he took a considerable share of the conversation, he rarely suggested the topics on which it was to turn, but readily and quietly took up whatever was presented by those around him, and astonished the idle and bar |