James Watt Family

James Watt was born on 19 January 1736 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, a seaport on the Firth of Clyde.

His father worked as shipwright, ship owner and contractor. He served as the town’s chief baillie, while his mother, Agnes Muirhead, came from a distinguished and well educated family.

James Watt Education

James Watt did not attend school regularly; initially he was mostly schooled at home by his mother but later he attended Greenock Grammar School.

He exhibited great manual dexterity, engineering skills and an aptitude for mathematics, while Latin and Greek failed to interest him. He is said to have suffered prolonged bouts of ill-health as a child.

James Watt Biography

When he was eighteen, his mother died and his father’s health began to fail.

Later Watt traveled to London to study instrument-making for a year, then returned to Scotland, settling in the major commercial city of Glasgow intent on setting up his own instrument-making business.

He made and repaired brass reflecting quadrants, parallel rulers, scales, parts for telescopes, and barometers, among other things.

At first he worked on maintaining and repairing scientific instruments used in the university, helping with demonstrations, and expanding the production of quadrants.

In 1759 he formed a partnership with John Craig, an architect and businessman, to manufacture and sell a line of products including musical instruments and toys.

James Watt Invention

In 1759 Watt’s friend, John Robison, called his attention to the use of steam as a source of motive power.

He realised that contemporary engine designs wasted a great deal of energy by repeatedly cooling and reheating the cylinder.

James Watt introduced a design enhancement, the separate condenser, which avoided this waste of energy and radically improved the power, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of steam engines.

Eventually he adapted his engine to produce rotary motion, greatly broadening its use beyond pumping water.

James Watt attempted to commercialise his invention, but experienced great financial difficulties until he entered a partnership with Matthew Boulton in 1775.

The new firm of Boulton and Watt was eventually highly successful and Watt became a wealthy man. In his retirement, Watt continued to develop new inventions though none was as significant as his steam engine work.

He developed the concept of horsepower, and the SI unit of power, the watt.

James Watt Steam Engine

In 1763, University asked Watt to repair a model its Newcomen engine. Even after repair, the engine barely worked.

Later Watt’s critical insight, arrived at in May 1765, was to cause the steam to condense in a separate chamber apart from the piston, and to maintain the temperature of the cylinder at the same temperature as the injected steam by surrounding it with a “steam jacket.”

In 1776, the first engines were installed and working in commercial enterprises. These first engines were used to power pumps and produced only reciprocating motion to move the pump rods at the bottom of the shaft.

The design was commercially successful, and for the next five years Watt was very busy installing more engines, mostly in Cornwall for pumping water out of mines.

James Watt Information

Soon his improvements to the steam engine “converted it from a prime mover of marginal efficiency into the mechanical workhorse of the Industrial Revolution”.

James Watt Awards

Soon Watt was much honoured in his own time. In 1784, member of Royal Society of Edinburgh made him a fellow.  Member of the Batavian Society for Experimental Philosophy elected him as its member, at Rotterdam in 1787.

In 1789, the Smeatonian Society of Civil Engineers elected him to its the elite group.

In 1806, University of Glasgow conferred him the honorary Doctor of Laws. The French Academy elected him a Corresponding Member and made him a Foreign Associate in 1814.

The 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960 as the unit of power incorporated in the International System of Units(or “SI”).