Description / Expertise
Length: 53 cm (20 ¾ inches)
The oval tureen engraved with presentation inscription below the everted gadroon border, reeded side handles rising from leafage and on four similarly headed knurled supports, matching cover, the similarly bordered stand rising at the ends to palm leaf grips overlaid with foliage. The inscription reads: ‘Presented to James Watt L.L.D. by the company of Proprietors of the Glasgow Waterworks’.
The background to this presentation silver is given by Sir J.D. Marwick in The Water Supply of Glasgow, 1901. ‘About 1811, the Glasgow water company consulted James Watt, then in his seventy-fifth year, as to the best mode of conveying water from a peninsula across the Clyde to the company’s engines at Dalmarnock – a difficulty which appeared to them almost insurmountable, for it was necessary to fit the pipes through which the water passed to the uneven and shifting bed of the river. Watt shortly afterwards suggested a plan, which showed that his inventive powers were unimpaired by age. Taking the tail of the lobster for his model, he devised a tube of iron similarly articulated, of which he forwarded a drawing to the company, and acting upon his recommendation, they had the tube forthwith made and laid down. It proved a complete success. Watt declined to be paid for the service thus rendered, but the directors acknowledged it by presenting him with a piece of plate of the value of a hundred guineas.’
James Watt had retained a keen interest in the development of Glasgow, up river from his hometown of Greenock. The town council had recognised the need to improve the water supply for the growing population in 1804, when Meyrick notes ‘Many proposals have been given in for supplying Glasgow with water from different sources, and surveys have been made, by order of the magistrates, in order to ascertain where a proper quantity can be procured, in a situation sufficiently elevated to serve the purpose. As yet, however, nothing has been concluded upon’. In May 1806, Thomas Telford supplied a report to the town council with his recommendation for ‘water from the River Clyde to be pumped into reservoirs at Dalmarnock, two or three miles above Jamaica Bridge, and conveyed thence, after filtration, into reservoirs in Sydney Street and Rottenrow’. This plan was approved by Parliament on 21st July 1806, and the works were then constructed, under the supervision of James Watt, and Boulton and Watt of the Soho works.
James Watt
James Watt (1736-1819), sometimes referred to as James Watt the engineer, was the son of James Watt of Greenock, a ship’s chandler and merchant, and his wife Agnes Muirhead. His uncle, John Watt, was a successful surveyor and his grandfather, Thomas Watt of Crawsfordsdyke who had started in Aberdeenshire as an apprentice carpenter and mason, moved to Clydeside as a young man to become a teacher of navigation and owner of a successful mathematics school. Watt’s early life was spent beside the Clyde, absorbing its life and becoming aware of the science that lay behind navigation and commerce. He received a good education from his mother and from the local school, as well as self-education in the workshop created for him by his father. His extraordinary powers of reasoned observation and persistence were apparent even at this early stage, and were to be a hallmark of his life.
His inquiring mind naturally led him into the ambit of the progressive University of nearby Glasgow, and from there to London to train for a year as a ‘premium apprentice’ as a precision-instrument maker. He returned to Glasgow and became instrument maker to the University.
In 1764 he was asked to repair the University’s model of Newcomen’s steam engine, and he was particularly struck by the extraordinary consumption of coal involved in the engine’s relatively weak performance. Over the coming months he first, with the help of the great chemist Joseph Black, identified through experiment the theoretical reasons for this. Watt and his friends – Joseph Black, John Robison, William Small and others – appreciated what a breakthrough an improved steam pump would be. Steam power was the transferable power of the eighteenth century.
Initially Watt was financed by John Roebuck of the Carron Iron Works. However in the early 1770s Roebuck’s bank failed, and he went bankrupt. Matthew Boulton of the Soho Works, Birmingham, bought out his interest in Watt’s invention and stepped brilliantly into the breach.
Watt had first visited the Soho Works in 1767, and met Boulton in 1768. From the outset Boulton recognised Watt’s genius, the importance of his invention, and the vital role that both could play in his business. In 1774 Watt entered into partnership with Boulton and moved with his family to Birmingham. He was to live and work there until his death 45 years later.
From that point development of the steam engine was swift. On receipt of an order, Watt assessed the customer’s technical requirements and himself produced the design drawings for an appropriate engine. Within a decade, Watt, responding to Boultonian pressure, invented and patented a rotary motion steam engine with its famous sun and planet gearing system and parallel motion. By the early 1780s Boulton & Watt was in profit, Watt banking £4,000 in 1783. Not only was their capital riding high, so was their reputation. In 1785 Watt and Boulton were elected Fellows of the Royal Society, together with their fellow Lunarians; Withering, Keir and Galton.
Both Boulton and Watt returned from the business in 1800. Watt prospered in the last twenty years of his life, feted as the greatest living inventor and engineer and honoured for his modesty (he declined a baronetcy). Glasgow University made him an honorary Doctor of Law. In the late nineteenth century the standard electrical unit was now marked on every light bulb, the Watt, and was named after him by international agreement. He is rightly regarded as the Father of the Industrial Revolution who, in the words of the inscription on the Chantrey Memorial, ‘enlarged the resources of his country, increased the power of man, and rose to an eminent place among the most illustrious followers of science and the real benefactors of the world.’
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