A History of the Growth of the Steam-EngineThurston, Robert Henry
History
A History of the Growth of the Steam-Engine
Thurston, Robert Henry
Steam-engines -- History
reasoning, and the conclusions to which it had led him, to Boulton, in
a letter written in December, 1782, and addressed a letter some time
afterward to Priestley, which was to have been read before the Royal
Society in April, 1783. The letter was not read, however, until a year
later, and, three months after, a paper by Cavendish, making the same
announcement, had been laid before the Society. Watt stated that both
Cavendish and Lavoisier, to whom also the discovery is ascribed,
received the idea from him.
The action of chlorine in bleaching organic coloring-matters, by (as
since shown) decomposing them and combining with their hydrogen, was
made known to Watt by M. Berthollet, the distinguished French chemist,
and the former immediately introduced its use into Great Britain, by
inducing his father-in-law, Mr. Macgregor, to make a trial of it.
The copartnership of Boulton & Watt terminated by limitation, and with
the expiration of the patents under which they had been working, in
the first year of the present century; and both partners, now old and
feeble, withdrew from active business, leaving their sons to renew the
agreement and to carry on the business under the same firm-style.
Boulton, however, still interested himself in some branches of
manufacture, especially in his mint, where he had coined many years
and for several nations.
Watt retired, a little later, to Heathfield, where he passed the
remainder of his life in peaceful enjoyment of the society of his
friends, in studies of all current matters of interest in science, as
well as in engineering. One by one his old friends died--Black in
1799, Priestley, an exile to America, in 1803, and Robison a little
later. Boulton died, at the age of eighty-one, August 17, 1809, and
even the loss of this nearest and dearest of his friends outside the
family was a less severe blow than that of his son Gregory, who died
in 1804.
Yet the great engineer and inventor was not depressed by the
loneliness which was gradually coming upon him. He wrote: "I know that
all men must die, and I submit to the decrees of Nature, I hope, with
due reverence to the Disposer of events;" and neglected no opportunity
to secure amusement or instruction, and kept body and mind constantly
occupied. He still attended the weekly meetings of the club, meeting
Rennie and Telford, and other distinguished men of his own and the
succeeding generation. He lost nothing of his fondness for invention,
and spent many months in devising a machine for copying statuary,
which he had not perfected to his own satisfaction at the time of his
death, ten years later. This machine was a kind of pentagraph, which
could be worked in any plane, and in which the marking-pencil gave
place to a cutting-tool. The tracing-point followed the surface of the
pattern, while the cutting-point, following its motion precisely,
formed a fac-simile in the material operated upon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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