All About Engines

56 All About Engines Watt’s steam engine was pumping water, raising coal and iron, and driving mills and factories. And when Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton he forgot that the national credit, which enabled us to continue the war unbeaten when every other country in Europe had been humbled to the dust, was established and maintained by clever inventors, beginning as, and often to the end of their days remaining, poor men ; by men who, amid grime and dust and sweat, won coal and wrought iron into wonderful machines; and by women and children who toiled amid the heat and moisture of the cotton mills. And of all those who created this new epoch in the world’s history, the greatest was James Watt. Each played his part, but compared with him they were as the raw apprentice to the most accomplished mechanic, as the merest tyro at the law to the subtlest Lord Chancellor. For it might almost be said that he was born out of his time. He was not a mere inventor, proceeding to solve a narrow problem by trial and error. His methods were the scientific methods employed even by few men long after he was dead. He saw, it may be vaguely, and he em- ployed in his engines, principles which were only stated in precise language or in a mathematical equa- tion when his engines had been in use for over sixty years. And he swept the field of inquiry so com- pletely that until 1884 there was no improvement of any importance in steam engines that had not been expressly foreshadowed in his specifications.