[Voice over - delivered in a staccato semi-monotone by an omiscient narrator.]
NARRATOR: Two men, two colleges, two continents, autumn, 1760.
[split-screen]
NARRATOR: On the left: tall, thin-skinned, shy, Mr. Thomas Jefferson, student at William and Mary College, taking his first bite of the academic apple, in his own words eager to continue his study of the classics, learn something of mathematics, gain a more universal acquaintance.
On the right: Mr. James Watt, employee, in his workshop at the University of Glasgow. Trained as an instrument maker, member of the Guild of Hammermen, a mechanic who can make anything, but a man ignorant of steam and steam engines, an ignorance soon to be remedied.
Two men with little to show as yet in the way of accomplishment. Two men unknowingly waiting for the cue to make their stage entrance in two very different revolutions. And for now, two men unaware that the cue will come from that same small influence waiting for them both in the wings behind the proscenium of -- the Diary Zone.
Like a Virginian
Jefferson's most famous words are: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The concepts and two-thirds of the final phrase are from philosopher John Locke - Locke's phrase was "Life, Liberty, and Property". Locke was a member of what Jefferson described as his intellectual trinity - Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and Locke - a 17th century British philosopher, one that Jefferson first studied in college.
When Jefferson began his college education, the faculty of William and Mary College was in turmoil. Numbering only seven to begin with, three professors had been dismissed because of their activities opposing the Two Penny Act, which affected the pay of clergy. Prior to the arrival at the college of William Small as professor of natural philosophy (science), all professors had been Anglican clergy.
William Small received an MA from Marischal College, Aberdeen, Scotland in 1755. By the time Small had entered college, the Scottish Enlightenment had already begun and Small and Marischal College were part of it. When Small was getting his education (and Jefferson his), the signal accomplishments of the Scottish Enlightenment in the physical and social sciences had yet to be achieved - among them the invention of geology by Hutton, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson, Watt's enhancement of the steam engine, Murdoch's invention of gas light, the development of railroads, and the physics and chemistry of Joseph Black.
While all of that was still in the future, the groundwork had already been laid by the time Small was in college. The Scottish Enlightenment rested on the proto-utilitarian philosophy of Frances Hutcheson (who coined the the phrase "the greatest good for the greatest number") who along with fellow Scot David Hume pursued a philosopy of reason and empiricism and the separation of religion and science - what we would call reality-based. The Scots initially took up the science and scientific attitudes of the British Newton and Bacon, as well as the continental Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo and others. Their philosophy extended that of the British empiricists like Locke and Berkeley as well as incorporating French philosophy.
Small was Jefferson's professor of physics, metaphysics and mathematics. But shortly after Jefferson enrolled, his other professor, Rev. Jacob Rowe, professor of moral philosophy, was dismissed after leading some of the students in a row with some of the boys of the town. Small became professor of moral philosophy as well. For at least half of his time at college, Small was Jefferson's only teacher. (Jefferson the Virginian - Dumas Malone, pp 51-55)
In Jefferson's own words:
It was my great good fortune, and what probably fixed the destinies of my life that Dr. Wm. Small of Scotland was then professor of Mathematics, a man profound in most of the useful branches of science, with a happy talent of communication correct and gentlemanly manners, & an enlarged & liberal mind. He, most happily for me, became soon attached to me & made me his daily companion when not engaged in the school ; and from his conversation I got my first views of the expansion of science & of the system of things in which we are placed. Fortunately the Philosophical chair became vacant soon after my arrival at college, and he was appointed to fill it per interim: and he was the first who ever gave in that college regular lectures in Ethics, rhetoric & Belles lettres.
Autobiography - Jefferson
Had Small only been an influential teacher and Jefferson's introduction to science and philosopy, it would have been notable. But Jefferson continues that Small
... filled up the measure of his goodness to me, by procuring for me, from his most intimate friend G. Wythe, a reception as a student of law, under his direction, and introduced me to the acquaintance and familiar table of Governor Fauquier, the ablest man who had ever filled that office. With him, and at his table, Dr. Small & Mr. Wythe, his amici omnium horarum, & myself, formed a parti quarr;, & to the habitual conversations on these occasions I owed much instruction.
Autobiography - Jefferson
At age 16, Jefferson, whose father had died several years before, was dining regularly with his professor and through his professor, with the governor of the colony, and with the leading lawyer in Virginia, Wythe, who was also involved with the House of Burgesses. The introduction to Wythe had a great influence on Jefferson, who read law with Wythe after his 2 years of college. Wythe later (in 1779) became the first law professor in the (future) United States and at William and Mary his students included Henry Clay, James Monroe and John Marshall.
Of these men, Wythe was closest to Thomas Jefferson -- so close that Jefferson once described Wythe as a "second father." At a time when law students often read law for a year or less, Jefferson spent five years reading law with George Wythe, and the two men together read all sorts of other material; from English literary works, to political philosophy, to the ancient classics.
George Wythe
Wythe also signed the Declaration of Independence.
Welcome to the Machine
In 1760, James Watt hadn't begun to investigate the properties of steam or steam engines. He was an instrument maker at the University of Glasgow. Ironically, Watt, whose inventions would both consume large amounts of coal and make coal mining easier, was sponsored by faculty member Joseph Black - the chemist and phyisicist who first identified and isolated carbon dioxide.
James Watt, is frequently but wrongly credited with the invention of the steam engine. Actually, the first steam-engine patent was granted in 1698, the year James Watt's father was born. By the time James was born in 1736, at Greenock on the River Clyde, Newcomen engines had been pumping water out of the coal mines in the Midlands for some 24 years.
James Watt and the Lunaticks of Birmingham
The University of Glasgow, in fact, owned a Newcomen steam engine, but it was in London being repaired. By 1763 the engine had been returned to Glasgow, but still didn't work, and Watt was asked to fix it. At that time, it wasn't steam pressure that powered the engine and pushed the piston - it was the vacuum created when the steam in the cylinder was condensed into water that provided the power stroke.
Each Newcomen engine was a monster, with a large boiler feeding steam straight up into a cast-iron cylinder, often 6 feet in diameter and 10 feet high. As the cylinder filled with steam, the piston rose, allowing the beam above to rock upwards. Hanging from the other end of the great beam, iron pump rods descended into the mine. When the cylinder was full, the supply of steam was shut off and cold water squirted in to condense the steam inside. This created a partial vacuum, and the pressure of the atmosphere on the top of the piston pushed it down, pulling the beam down after it, lifting the pump rods, and so pumping water from the mine. These massive engines ran at perhaps five or six strokes a minute, slow but inexorable.
James Watt and the Lunaticks of Birmingham
The cold water that condensed the steam also cooled the machine's cylinder, so that when the next charge of steam was drawn in, much of the energy in the steam went to reheating the massive cylinder block - the Newcomen engine was horribly inefficient.
A vast amount of heat was consequently wasted in repeatedly heating and then cooling the cylinder at each cycle, and Watt realised that the efficiency of the machine could be greatly improved by having a separate, but linked, condenser. That way the cylinder could stay hot, whilst the condenser would remain cool. This invention of Watt's saved between two-thirds and three-quarters of the coal consumed by the older type of engine.
James Watt
Watt's insight was to condense the steam into water and create the vacuum that powered the engine with a condenser separate from, but connected to, the cylinder. His accomplishment is equivalent to taking a Hummer from 10 MPG to 50 MPG with only a small modification.
Watt perfected his improved engine in 1765. He lacked the capital to finance production of the engine, so he partnered with John Roebuck, who owned both an ironworks and a coal mine that needed a steam engine to pump out its water. Watt made trips to London in 1767 and 1768 to secure his patent, stopping in Birmingham both times. Meanwhile, Roebuck incurred debts on behalf of himself and Watt, and with Watt's steam engines neither being produced or sold, Watt was forced to take up work as a surveyor - for eight years - to support his family and service his debts.
[Watt] first met Matthew Boulton on his second visit to Soho [Birmingham] in 1768, when he called in on the way back from London, where he had sworn his famous patent, which was for 14 years, on 9th August. The two men took an immediate liking for one another, Boulton recognising that Watt's diffidence concealed a keen intelligence in need of encouragement, whilst Watt marvelled at the organisation, skill and ingenuity displayed at Soho and the beautiful work done there. In the end he stayed a fortnight, meeting several people besides Matthew Boulton who were destined to become lifelong friends. Fully realising the significance of Watt's invention, Boulton expressed a wish to be involved in manufacturing it, but since he had a two-thirds share in the patent Roebuck had to be consulted, and when he offered Matthew Boulton a licence covering only the Midland counties it was firmly declined, on the grounds that the investment needed to establish proper manufacturing facilities with the equipment needed to produce engines accurately and efficiently, could not be recouped from so small a market.
This was to prove a severe setback to James Watt, who learnt the hard way that it was one thing to make a brilliant invention, and an altogether different thing to make a practical reality of it. He had no engineering expertise himself, and Roebuck's men lacked the skills needed to produce a steam-tight, efficient engine. One by one, his fourteen precious years slipped away and he became increasingly disillusioned and frustrated. He was forced to take work as a canal surveyor in order to support his family. Then, in 1773, James Watt suffered a double blow. His wife died in childbirth and Roebuck went bankrupt. These reverses brought him to his lowest ebb.
At this point Matthew Boulton was able to use his position as a major creditor of Roebuck's to secure for himself Roebuck's share of Watt's patent. As we have seen, Boulton and Watt had been friends for some time and, seeing no future for himself in his native land, on 17th May 1774, aged 38, James Watt left Scotland for Birmingham, where he would spend the remaining 45 years of his life. The most famous partnership of the Industrial Revolution, that of Boulton & Watt, was about to begin. It is a testament to the strength of the mutual trust that existed between the two men that they seem never to have bothered to execute a deed of partnership, finding it adequate - and rightly so, as things turned out - to run this large and historic business purely on the basis of a gentleman's agreement.
James Watt
Boulton had inherited his works from his father. His principle products were items like buttons and belt buckles - particularly the then-fashionable inlaid belt buckles. However, Birmingham, where Boulton's factories were, was not considered a center of high fashion, so Boulton shipped his buckles to France and then re-imported them to England as French belt buckles, and they sold wildly.
Watt's steam engine improvement was one of the key factors in the Industrial Revolution, but Watt's contributions don't end there. It's arguable that Watt and Boulton helped lay the foundations for precision metalworking on large scale products - necessary technology for many inventions that followed, like locomotives, steamships, automobiles, aircraft, spacecraft, or even the hard drive in your computer. The Newcomen engine that Watt improved had a square cylinder and piston and was not usable for rotary motion to drive machinery - things Watt and his engineers eventually corrected. Both Watt's invention and the technology surrounding it were critical to the Industrial Revolution.
Watt's success also stimulated research in thermodynamics which underlies many later concepts in modern physics. The unit of power is named for James Watt.
Watt was by nature pessimistic, a hypochondriac and hated meeting strangers. It was on Watt's second visit to Birmingham that he met Boulton and secured the future for his steam engines. On Watt's first visit to Birmingham, he had planned to meet Boulton, but Boulton was out of the city. Had the pessimistic Watt been turned away by a rude housekeeper, or a plant guard pointing to a "No Admittance" sign at one of Boulton's factories, or someone viewing him as a psuedo-scientific crank, history might have different.
But when Watt knocked on Boulton's door on his first visit to Birmingham in 1767, someone else answered -- Dr. William Small. The same William Small who had taught and mentored Jefferson, now with an MD earned from Marischal College in 1765. Small had returned from Virginia in 1764.
Small had the scientific knowledge to understand Watt's invention. He took Watt on a tour of Boulton's works, and was a capable enough guide to leave Watt suitably impressed. Small was also a close associate of Boulton - he was introduced to Boulton with a letter from Benjamin Franklin, who had met Small in America - and was able to communicate to Boulton both Watt's capabilities and the significance of his technology, leading to the handshake partnership described above.
Small, as both an MD and friend was a frequent correspondent with the hypochondriac Watt, and they also discussed business and technical matters. Boulton and Small were the founders of the Lunar Society, which met during the full moon, so members could find their way home in the dark (gaslight having not been invented yet - later invented by Watt and Boulton engineer William Murdoch). The Lunar Society - Lunaticks, as they called themselves - met to discuss matters of science, technology, business and philosophy, and included Watt, potter Josiah Wedgewood, and Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather) and other lesser know intellectuals.
In 1775, Jefferson, in appreciation and friendship, sent to Dr. Small three dozen bottles of Madeira and a long letter detailing the political situation in the colonies. Small never saw either.
[voice over]
NARRATOR: One Doctor William Small, proselytizer of the Scottish Enlightenment, influencer of revolutionaries, facilitator of partnerships, and good friend, who won't live past 1775 to see the final acts of two productions in which he had a supporting role. A story for would-be revolutionaries, one Small story, submitted for your approval from -- the Diary Zone.