The Life and Legend of James Watt
offers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David ...Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting his inventions and ideas, and determined in pursuit of money and fame. A skilled and creative engineer, Watt was also a compulsive experimentalist drawn to natural philosophical inquiry, and a chemistry of heat underlay much of his work, including his steam engineering. But Watt pursued the business of natural philosophy in a way characteristic of his roots in the Scottish "improving" tradition that was in tension with Enlightenment sensibilities. As Miller demonstrates, Watt's accomplishments relied heavily on collaborations, not always acknowledged, with business partners, employees, philosophical friends, and, not least, his wives, children, and wider family. The legend created in his later years and "afterlife" claimed too much of nineteenth-century technology for Watt, but that legend was, and remains, a powerful cultural force.
This short essay gives an account of my current work writing a long sequence of poems centred on the life and times of the engineer, scientist and businessman James Watt. Material from Birmingham's ...extensive Boulton & Watt archive has assisted decisions on form, language and content, and guided me to write poems using things left unsaid, half-formed ideas and dreams. The three poems which conclude the article demonstrate different engagements with the archival material; one draws on a catalogue entry, one derives from several years of family correspondence while the third employs a record of fruit picked by James Watt in 1813 to frame Watt's retrospection.
James Watt’s 1769 patent is widely supposed to have stood in the way of the development of high-pressure steam technology until it finally expired in 1800. We dispute this popular claim. We show that ...although it is true that high-pressure steam technology developed only after the expiration of Watt’s patent, the delay was due to factors other than that patent itself, including the widely held opinion that the use of high-pressure engines were excessively risky. Indeed, Watt’s monopoly rights may actually have hastened the development of the high-pressure steam engine by inspiring Richard Trevithick to revive a supposedly obsolete technology so as to invent around them.
Reminiscences of James Watt Hart, Robert
Scottish archaeological journal,
03/2012, Letnik:
34-35, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Read at a Meeting of the Society held at Glasgow, on 2nd November 1837.) As some of the members of the Society expressed a desire at our last meeting, that I would give some recollections of the ...interviews that my late brother (Mr. John Hart) and myself had with the celebrated Dr. James Watt, the inventor of our improved steam-engine, I have accordingly thrown together the following brief narrative. As these meetings took place forty-three years since, many observations that were made at the time may have escaped me at present; yet, when the same subjects are touched on, I have as distinct recollection of his treatment of them as if it were of yesterday.
Dasgupta (2004) challenged Darwinian theories of creativity by scrutinizing 3 historic episodes drawn from the careers of James Watt, Jadadis Chandra Bose, and Pablo Picasso. However, in this article ...I present counterarguments based on a critical consideration of scholarship, theory, logic, and data. By all 4 standards, the anti-Darwinian argument is considerably undermined. In particular, (a) Dasgupta's presentation did not reflect the most recent Darwinian scholarship, and therefore, (b) the theory evaluated is one not advocated by any modern proponent. Moreover, the supposed test (c) requires the application of an inappropriate falsifiability criterion, and (d) depends on a questionable interpretation of data-data that may not even be the most germane to the theory's empirical evaluation. I end by discussing the broader problems faced by anyone advocating Darwinist theories of creativity.
James Watt Carnegie, Andrew
2009, c2009., 2009-05-01
eBook
Odprti dostop
The essential improvements that Scottish inventor James Watt (1736 - 1819) made to the steam engine were fundamental to the Industrial Revolution. It would be hard to overstate the value of this ...invention to technological and social change - it gave us the modern world we live in today. This is his biography as written by Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish-born American industrialist, businessman, and philanthropist.
