19th January 1736. His
grandfather was a farmer in Aberdeenshire, and was killed in one of the
battles of Montrose. His father was a teacher of mathematics, and was
latterly chief magistrate of Greenock. James Watt, the celebrated man of
whom I now speak, was a very delicate boy, so much so, that he had to
leave school on account of his health, and was allowed to amuse himself
as he liked. This he did in a scientific way, however, as an aunt of his
said to him one day: "Do you know what you have been doing? You have
taken off and put on the lid of the teapot repeatedly; you have been
holding spoons and saucers over the steam, and trying to catch the drops
of water formed on them by it. Is it not a shame so to waste your time?"
Mrs. Muirhead, his aunt, was little aware that this was the first
experiment in the way which afterwards immortalised her nephew.

In 1775 Watt was sent to London to a mathematical instrument maker, but
could not stay on account of his health, and soon afterwards came back
to Glasgow. He then got rooms in the College, and was made mathematical
instrument maker to the University, and he afterwards opened a shop in
the town. He was but twenty-one years of age when he was appointed to
this post in the College, and his shop became the lounge of the clever
and the scientific. The first time that his attention was directed to
the agency of steam as a power was in 1734, when a friend of his, Mr.
Robinson, who had some idea of steam carriages, consulted him on the
subject,--little is said of this, however. In 1762 Watt tried some
experiments on high-pressure steam, and made a model to show how motion
could be obtained from that power; but did not pursue his experiments on
account of the supposed danger of such pressure. He next had a model of
Newcomen's engine, which would not work well, sent him to repair. Watt
soon found out its faults, and made it work as it should do. This did
not satisfy him, and setting his active mind to work, he found in the
model that the steam which raised the piston had of course to be got rid
of. This, as a natural consequence, caused great loss of heat, as the
cylinder had to be cooled so as to condense the steam; and this led him
at last, after various plans, to adopt a separate vessel to condense
this steam. Of course, if you wish to save fuel, it is necessary that
the steam should enter a heated cylinder or other vessel, or else all
the steam is lost,--or in other words, c