The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  While pasteboard finally worked well enough, it did nothing to solve the central mechanical problem, which was getting the piston to fit into the cylinder as tightly as possible with as little friction as possible—as usual, two objectives fundamentally in conflict with each other. Over the first two years of experimentation, Watt built, again by hand, three models, each with a different cylinder: the original, with a cylinder of 1¾″ brass, but no steam jacket; a 1⅖″ cylinder with steam jacket; and one five or six inches long with a steam jacket made of wood. The tin straws, which worked as a surface condenser, were discarded because of difficulties with consistency and replaced by jet condensers similar to those used by Newcomen.

  Not all, or even most, of the revisions—in a nod to Usher’s stages of invention, perhaps better to call them “critical revisions”—were the inspirations of a solitary inventor. A friend, Dr. William Small,* advised by letter, “Dear Jim … Let me suggest a method32 of making your wheel and valves tight: Let the valve frame be made easy for the groove and about half thick; put a ply of pasteboard below the frame … and place it in the groove in its proper place, then lay a ring of pasteboard all around each side of the groove and over each valve frame, taking care no pasteboard projects over the frames or grooves….”

  By 1768, Watt, three years into his deal with Roebuck, acknowledged that “what I knew about the steam engine33 [in 1765] was but a trifle to what I know now.” His frustrations were growing pronounced. Any slight defect in any component was enough to compromise the design, and therefore the designer’s temper. Newcomen’s engine had only to be better than a horse-driven pump; Watt’s had to be better than Newcomen’s, and that meant cheaper. The unforgiving arithmetic of coal obliged him to produce not merely an elegant design, but one that consumed less fuel, and virtually anything less than perfection in the boring of the cylinder or the strength of the solder consumed more.

  Watt’s perfectionist habits, which had given rigor to his early experiments and made the original separate condensing model work so encouragingly, were no longer much of an advantage. Because while Watt could build a small model to the most exacting specifications, a larger, and therefore practical, version needed a design that could be executed by others; “my principal hindrance34 in erecting engines,” he wrote to Roebuck in 1765, “is always the smith-work.” Supposedly, the smiths at Roebuck’s Carron foundry were the best in England, but even their skills were not up to making a cylinder to tolerances that resulted in one that was (a) perfectly round (so that the piston would fill it) and (b) airtight.

  Watt’s only “relief amidst [his] vexations”35 was, perversely enough, the need to make a living. Though Roebuck was paying the expenses while Watt was attempting to produce a working engine, and had even set the inventor up in a workshop at Kinneil, near the town of Borrowstounness (more popularly, Bo’ness) in central Scotland, he was not paying Watt a salary. To support his family—in 1764, Watt had married his cousin, Margaret Miller, who would give him five children before her death in 1772—the inventor adopted his father’s trade, surveying the canals of northern England, which, he wrote, “have given me health and spirits36 beyond what I commonly enjoy at this dreary season…. Hire yourself to somebody for a ploughman; it will cure ennui.”

  At Kinneil, however, the pressure was unrelenting. By the middle of 1768, Watt had built an eighteen-inch cylinder out of tin, but the same malleability that made it an excellent material for sealing in the vacuum also made it something less than robust. Roebuck didn’t care. He badly wanted some indication that his investment would be redeemed sometime soon, and he insisted that Watt apply for a patent. And so, in January 1769, Watt, somewhat reluctantly, traveled to London, where, despite the still imperfect design of his engine, he had been granted patent number 913 for “a method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire-engines.” His first meeting after collecting the document from the Great Seal Patent Office was with neither Roebuck—the man who had financed the patent—nor Joseph Black, the friend who had inspired it, but with a Birmingham manufacturer named Matthew Boulton.

  BOULTON WAS THEN THIRTY-NINE years old, eight years older than Watt, born into a family that made small metal goods: buckles, buttons, graters, household tools—“toys,” in the vernacular of the day. When he was still in his teens, he entered the family business, most of whose functions were, typically for the time, jobbed out to others: raw materials were bought from one firm, sales handled by another, transportation by a third. Sometimes the other firms were dependable, sometimes not. But they were always costly, which seemed to Boulton an opportunity. By the time he was twenty-five, he had not only enlarged the business but was in the process of changing it irrevocably. Determined to integrate all possible aspects of manufacturing, Boulton moved the metal stamping operations from one water mill to another, starting construction in 1762 on what would become the world’s largest and most famous factory with the relatively modest outlay of £9,000.* Eventually settling two miles from the center of the city of Birmingham, the Soho Manufactory would grow to include workshops, showrooms, stores, offices, worker dormitories, and design studios. It also incorporated a decidedly progressive bent in workforce relations: Boulton used no child labor, and he even offered his laborers, in return for one-sixtieth of their wages, social insurance that paid benefits in the event of illness or injury.

  By the time he was thirty, he was already acknowledged as not only a visionary businessman, but also a hugely successful one. Soho’s output of jewelry, silverware, and gilt decorative products, as well as the traditional iron and tin “toys,” made Boulton, in the words of Josiah Wedgwood (himself a rather remarkable story in the history of ceramics), “the Most compleat Manufacturer37 of Metals in England.” And he was more. James Watt is very likely the best known of all the inventors associated with the introduction of steam power. Partly this is because his life is such a useful bit of shorthand for the entire world of invention that fueled the perpetual innovation machine we call the Industrial Revolution. But the unique elements that made Britain so hospitable to inventions produced by her artisan class, including the legal and cultural incentives articulated in Coke’s Statute and Locke’s Treatises, were only half of the transaction. Increasing the supply of inventors by permitting them to sell their ideas was useless without a market in which those ideas could be sold. And since ideas don’t sell themselves any better than anything does, someone needed to sell them. If James Watt was primus inter pares on the supply side of the steam economy, Matthew Boulton was unquestionably the man best equipped to introduce him to those willing to pay for his supply of ideas.

  Watt had already visited the Soho Manufactory once before, in 1767. It is not known whether Watt, whose distaste for dealmaking was one of his most consistent affects—“I would rather face a loaded cannon38 than settle an account or make a bargain”—managed to drop the hint that his partnership might be subject to improvement, but nothing came of it for more than a year, during which Roebuck’s fortunes deteriorated dramatically. In one of the most reliable tropes of his life, Roebuck’s talent for finding innovative business opportunities was sabotaged by his chronic inability to make them pay off, and his investment in a coal mine was, literally, underwater. He needed cash, and thought he knew the best way to get it.

  In December 1768, at the same moment that Watt’s patent application was moving through the London bureaucracy, Roebuck sent a letter to Boulton offering to sell him an exclusive franchise for the Watt engine in three English counties: Warwick, Stafford, and Derby; Boulton declined. In January, Watt, in possession of his first patent, stopped in Birmingham on his way back to Scotland; one can only guess what they discussed, but there can be little doubt that both Watt’s plans and Roebuck’s offer were shared. In the event, on February 7, 1769, Boulton sent James Watt a letter that read in part:

  I was excited by two motivs39 [sic] to offer you my assistance which were love of you, and love of a money-getting ingenious project. I
presum’d that your engine would require mony [sic], very accurate workmanship, and extensive correspondence, and the best means … of doing the invention justice would be to keep the executive part out of the hands of the multitude of empirical Engineers who from ignorance, want of experience … would be very liable to produce bad and inaccurate workmanship…. My idea was to settle a manufactory near to my own by the side of our Canal [i.e. in Birmingham] where I could erect all the conveniences necessary for the completion of Engines and from which Manufactory We would serve all the World with Engines of all sizes … it would not be worth my while to make for three Countys only, but I find it very worth while to make for all the World….” (emphasis added)

  James Watt’s new engine was a visionary leap—the separate condenser alone doubled the amount of useful work that the Newcomen engine could extract from a given amount of fuel—but its place in history depended on more than Watt’s engineering brilliance, perfectionist temperament, or even the grant of a property right to the idea. Watt (and, for that matter, Roebuck) would have been happy to grow prosperous replacing the Newcomen engines at England’s coal mines. Changing the world demanded a far larger ambition, and Matthew Boulton was just the man to supply it. It’s no coincidence that Boulton’s grandiloquent promise to “make for all the world” (one that he would, in the event, redeem), like Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to Franklin Roosevelt warning about possible German development of the atomic bomb, was written in response to a history-shaking example of what is a very nearly universal human phenomenon: the flash of inventive insight.

  The nature of which is the subject of chapter 6.

  * Place names like Aberdeen and Culloden testify to the Scottish influence on Jamaican history.

  * It wasn’t Defoe’s first comment on the new world being created in Britain. In his 1697 Essay on Projects, he named his era “the Projecting Age,” by which he meant the “projectors” who sought to build commercial empires supported by patents and monopolies (and, to be fair, “projects” like overhyped investments, about which more below).

  * And only yards away from the Department of Moral Philosophy, where Adam Smith, whom we will meet in chapter 11, had held a professorship since 1751.

  * Anderson, whose nickname among the university’s students was “Jolly Jack Phosphorus,” is a fascinating character in his own right: A professor of Hebrew and Semitic languages as well as natural philosophy, he is best remembered as an early advocate of higher education for artisans and craftsmen, for whom he held classes throughout his forty years at Glasgow. So dedicated was he to this underutilized national resource that his estate was used to found Anderson College, now part of the University of Strathclyde.

  * For more about the nature of that flash of insight, see chapter 6.

  * An entire book—be undismayed, not this one—could be written on the history of sulfuric acid as a symbol for the evolution of modern civilization. Under the name “oil of vitriol,” it was the most important weapon in the arsenal of medieval alchemists—the original philosopher’s stone—and remains critical not only for producing fertilizer and bleaching textiles, but as a precursor chemical for sodium carbonate, which is essential for the manufacture of both paper and glass. Even now, a number of international economists use its production as a proxy for a nation’s level of industrial development.

  * Small would have been a key asset in any game of eighteenth-century “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” as a correspondent of Watt, a friend of Benjamin Franklin, and, before his return to Scotland from North America, Thomas Jefferson’s onetime professor at the College of William & Mary.

  * Modest indeed—a fraction of what he would eventually spend on rejiggering Watt’s patent.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE WHOLE THING WAS ARRANGED IN MY MIND

  concerning the surprising contents of a Ladies Diary; invention by natural selection; the Flynn Effect; neuronal avalanches; the critical distinction between invention and innovation; and the memory of a stroll on Glasgow Green

  It was in the Green of Glasgow.1 I had gone to take a walk on a fine Sabbath afternoon. I had entered the Green by the gate at the foot of Charlotte Street—had passed the old washing-house. I was thinking upon the engine at the time, and had gone as far as the Herd’s-house, when the idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication was made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder. I then saw that I must get quit of the condensed steam and injection water, if I used a jet as in Newcomen’s engine. Two ways of doing this occurred to me. First, the water might be run off by a descending pipe, if an offlet could be got at the depth of 35 or 36 feet, and any air might be extracted by a small pump; the second was to make the pump large enough to extract both water and air…. I had not walked farther than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.

  THE “WHOLE THING” WAS, of course, James Watt’s world-historic invention of the separate condenser. It is one of the best recorded, and most repeated, eureka moments since Archimedes leaped out of his bathtub; but accounts of sudden insights have been a regular feature in virtually every history of scientific progress. The fascination with the eureka moment has endured mostly because it turns out to be largely accurate, in general terms if not in detail (no apple actually hit Sir Isaac’s cranium, but one falling from a tree in Newton’s garden at Woolsthorpe Manor really did inspire the first speculations on the nature of universal gravitation).

  Watt’s own flash of insight is worth examining not only for its content, but for what it says about insight itself. Those eureka moments are so central to the process of invention that understanding the revolutionary increase in inventive activity demanded by the steam engine also means exploring what modern cognitive science knows (and, more often, suspects) about the mechanism of insight. Watt’s moment is just one instance—an earth-shaking one, to be sure—of a phenomenon that is, among humans, nearly as universal as the acquisition of language: solving problems without conscious effort, after effort has failed.

  This is not, of course, to say that effort is irrelevant. The real reason that insights seem effortless is that the effort they demand takes place long before the insight appears. It takes a lot of prospecting to find a diamond (to say nothing of the time it took to make one), which is why—scrambled metaphors aside—“effortless” insights about musical composition don’t occur to nonmusicians. And why, of course, insights about separate condensers don’t occur to scholars of ancient Greek. Expertise matters.

  This seemingly obvious statement was first tested experimentally in the 1980s by a Swedish émigré psychologist, now at the University of Florida, named K. Anders Ericsson, who has spent the intervening decades developing what has come to be known as the “expert performance” model for human achievement. In study after study of experts in fields as diverse as music, competitive athletics, medicine, and chess, Ericsson and his colleagues were unable to discover any significant inborn difference between the most accomplished performers and the “merely” good. That is, no test for memory, IQ, reaction time, or any other human capacity that might seem to indicate natural talent differentiated the master from the journeyman.

  What did separate them was, therefore, not inherited, but created; time, not talent, was the critical measurement. Though Ericsson found that both the violinists and basketball players started playing at roughly the same age, the stars in both pursuits spent more time at it than their less accomplished colleagues. Twice as much time, in fact; against all expectations, an expert musician spent, on average, ten thousand hours practicing, as compared to five thousand spent by the not-quite-expert.

  The model turned out to apply to a range of pursuits. Cabinetmakers and cardiologists, golfers and gardeners, all became expert after roughly the same amount of time spent mastering their craft. Of all the legends of James Watt’s youth, the one no one doubts is that h
e spent virtually every waking hour of his “apprenticeship” year with John Morgan mastering the skills of fine brasswork, gearing, and instrument repair. His pride in the fine navigational instrument he built as his graduation project is indistinguishable from that felt by a gymnast doing her first back handspring.

  James Watt, however, is remembered not as a master clockmaker, but as one of the greatest inventors of all time. And this is where the expert performance model becomes even more relevant. By the 1990s, Ericsson’s research was demonstrating2 that the same phenomenon he had first discovered among concert violinists also applied to the creation of innovations: that the cost of becoming consistently productive at creative inventing is ten thousand hours of practice—five to seven years—just as it is for music, athletics, and chess.

  Some of that time is spent acquiring a history of the field: knowledge of what other violinists and inventors have achieved before in order to avoid, in the telling phrase, “reinventing the wheel.” The knowledge need not be explicit; the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi* famously thought that leaps of invention were a function of what he called tacit knowing: the idea that, in Polanyi’s words, “we know more than we can tell.” To Polanyi, the acquisition of such internalized knowledge, via doing, rather than studying, is necessary preparation of the soil for any true insight.

  But knowing that inventors accumulate knowledge of other invention doesn’t explain how they accumulate skills during those ten thousand hours of repetition. Inventing, after all, isn’t a craft like basketball, in which mastery is acquired by training muscle and nerve with constant repetition.

  Nonetheless, in light of Ericsson’s discovery that the route to expert performance looks very similar whether the performance in question is a basketball game, or a chess match, or inventing a new kind of steam engine, it seems worth considering whether the brain’s neurons behave like the body’s muscles. And, it turns out, they seem to do just that: The more a particular connection between nerve cells is exercised, the stronger it gets. Fifty years ago, a Canadian psychologist named Donald Hebb first tried to put some mathematical rigor behind this well-documented phenomenon, but “Hebbian” learning—the idea that “neurons that fire together, wire together”—was pretty difficult to observe in any nervous system more complicated than that of a marine invertebrate, and even then it was easier to observe than to explain.