4

MATTHEW BOULTON

Wedgwood, Watt and the Steam Revolution

From the moment it opened in April 1786, the Albion Mill was famous. Five storeys high, on the ‘Surrey-side of Blackfriars’, London’s first great factory towered over Southwark. ‘There has not been any public edifice perhaps ever erected in the country’, wrote one observer, ‘with a more patriotic view than the Albion flour mills.’1 Its great grinding machines could pulverize so much grain, so fast the mill slashed the capital’s bread bill, knocking 2 shillings off the price of a bag of flour – and knocking Lambeth’s windmills out of business.2

More spectacular than its size was its power, for the ‘arduous and laudable undertaking’ was driven entirely by steam. At its core revolved nine pairs of millstones – which soon multiplied to twenty-seven – all driven on by steam engines. Engine-powered hoists lifted corn from barges on the Thames. Machine-powered fans filtered out the impurities. The Albion Mill was a revolution. It ‘calls our attention’, wrote the Scots Magazine, ‘to the great changes it is probable this agent [steam] may hereafter produce in the appearance of the civilized world... Every lover of science and every friend to mankind will receive pleasure from the inspection of this immense machine.’3

But William Blake was not so sure. The twenty-nine-year-old radical poet and engraver ran a print shop not far away. From his window, in Lambeth’s Hercules Buildings, he could see the mill and what he saw he thought was evil. It seems his neighbours shared the sentiment.

Late on the evening of Wednesday, 2 March 1791, fire was spotted in the factory. Within minutes, the flames burnt with such a ferocity that the buildings all around were scorched. With the river low, water-pumpers could not get near the conflagration.4 When the roof collapsed, a column of fire spiked into the London skies, ‘so awfully grand as to illuminate for a while the whole horizon’, sending parched wheat on the wind miles away to Westminster, where it ‘lay in great abundance’ on the parade ground of St James’s Park. Within hours, the mill was lost.5 Miraculously, the company’s pigs, fattening in the yard next door, survived. But 2,000 sacks of corn and flour had burned, along with the wheat barges.

Yet despite the apparent catastrophe, in the fire-light could be seen groups of millers, dancing. As the factory burned, observers could not help but notice ‘a very curious scene... instead of the usual sentiments of compassion and instead of rendering active assistance, [the crowd] stood idly by with folded arms and testified only satisfaction at the overthrow of a work which they considered as pernicious in its tendency’. Placards mysteriously appeared with slogans such as ‘Success to the mills of ALBION but no Albion Mills’. By the morning, celebratory poems and songs were circulating on Southwark Bridge. Within a week a ballad was doing the rounds including the lines ‘but very few did sorrow show, / That the Albion Mills were burned so low.’ The workers had burned down the mill.

For twenty years, Albion Mills’ burnt-out hulk haunted the London skyline, an inauspicious augury of a new era fast taking shape. In his poem ‘Jerusalem’, later put to music as the hymn, Blake immortalized the ‘dark, satanic mill’. The Industrial Revolution, with all its force and tension, was well underway – and one man – the industrial revolutionary behind Albion Mills – was determined to make a fortune in the process: Birmingham’s Matthew Boulton.

*

Matthew Boulton was born at home in Whitehall’s Lane, two years after the death of Sir Thomas Pitt, on Birmingham’s northern border, on Tuesday, 3 September 1728.*1 He had the very good fortune to arrive as the third child into an old established family in a young, exciting city.

It was the era described for us in glorious richness by the author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, who left London six years before Boulton was born on a tour of the new nation of Great Britain, formed by the union of the English and Scottish parliaments in 1707. Commissioned by his mysterious employer Robert Harley, Defoe spent each day travelling, before finding an inn in which to compose his reports. The bulletins made up an extraordinary book: A Plan of the English Commerce, being a Complete Prospect of the Trade of This Nation. Here, we find the sights of ‘the most flourishing and opulent country in the world’. ‘Every new view of Great Britain’, wrote Defoe, ‘would require a new description: the improvements that increase, the new buildings erected, the old buildings taken down: new discoveries in metals, mines, minerals; new undertakings in trade; inventions, engines, manufactures, in a nation pushing and improving as we are: these things open new scenes every day.’

This was a country where more than a quarter of the population were now making things and where nearly one in five were engaged in ‘industry’, a figure some 50 per cent higher than the European average.6 Since around 1700, Britain’s regional industrial specialisms had begun to settle, and everywhere on his travels, Defoe found hives of industry: the Exeter serge-makers, the Norfolk weavers, the Essex bay-makers, Wiltshire’s fine clothiers, the hardware and cutlery makers across the Midlands, and the cottonware, ironware, Yorkshire cloths and kerseys made across the northern manufacturing districts of Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Halifax. In general, ‘industry’ meant ‘cottage industry’, organized by middlemen who farmed great networks of activity that would predominate for another century. In the 1730s, one Lancashire merchant estimated that he put work out to 600 looms; in the Black Country, another guessed he supplied work to small forges and ‘little masters’ in 1,000 homes.7 But, amid the commotion, the first signs of a revolution in factories, forges and fuel could now be seen.

The country’s greatest business was probably still the Royal Dockyards in Chatham, Kent, where Defoe found that: ‘The building yards, docks, timber-yard, deal-yard, mast-yard, gun-yard, rope-walks... are like a well-ordered city; and tho’ you see the whole place as it were in the utmost hurry, yet you see no confusion, every man knows his business.’8 But entrepreneurs were assembling new ways of doing business, and in Derby, Defoe found a harbinger of things to come. Crossing ‘that fury of a river called the Derwent’, he remarked on a ‘fine, beautiful and pleasant’ town – and the country’s first factory: Thomas Lombe’s £30,000 silk mill, built for 300 workers to designs smuggled out of Italy by his half-brother John in covert sketches hidden in bales of raw silk. ‘Here is a curiosity in trade worth observing,’ wrote Defoe, ‘as being the only one of its kind in England, namely a throwing or throwster’s mill, which performs by a wheel turn’d by water’ and which ‘performs the labour of many hands’. The Italians, in their fury, dispatched ‘an artful woman [who] came over in the character of a friend’ and slowly poisoned the twenty-nine-year-old John Lombe ‘who lingered two or three years in agonies, and departed’.9 He was given the most superb funeral ever seen in Derby. Thomas’s mill, protected by patent, was luckier: it made a fortune.

As factories began to spread, so the nation’s forges began to multiply. In the Midlands, Defoe saw the hearths fuelled by Shropshire coal, shipped in abundance along the Severn, at half the price charged in London. ‘Every farm has one forge or more,’ he noted, and ‘we cannot travel far in any direction out of the sound of the hammer’.10 He did not, of course, spot everything on his journey. Defoe missed the new iron trade’s great entrepreneur, Abraham Darby, busy with his breakthrough mastering the art of smelting iron from abundant coal instead of limited, expensive charcoal.11

Darby had served his apprenticeship in Birmingham and set up shop in Bristol, with fellow Quakers, as brassmaker. He eventually leased the old Vale Royal furnace on the deep gorge-like valley of Coalbrookdale next to the Severn, an old established iron-making centre, where coal lay exposed along the margins. Here, he started a business worth an estimated £2,804, imitating Dutch techniques for casting brass pots. But, soon frustrated with the business of ferrying in wood for charcoal, he began to experiment. In 1709, according to his daughter-in-law Hannah Rose, ‘sometime after he suggested the thought that it might be practicable to smelt the iron from the ore in the blast furnace with pit coal; upon this he first tried with raw coal... but it did not answer. He not discouraged, had the coal coked into cinder, as is done for drying malt, and it then succeeded to his satisfaction.’12 It was a breakthrough that would transform the British iron industry, and it was not too long before men such as Ambrose Crowley, who began as an apprentice to an ironmonger, opened his first nail manufactory in 1684. By 1728 he had built a business of slitting mills, steel furnaces, foundries, forges, warehouses and ships worth some £250,000.13

Nor did Defoe have much to say about the ‘coal rush’, which was already prompting gentlemen to scour their estates for tell-tale signs of seams. If, like Lord Paget, they found it under their flower-beds or parklands, no matter. Mining began at once. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the north-east of England was already shipping 1.3 million tonnes of coal; 450,000 tonnes more came from Scotland, and the West Midlands was not far behind.14

Lombe’s mill, Darby’s forge, the mines of Newcastle, Shropshire and Cornwall – here was the cutting edge of a revolution that would soon transform the new Great Britain and create, in the process, important new hubs, such as Matthew Boulton’s Birmingham.

*

Situated close to iron ore, coal and running water, Birmingham was a town of smiths, scythesmiths, bladesmiths, nailers, ironmongers and wheelers (making arms and weaponry). Its industry dated back to at least the 1500s.15 In 1538, John Leland found ‘many smiths in the town that use to make knives and all manner of cutting tools, and many lorimers that make bits and a great many nailors, so that a great part of the town is maintained by smiths who have their iron and sea-coal out of Staffordshire’.16 By the time William Camden arrived in 1610, the antiquarian-topographer found a town ‘echoing with forges, most of the inhabitants being iron-manufacturers’; and around the same time, William Smith recorded ‘Bromicham’ as a place where ‘great store of knives are made; for almost all the town’s men are cutlers, or smiths’.17

By the early 1700s, Birmingham boasted an extraordinary range of trades: braziers, founders, casters, bell-founders, gearmakers, locksmiths, nailers – and, like Matthew Boulton’s father, toymakers. The town’s lack of guilds offered freedom to new arrivals, and it became a haven for religious Non-conformists. Ambitious newcomers were drawn by its diversity of craftsmen and wealthy families prepared to back new ventures – some of which, by the 1650s, were making fortunes in the ironmongery business and building great homes like Erdington Hall. The town made a fortune from the Civil War; in one deal, for instance, Robert Porter sold the Parliamentary army 15,000 swords, and by the Restoration of Charles II, the town boasted 178 smiths’ hearths, and many owners had diversified into gunmaking.

By the time Matthew Boulton was born, Birmingham was a town of 15,000 people, packed into nearly 4,000 houses spread over 100 streets, including the old thoroughfares leading to the medieval Bull Ring.*2 Matthew lived in the upper half of town, on the sandstone ridge where Birmingham’s new merchant classes were building their homes around classical squares. Nearby was the new St Philip’s Church, with its elegant dome modelled on St Paul’s Cathedral, beyond which fields and orchards stretched back into the Warwickshire countryside.

In Low Town, ‘filled with workshops and ware-houses of the manufacturers’, were the old timber buildings densely packed with forges. Steel-houses sat along Steelhouse Lane and Cole’s Hill Street, while the markets – for meat, flowers, cattle, pigs, sheep, horses, and corn and garden produce – were laid out around the Bull Ring, around which the cock-fighting, bowling green and theatres offered a little respite from the noise of the metal-bashers. William Hutton, the town’s first historian, described the scene in 1740, when Boulton would have been twelve: ‘I was, each morning by three o’clock, saluted with a circle of hammers... I had been among dreamers but now saw men awake. Their very step shewed alacrity. Every man seemed to know what he was about. The town was large, and full of inhabitants and those inhabitants full of industry.’18

The air was full of new ideas, whether offered in the public lectures on electricity or on offer in exhibitions of ‘mechanical marvels’. Through this bustling town, Matthew walked to school in Deritend, a few miles south across the River Rea, to Reverend Ansted’s private academy, where he studied mathematics and drawing and acquired – in the words of Samuel Smiles – ‘the rudiments of a good ordinary English education’.19

Some time before the age of seventeen, Matthew started work for his father, who by all accounts was a man in the right place at the right time. The elder Boulton, also named Matthew, had started as an apprentice. He was descended from an old, landed Staffordshire county family: his grandmother’s line boasted a Chancellor of Lichfield Cathedral (the Reverend Zachary Babington) and his great-grandfather, Richard Dyott, was a Staffordshire knight. After marrying in 1723, in St Martin’s Church in Birmingham’s Bull Ring, the elder Boulton had set up shop as a toymaker, a trade that encompassed the manufacture of an infinite variety of small metal goods in gold, silver, tortoiseshell, steel and iron: buckles, trinkets, watch-chains, hooks, cork-screws, seals, tweezers, buttons, snuffers, candlesticks and clocks. It was a booming business. Indeed, Edmund Burke would later christen the city ‘The Toyshop of Europe’, a rather more charitable description than Thomas Telford’s denunciation of the place as ‘famous for its buttons and its locks, its ignorance and its barbarism’.20

It was not long before the Boulton family was moving up in the world, to Snow Hill, where the houses – set back from the road – had great chimneys for hearths big enough for metalwork. Of the toymaking trade’s two most important branches – buckles and buttons – the elder Boulton was a specialist in the former, buying steel on credit from the big ironmongers who dominated the industry and crafting it for market as fashionable goods for export to France, from where they might be reimported to England as the latest French ‘novelties’.21

As a teenager, the younger Boulton was quick to introduce improvements into methods of manufacture, inventing inlaid steel buckles, with enamel,22 and having mastered his craft, the young Boulton, was soon a master of commerce, for he had the fortune to work among one of the most brilliant generations of English entrepreneurs. Into Birmingham in the 1720s had come an extraordinary constellation of innovators. John Baskerville (1706–75) arrived from Worcestershire, trading in papier-mâché and japanned goods, before he became a printer and inventor of the Baskerville typeface. Samuel Garbett (1717–1803) was an influential button- and hardware-manufacturer, and later co-founder of the important Carron Ironworks in Scotland, one of the greatest in Europe and worth some £150,000 by 1773. His business partner, John Roebuck (1718–94), was a pioneering industrial chemist, whose experiments with smelting and acid inspired Birmingham’s first refinery of precious metals. All helped teach Boulton the arts of finance and patronage, the appliance of science, and the importance of art. Along with these men, Boulton would one day join some 209 Birmingham citizens each worth more than £5,000 – as much as £9 million today – who, according to William Hutton, ‘began [in] the world with nothing but their own prudence’.23

In little over a decade after starting work, Matthew Boulton’s energy and enterprise took him from apprenticeship to leadership of the family firm. Having mastered his trade by the age of twenty-one, he settled, marrying his distant cousin, Mary Robinson, on 9 February 1749, at St Mary’s Church in Lichfield. With marriage came money – a small fortune in fact, for Mary was the daughter of Luke Robinson, a wealthy mercer, and had inherited a substantial estate from her godmother. When Mary’s father died, within a year of her marriage to Matthew, Mary inherited another £3,000.

Boulton’s father soon made his son a partner, and as Matthew’s twenties progressed, the Boulton business powered forward. Such was the demand for its products that in 1755 Matthew’s father took out a lease on a rolling mill – Sarehole Mill – to ensure supplies of more sheet metal.*3 Two years later it was clear that although Matthew was signing letters ‘Father and self’, it was in fact he who was now driving the business.24 Theirs was an industry that was now expanding fast, and buckles were worth a fortune; indeed, by 1760 some 8,000 people in England were making buckles in an industry worth around £300,000.25

Matthew’s letter-books for the period are packed with orders. He was clearly a man who sought the best; in one letter to Sheffield’s pioneering steelmaker, Benjamin Huntsman, in 1757, he sent ‘a parcel of goods of the newest patterns’ in return for a request for the best steel Huntsman could muster.26 And when Boulton joined his fellow tradesman to testify to Parliament on the state of the toy trade, he offered a wide knowledge of business in the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.27

Success at work, however, was marked by tragedy at home. Before 1753, Matthew and Mary lost three children – Dorothea, Anne and Maria all died in infancy – and now Mary herself was unwell. Among Matthew’s early papers are notes on ‘Hystericks’; on one sheet, he wrote out the symptoms – creeping coldness, headaches and spasms, adding that ‘hence it is that hysterickal women feel constriction in the throte as if strangled’.28 Another paper lists a host of anti-epileptic remedies. In August 1759 calamity came. Mary died, and a month later Boulton’s father, too, was dead. Matthew buried his wife in the Robinson family crypt in Whittington, near Lichfield, with a eulogy:

If bearing many children, & enduring many pains & illnesses,

With patience under his Eye

If preserving fair Virtue around her unpolluted Bed,

If passing through Life without one Black Spot upon her Fame,

If these things can endear a Wife to a Husband

Thou wert dear to me

At the age of thirty-one, Matthew Boulton had lost his wife, his children and his father. And so he proceeded to fling himself into his future.

*

Within months of his loss, Boulton was back on the road to London, pushing sales hard among the capital’s elite and presenting a sword hilt to Prince Edward, the Duke of York, which so impressed George, Prince of Wales, that a royal order followed. His second front in Birmingham would bring even more. Boulton had decided to woo his now very rich sister-in-law, Anne, who had inherited her sister’s share of the Robinson family estate, worth some £28,000 (between £45 million and £65 million today). By the spring of 1760, he was addressing Anne as ‘My dear Heart’, ‘My dear charmer’ and ‘My dear Angel’. Under ecclesiastical law, a marriage to his sister-in-law was not strictly legal and Anne’s friends were not keen.*4 But, inspired by a pamphlet he had found which bolstered his case, Boulton pressed on.*5 When Anne’s mother died in May 1760, the pair stole away to London, and on 25 June 1760 they were married in St Mary’s Church, in Rotherhithe.

The new Boulton family, now very wealthy, settled down in Birmingham’s Snow Hill. Over the five years that followed, with his old confidence and his new resources, Boulton set about building the factory and friendships that would help define the Industrial Revolution: the Soho Manufactory and the Lunar Society.

Boulton was probably inspired in his methods by the city’s greatest toymaker, John Taylor (1704–75), who, instead of ‘putting out goods’ to networks of artisans, had created a ‘factory’ of specialized workshops employing 500 people.*6 Boulton now began plotting a factory of his own. Backed by his new wife’s wealth, in 1761 he took the lease on Soho House and its estate – 13 acres of windy Handsworth Heath, replete with a rolling mill, 2 miles north of Birmingham, where the owners had dammed Hockley Brook to create a wide millpond for a new mill.

Having bought the lease and all the buildings for £1,000, Boulton set about rebuilding the house, replacing the mill, and creating warehouses, workshops and somewhere for his workmen to live. The market around him was now booming – in 1759, Birmingham’s manufacturers explained to Parliament that 20,000 people now worked in the city’s toy trade, manufacturing £600,000 worth of goods. But, despite the family fortune, Boulton needed a dizzying array of loans. He soon found himself over-stretched. He needed a partner, and on a business trip to London in January 1762, he found one.

John Fothergill had trained as an apprentice in Königsberg, Prussia, and had wide sales experience on the Continent – in one year travelling through Hamburg, Lübeck, Königsberg, Denmark, Sweden, St Petersburg, and returning via Narva (Estonia), Riga (Latvia) and Königsberg.29 He liked Boulton and offered to invest alongside him, adding £5,000 to the £6,000 Boulton was sinking into the Soho site.*7 More was to come two years later, when Boulton’s brother-in-law died and the entire Robinson estate passed to the Boulton family. Boulton now seized the chance to begin building on a truly magnificent scale, creating, as he so modestly put it, ‘the largest hardware manufactory in the world’.30

Completed fully around 1766, the new Soho Manufactory ‘engaged the attention of all ranks of people’.31 Built at an alleged cost of £20,000, it was five times over budget and big enough for 1,000 workmen.32 Clerks, managers and their families lived on the upper floors; a rolling mill was on site; and the factory was packed with the latest tools. Within two years, Boulton had mastered the art of making the silver-and-copper ‘Sheffield plate’, the only such factory in the West Midlands.

Boulton and Fothergill had set out to build not simply a factory but also a brand. The partners took the exceptional step of employing the architect William Wyatt to design an industrial building beautiful enough to express the proprietors’ grasp of classical taste, and exquisite enough to adorn their continental publicity.33 Boulton understood something crucial. Success required him to conquer the terrible reputation of ‘Brummagem wares’ – the term that stuck to Birmingham’s mass-market trinkets and cheap reproductions. As Boulton noted to a friend, ‘The prejudice that Birmingham hath so justly established against itself makes every fault conspicuous in all articles that have the least pretension to taste.’34

It was not a cheap strategy. In 1764, the Boulton & Fothergill partnership lost £3,000, and so slowly over the course of 1764 and 1765 Boulton centralized the production that had hitherto been scattered across the city, and evicted Fothergill so that he could move in and personally supervise the factory floor. Fothergill, Boulton discovered, had not been the best of factory managers, as he noted: ‘As Fothergill is not of the least use in the Manufactory, if he will not live near a warehouse in Town[,] Query[:] of what use will [he] be?’35

The fame of Soho and its Manufactory continued to outperform its finances. Despite Boulton’s supervision, manufacturing was still run in a ‘spectacularly disorganised way’, with a very poor grip on the workforce, stock control, pricing or the basics of collecting money.36 Yet, by the summer of 1767 Boulton was writing of the foreign and other visitors that arrived every day, ‘who are all much delighted by the extension and regularity of our manufactory’.37 In August 1767, he had to apologize to one frustrated customer for a delayed order on account of the fact that ‘I had lords and ladies to wait on yesterday; I have French and Spaniards to-day; and tomorrow I shall have Germans, Russians and Norwegians’.38

Boulton could now boast the best of customers. In 1767, he was presented to George III and Queen Charlotte, who acquired from him ‘a pair of cassolets, a Titus, a Venus clock, and some other things’. Writing to his wife, Boulton noted that ‘I was with them, the queen and all the children, between two and three hours... Never was a man so much complimented as I have been.’39

*

Boulton’s influence owed as much to his enquiring mind as to his expanding wealth. As a young man, he was fascinated by science. In his late twenties, he was studying electricity and planning a scientific library of his own, and jotting down experiments on everything from precipitation, boiling points and the freezing points of mercury, to the human pulses, the movements of the planets and the manufacture of phosphorus.40

When the future framer of the US Constitution, Benjamin Franklin, settled in England in 1757, he met Boulton in Birmingham. Together they attempted to seal Leyden jars to prevent leakage of ‘electrical fluid’ in 1760. Boulton occasionally supplied Franklin with new glass for his instruments. He soon owned two electrical machines and met experimenters from across the country. But it was a different friendship that was to prove the more significant: Boulton met the doctor, poet and inventor Erasmus Darwin in the late 1750s, and together the pair soon formed the kernel of Britain’s leading provincial philosophical society.*8

The Lunar Society, so named because the members met on the night of a full moon to light the ride home – was not unique to Birmingham. Indeed, such clubs existed all over Britain; but only in Birmingham did the members mix pioneers of experimental chemistry, physics and medicine with leaders of manufacturing and commerce. Their science prompted their innovation. And their innovation soon transformed their industry.

The Lunar Society’s empirical methods were born through a century of scientific endeavour, which had been revolutionised by the foundation of the Royal Society. The country’s greatest scientist – Isaac Newton – had died the year before Boulton was born. ‘On the 28th past,’ ran the London Gazette on 4 April 1727, ‘the Corpse of Sir Isaac Newton lay in State in the Jerusalem Chamber, and was buried thence in Westminster-Abbey near the Entry in the Choir.’ ‘What a nation’, wrote a French observer, ‘that buries its scientists with its kings.’41 His pall bearers included the lord chancellor, the dukes of Montrose and Roxburgh, and the earls of Pembroke, Sussex and Macclesfield, all ‘being Fellows of the Royal Society’.

Boulton’s generation would not make breakthroughs of the magnitude of Newton and his peers. But in the thousands of little inventions and innovations, and in the hundreds of amateur laboratories, workshops, lectures and discussion clubs, it was Boulton and his contemporaries that allied science to invention and invention to industry.

Boulton’s blessing lay in his ability to draw on traditions and techniques that were now well-established around him. England was not a land of pure free-thinkers. Both culture and the constitution supplied plenty of constraints on anyone not judged a proper Anglican, for example. But it was a land where reason also flourished. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, the stage, the newspapers, the parks, the markets, the Royal Exchange, the bustling wharves of the Thames, and above all the coffee houses, all became new arenas for news, gossip, scandal, but also ideas – and energy.*9 They provided the space and place for ideas to be weighed, surveyed and applied.

Here was the formation of society that would remain recognizable to the Victorians. Informing day-to-day conversation was a new industry of newspapers. In 1695, the press Licensing Act fell, and newspapers began to proliferate, first in London and then around the country. In 1718 Ambrose Phillips launched the Free-thinker magazine with its motto adapted from Horace, ‘dare to know’. ‘All Englishmen’, wrote the Swiss visitor Cesar de Saussure, ‘are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news.’42

No longer was the royal court the prime mover in the sponsorship of ideas. Indeed, the very concept of the monarch’s divine right to rule was slowly being dismantled and supplanted with a theory of social contract, set out with eloquence by John Locke in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). In this new atmosphere, rich and poor mingled freely at hustings, races, spas, parks, on stagecoaches and, of course, in coffee houses. The country was, Defoe noted, a land where lords played bowls with tradesmen, where peasants rode on horseback, where the status of gentleman was open to anyone who looked and behaved the part. By 1726, Voltaire – having spent three years in English exile – could write: ‘The English are the only people upon earth... who, by a series of struggles, have at last established that wise government, where the prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time is restrained from committing evil.’43

In this atmosphere of diffusion – an Age of Reflection – there was one arena of especial importance: the Royal Society, a meeting of minds that would prove as important to the Industrial Revolution as the Royal Exchange or the Royal Navy.

The Society first met on Wednesday, 28 November 1660, when, after a lecture by Sir Christopher Wren, a dozen men came together for the purpose of the ‘promoting of experimental philosophy’. At first steered by Robert Hooke, the author of the first popular-science book, Micrographia, which Samuel Pepys described as ‘the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life’, the Society was soon meeting once a week.44 By 1665, over a hundred Fellows were actively engaged in the Society’s work, with weekly attendance of anywhere between a dozen and twenty. Under Sir Isaac Newton, however, the Society became the driving force in the evolution of British science. Taking office as president in 1703, Newton helped establish careful rules of experimentation and over the next twenty years he missed just three meetings, transforming a society of scholars into a truly scientific movement.45

Inspired by the model, the Birmingham Lunar Society, which was never more than fourteen in number, drew together not only Boulton and Darwin, but James Watt, the perfecter of the steam engine, Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery pioneer, Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, William Murdoch, the inventor of gas lighting and creator of the first steam locomotive to run on roads, and Dr William Small, tutor to Thomas Jefferson, the future President of the United States.46

By 1766, the circle was meeting as often as it could, dining at two o’clock until eight in the evening. Wine flowed. Tables were full. And when the eating was done, out came the instruments, plans, models, minerals or machines. The ‘philosophical feast’ often lasted into the next day, or longer, and the gathered friends were able to share news and feed back ideas to London, the Royal Society, the Society of Arts, and the coffee houses like Slaughter’s in St Martin’s Lane to where Boulton (and various ‘philosophers and artists’) would repair when he was in the capital and at a loose end.

Enthused with the Lunar Society’s inventive spirit, Boulton would put it to good use in two extraordinary partnerships that would help him establish his claim on history: the first with Josiah Wedgwood, and the second with Mr James Watt.

*

Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) was one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. He was born into an old family of Staffordshire potters, in Burslem, surrounded by the Midlands’ soft yellow and brown clays that his forebears had shaped, baked and glazed into ‘butterpots, pitchers and patterned plates’. He had the good fortune to work just as the East India Company’s china imports were fuelling demand for distinctive blue-and-white fine Chinese porcelain. In 1708, Europeans had cracked the long-concealed secrets of its manufacture, and in 1745, soft-paste porcelain was made for the first time in Chelsea.

Wedgwood, who lost his father young, was apprenticed to his older brother. Aged twenty-four, Josiah joined Thomas Whieldon, a pioneer of new production methods, who gave Wedgwood the freedom to begin the first of 5,000 carefully recorded trials with new glazes and manufacturing techniques.47 Like Boulton, Wedgwood had married well and used his wife’s dowry to pioneer a successful line of brilliantly glazed earthenware aimed at the squire’s table, before winning his first orders from Queen Charlotte, for a tea-set. The title of ‘Potter to Her Majesty’ followed, and then a brand, ‘Queen’s Ware’. Soon, members of the aristocracy were beating a path to his door at Burslem to place their orders.

It was, however, not ceramics but canals that first united Boulton and Wedgwood. Moving the raw materials needed for manufacturing into their factories, and the finished goods out of them, at acceptable speed and cost, were significant problems for entrepreneurs such as Wedgwood and Boulton. Together they would transform the region in which they worked, creating connections to England’s cities, its ports and its markets around the world.

By the time of their collaboration, some 15,000 miles of road connected up the country. With an absence of local taxes, the country represented a single marketplace, which, said the Venetian ambassador in 1706, explained why ‘industry was further advanced in England than in any other part of the world’.48 But bulkier and heavier goods, such as coal, needed to travel by water, and so throughout Boulton’s lifetime, in additional to the coastal traffic, rivers were deepened and canalized, and waterflows controlled with new locks and sluices. The Thames, all the way from Oxford, along with the Wey, the Lea and the Medway were crowded with food and timber coming down to London, while Tyne coals were dragged up.

When the opportunity for riverine improvements reached their limits, the country’s entrepreneurs began digging canals. Inspired by the Canal du Midi in France, the Duke of Bridgewater had, in 1759, won a Parliamentary battle to develop a 41-mile route from deep within his coal mines in England’s north-west to the docks and wharves of Manchester’s Deansgate. When the Bridgewater Canal, designed by James Brindley, opened in 1761, the price of coal in Manchester halved. In the ensuring canal mania, discussed in coffee houses and councils all over Britain, it was Josiah Wedgwood who emerged as campaigner in chief for a new ‘Grand Trunk’, a 93-mile canal to link Staffordshire’s Potteries to the River Trent, the Humber Estuary and then the North Sea, and to Liverpool, the Mersey Estuary and out into the Atlantic.

In 1763, a petition for a local turnpike noted that the 150 potteries around Burslem employed 7,000 people and exported huge quantities to America, the West Indies and Europe. Inspired by Bridgewater’s example, Wedgwood set about building a consortium of Midlands entrepreneurs and landowners with persuasive arguments about the profits to be had by lowering everyone’s cost of transport. By 1765, he was discussing the idea of a Staffordshire project with fellow potters, winning the backing of Lord Gower, a major local owner of land and mines (and the Duke of Bridgewater’s brother-in-law), publishing pamphlets, lobbying Parliament and countering competing petitions.

In May 1766, Wedgwood’s scheme won its royal assent and the following month he was appointed its treasurer. On 26 July 1766, every pottery in Burslem was closed as the town dressed in its best and poured on to the fields beneath the town as Josiah Wedgwood cut the first sod of the Trent and Mersey Canal. It would take another five years to finish, but when it opened, transport costs fell by almost 90 per cent.

Matthew Boulton and Wedgwood had collaborated on the project – Boulton was among the canal’s shareholders. When Wedgwood first visited the Soho site in May 1767, he concluded that Boulton was ‘the first – or most complete manufacturer in England, in metal. He is very ingenious, Philosophical and Agreeable.’49 Within a year, Wedgwood spotted the opportunity to work further together.

Since the late 1750s, the architectural work of the Adam brothers, fresh home from Rome, had begun to shape a penchant among Britain’s elite for the antique and neoclassical. In the years after peace with France in 1763, and with fresh discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii, a craze for antiques swept fashionable society. When England’s ambassador to Naples, William Hamilton, arrived home in 1771 with the first collection of Etruscan vases (now in the British Museum), Britain’s elite began demanding classical vases of their own, offering hundreds of pounds for just the right design. It was, said Wedgwood, ‘vase madness’ – ‘an epidemical madness reigns for vases, which must be gratified’.50 At his London showroom, ran one report, ‘vases, vases was all the cry’. In spring 1768, therefore, Wedgwood proposed a partnership to bring together Boulton’s metalwork and Wedgwood’s ceramics in a new line of ormolu-mounted ceramics, of the type that Boulton had seen in Paris in 1765.*10

As the wealth of the country increased, the two entrepreneurs could envisage a huge new market opening up before them. By 1750, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool had grown from almost nothing to become three of the largest six provincial towns. Indeed, by the time Boulton died, one in six of the population were big-town dwellers, nearly twice the rate on the Continent.51 Although the vast majority of towns remained small, between 1700 and 1800 the number of towns with a population of more than 2,500 people trebled to almost two hundred. Their inhabitants had larger incomes and were more cheaply fed. These new towns also supported an ever-growing middle class, who created a seemingly insatiable demand for food and goods. No town was greater than London, where what Defoe had called ‘the middling sort’ were perhaps a quarter of the population.52 Defoe was struck how ‘this whole kingdom, as well the people, as the land, and even the sea, in every part of it, are employed to furnish something and I may add, the best of every thing, to supply the City of London with provisions’. The sheer size and power of the capital was now driving the expansion of agriculture and industry across provincial England – and the evolution of taste, which Boulton and Wedgwood sought together to satisfy. 53

Boulton now expanded Soho, raising £3,000 on his wife’s estate, borrowing another £5,000 from his friend Baumgarten, and selling property inherited from his father.54 Over a weekend at Soho, wrote Wedgwood, ‘We settled many important matters & laid the foundation for improving our manufacture, & extending the sale of it to every corner of Europe.’55 Together, Wedgwood and Boulton now hunted out works of art from clients, friends, rivals, the British Museum, Oxford colleges and Blenheim Palace to inspire designs created by modellers, craftsman and painters. By 1769, Boulton was taking orders for ormulu from the Earl of Shelburne and the banker Henry Hoare, and receiving compliments – if not cheques – from the king.56 In 1763, the firm’s takings had been some £7,000; by 1767, they had more than quadrupled to £30,000, worth between £45 and £62 million today. 57

But Boulton and Wedgwood’s partnership stretched beyond products, to production. On the Soho site, Boulton had become among the first to use a mill to power grinding tools. A steel-house had been built for converting iron to steel, with a shakebox for polishing it. ‘I have almost every machine that is applicable to those arts,’ noted Boulton to a friend in 1770 ‘[along with]... two water-mills employed in rolling, polishing, grinding, and turning various sorts of lathes’.58

Wedgwood, too, had created his own revolutionary factory at Etruria, opened on 13 June 1769, spread over seven acres of land and bounded by the new canal. Unlike Boulton, Wedgwood experimented personally, including for the first time with proper cost accounting. Indeed, Wedgwood’s pioneering study of business costs in 1771 exposed the huge sums that were tied up in working capital and unsold stock, which the pricing of goods failed to reflect. His work inspired a careful ‘price book of workmanship’, costing everything from clay to sales staff, and he started to increase production runs over which to amortize the costs. It was an approach emulated by Boulton’s foreman, John Scale, in 1773.

Both Wedgwood and Boulton also experimented with company care. Factory walls were whitewashed. Ventilation was installed. Schools, health schemes and homes were provided for workers. Good weekly wages were paid, on a par with those for skilled craftsmen – up to £1 for a skilled man; and in the early 1770s, the first insurance scheme for workers, the Soho scheme, was established.

The Boulton and Wedgwood partnership remained strong until around 1772, by which point fashion was moving on – and Boulton’s cash-flow was severely stretched. The great and good now had their vases and ormolu, and Boulton was left with great stocks of the products, which he was forced to ship off to the court of Catherine the Great in St Petersburg. When one of his key lenders, one Mr Tonson of London, from whom he borrowed £10,000, died in 1772, Boulton struggled to raise new credit.59 But he was determined to keep his show on the road. ‘We have a thousand mouths at Soho to feed and it has taken so much labour and pains to get so valuable and well-organised a staff of workmen together, that the operations of the manufactory must be carried on at whatever risk.’60

*

Another market – and another product – was needed. With Wedgwood’s help, Boulton had moved from toys to ormulu; now, he moved from ormulu to silverware, using the skills of the craftsmen he had assembled at Soho to create exquisite – and exquisitely expensive – candlesticks, plate, jugs and tableware.61 His designers were world-leading, and Boulton’s products were widely exported – but, Birmingham lacked the power to certify the authenticity of its silverware, gravely limiting Boulton’s ability to expand.

His connections to market were now excellent: ‘Our navigation goes on prosperously’, wrote Boulton to the Earl of Warwick in 1772, ‘we already sail from Birmingham to Bristol and to Hull.’62

But the lack of a local assay office was proving problematic. Since 1300, silver goods had to be checked before sale and hallmarked in one of the ‘assay’ offices; Boulton used those at London and Chester. To add to the problem, the roads were so bad that Boulton was beginning to lose a fortune in damaged goods. Therefore, he fixed his mind on a plan.

As early as 1766, the Earl of Shelburne had noted that ‘it is very hard on a manufacturer to be obliged to send every piece of plate to Chester to be marked’.63 Boulton had long mooted the idea of a Birmingham assay office and in 1771, furious at the near ruin of some expensive candlesticks for Shelburne, he decided to turn ideas into action. Writing to Shelburne, he declared that ‘I am very desirous of becoming a great silversmith, yet I am now determined never to take up that branch in the large way I intended, unless powers can be obtained to have a marking hall at Birmingham.’64

Boulton quickly joined forces with his parliamentary lobbyist-in-chief Samuel Garbett and began raising a petition. By January 1773, his diary recorded a list of more than forty dukes and earls along with three bishops whose arms he had gone to twist. Petitions to halt Birmingham’s efforts circulated from Sheffield and London. But in a coup de grâce, Garbett’s committee, dominated by Midlands MPs, rounded up twenty-two pieces of London silver and found all but one to be well below standard. Boulton won his vote, and royal assent was granted on 28 May 1773. On 31 August, the Birmingham Assay Office opened for business in two rooms above the King’s Head Inn on New Street. The company of Boulton & Fothergill was its first customer, submitting 104 items.*11 It was decidedly a step forward. And yet within a month, a twist of events would conspire to offer Matthew Boulton a prize that was even greater: a partnership with an unlucky Scottish engineer called James Watt. Together, they would change the course of the Industrial Revolution.

*

James Watt was born in Greenock, on 19 January 1736, into a practical and prosperous trading family. His grandfather was a ‘teacher of navigation’, and his uncle a lecturer in mathematics, astronomy and surveying. His father was a merchant, shipwright, carpenter, vessel-owner and instrument repairer to the captains, who brought to him their navigational equipment at a journey’s end. The years after Isaac Newton’s death had witnessed a burgeoning market for all manner of instruments – telescopes, microscopes, barometers, thermometers, chemical balances, orreries and armillary spheres – and all needed making, fixing, repairing.

A sickly child, James Watt nevertheless found he thrived on mathematics at school; at home, he spent time making things in a little workshop equipped for him by his father. At the age of seventeen, however, disaster struck: James’s mother died, and his father lost a ship along with a lot of money. Watt needed work, and so he moved in briefly with his uncle, a don at Glasgow University. But, despairing at the lack of tuition available for his chosen craft of instrument making, he persuaded his father to find two guineas to send him to London. Two years later, he opened his own shop in Glasgow’s Saltmarket, where, inspired by his physicist friend John Robison, he began to tinker with the principles of the steam engine, studying and experimenting with the weight that could be lifted by steam escaping from a kettle.

Steam engines, or ‘fire engines’, had been evolving for nearly five decades by the time Watt began his experiments. Indeed, in 1698, William III had left his apartments at Hampton Court and crossed his baroque gardens to watch a fire engine designed and demonstrated by a military engineer, Thomas Savery. It was neither beautiful nor efficient. It consisted of a low brick shed between two chimneys of brick and pipe, into which an assistant threw shovels of coal in the direction of two great iron eggs, while another caught a trickle of water, the condensed steam, in a bucket.65 It would take Savery another fourteen years before, in 1712, he and his partner Thomas Newcomen, a Dartmouth ironmonger and blacksmith, perfected the first successful steam engine. Installed near Dudley Castle, west of Birmingham, it was capable of pumping water from Lord Dudley’s coal mine at a rate of 10 gallons per stroke from a depth of 150 feet.

In 1760, Glasgow University asked Watt to repair a model Newcomen steam engine which had come their way. Frustrated at its inefficiencies, he began a series of experiments to puzzle out how to perfect the engine – in particular how to reduce the huge quantity of coal that the engine needed to consume to create steam. The Newcomen engine relied on heating water to create the steam that raised a great piston linked to a large rocker beam, to which in turn was attached the pump. But because cold water was then deployed to condense the steam back into water, and allow the piston to fall in a downstroke, huge amounts of coal were needed to heat up the water again to repeat the whole cycle.

For years, Watt puzzled over the problem, until, in spring 1765, on his Sunday walk, he realized the solution. ‘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 had not walked further than the golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.’66

The following day, Watt built himself a model and was delighted to see his theory worked. His calculations showed that his own designs were nearly 40 per cent more powerful than the Newcomen design, and by the summer of 1765 he had perfected a design ‘that shall not waste a particle of steam’.67 In September, Watt joined forces with John Roebuck, a serial entrepreneur who had started a medical practice in Birmingham before co-founding the Carron Ironworks, in Scotland, with Lunar Society member Samuel Garbett before branching into coal-mining. Roebuck also knew Boulton well – indeed, he invited Boulton to take a 10 per cent share in the mine.68 Looking for a better engine to drain his fast-flooding mines, Roebuck asked for Watt’s help.

Watt, however, faced a problem. Hard as he tried, he could not get his engine design to work at scale. Over the summer of 1766, as his money troubles multiplied, Watt sold his instrument-making shop and turned his hand to surveying. In his spare time, his experiments continued, until in April 1768, he finally cracked the problem of keeping cylinders air-tight and built an engine capable of 20 strokes a minute.

Roebuck was now interested enough to step in with serious money. In return for clearing Watt’s debts, he took a two-thirds share of the invention. And at this point, Watt’s path and Boulton’s – who was fascinated by the potential of steam power to drive his Soho machinery – began to cross.*12

In April 1767, Watt set off to London to file his patent. Curious to see the famous Soho House and Manufactory for himself, he stopped off in Birmingham. Boulton being absent, Watt was escorted round by Dr Small, who now encouraged Watt to relocate to Birmingham: he wrote to him the following year, to urge Watt to ‘get your patent and come to Birmingham, with as much time to spend as you can’.69

On hearing of Watt’s breakthrough, Boulton had immediately made him an offer. But despite spending a fortnight in the mechanic’s paradise at Soho, all Watt would offer was a franchise to sell the engine in three Midland counties. Boulton wanted much more. ‘I was excited by two motives to offer you my assistance which were love of you and love of a money getting, ingenious project,’ Boulton explained: ‘To... produce the most profit, my idea was to settle a manufactory near to my own, by the side of our canal, where I would 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.’70

Watt’s patent was granted on 5 January 1769 (and on Small’s advice, it was filed with general principles rather than a specific design). He returned to Roebuck’s mine to start building. It proved a nightmare. Dogged with practical problems and short of money, Watt was forced to resume surveying work for canals to pay the bills. Progress with the engine ground to a halt. And then, just for good measure, in the summer of 1772, the Scottish economy froze. Crops failed. Trade stalled. Banks collapsed.

Boulton was among those who lost thousands in the downturn; but Watt’s partner Roebuck lost everything. He was declared bankrupt in March 1773. His misfortune was to prove Boulton’s gain. As luck would have it, Boulton was among his creditors, owed £1,200. At the end of March, Boulton proposed he cancel the debt in return for Roebuck’s share of Watt’s steam engine. Within two months, Roebuck accepted. The engine constructed at Roebuck’s Kinneil House was dismantled and shipped to Soho.

For Watt there was one more tragic twist of fate to come. While out surveying for the Great Glen Canal in the Highlands in September, a letter arrived pronouncing his wife to be dangerously ill. Setting off home through the beating rain, Watt arrived in Dumbarton two days later on 29 September 1773. But he was too late. He was greeted with the news that his wife had died five days before. Devastated, Watt could not bring himself to return to his house. It was now that Dr Small begged him to throw himself into work and, better, to move to Soho. With debts mounting, Watt settled his affairs, placed his children with relations in Glasgow, and set off for Birmingham. He arrived on 31 May 1774 and set up shop with Matthew Boulton.

*

There was perhaps no better time for James Watt to arrive at Soho. The Industrial Revolution was gathering speed, in no small part fuelled by England’s booming markets overseas. Britain’s new manufacturers were now well connected to America, the West Indies and the markets beyond. Exports were driving perhaps a fifth of Britain’s growth, and a gigantic 40 per cent of the country’s manufacturing. By the 1750s, over 100,000 people were already employed in the textile business, largely in woollens and the first cotton linen and silks mills. By 1760, the nation was importing 1.2 million pounds of cotton. In 1771, Jedediah Strutt and the great Richard Arkwright opened their huge new water-powered Cromford Mill, just 20 miles north of John Lombe’s old mill in Derby, and soon it employed 1,000 people, living and working in the country’s first industrial village.71 Strutt was a silk manufacturer, familiar with Lombe’s mill, who had met Arkwright in Nottingham. In partnership together, they decided to build their factory on a stream flowing from the lead mines, which reputedly never froze. By 1800, 1,000 mills similar to Arkwright’s were sucking in from abroad 52 million pounds of cotton.72

Meanwhile near Coalbrookdale, where the iron revolution had begun, a great new symbol of Britain’s iron power was taking shape. Soon hailed as a wonder of the world, the first pure iron bridge was opened by Abraham Darby’s son in 1781.*13 It was assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle from huge pieces cast in a forge that now employed over 1,000 people, described by the traveller, Arthur Young. Young marvelled at the ‘furnaces, forges, &c. with the vast bellows that give those roaring blasts, which make the whole edifice horridly sublime. These works are supposed to be the greatest in England.’ Within weeks, the Shrewsbury Chronicle could report ‘great numbers of carriages, besides horses and foot passengers have daily passed’ across the new arch.73 Yet Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge were simply the most spectacular symbols of an industry that now boasted many giant firms, which by 1780 together produced some 62,000 tonnes of iron.*14 The country’s mines too had multiplied; many gave work to over 1,000 workers and, by 1800, England’s north-east, Scotland and the West Midlands were producing 10 million tonnes of fuel.74 In all, the last eighteen years of the 1700s witnessed half of the total century’s growth in coal shipments and copper mining; three-quarters of the increase in broadcloth manufacture; four-fifths of the increase in printed cloths; 90 per cent of the growth in exports of cotton goods; and half of the century’s patents.

As such, the country had become an extraordinary potential market for steam engines. And so with Watt’s arrival, Matthew Boulton wasted no time in getting down to business. New perfections and new patents were needed, and neither took long to arrive. Over the summer of 1774, Boulton offered James Watt his old house in Newhall Walk. With Soho’s engineers on hand to help, by November 1774 Watt’s ‘fire engine’ was working better than any before it.75

Boulton, however, now spotted an enormous problem. With just eight years left on Watt’s patent, there was not enough time to build an engine plant and make a decent return. He now turned to Parliament with a petition for a private bill extending the patent for twenty-five years. It was a lot to ask – and the timing was terrible. Across the Atlantic, on 19 April 1775, an exchange of fire in Lexington, Massachusetts, confirmed that the crisis that had raged since the Boston Tea Party in 1773 was now a full-blown war of independence. Parliament was understandably distracted. Yet, for three intense months, Boulton and friends rounded up votes, and on 22 May 1775 secured a new Act, including an extension of the patent to Scotland. Protected by the legislation, Boulton and Watt now began the search for profit in mines, mills – and a mint.

By the summer of 1775, Boulton brought in his first two big orders, including a commission for a huge 50-inch cylinder to power the pump at the Bloomfield Colliery in nearby Tipton. By March 1776, the engine was assembled, and at a special ceremony the pump was started. Moving at 15 strokes a minute, it proved a spectacular success, draining a 60-foot pit of water in under an hour, ‘after which’, according to Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, ‘a name was given to the machine, viz, the Parliament Engine, amidst acclamations of a number of joyous and ingenious workmen’.76

Boulton was completely seized with the potential of the market before him. ‘If we had a hundred wheels ready made, and a hundred small engines like Bow engine, and twenty large ones executed, we could readily dispose of them all. Therefore, let us make hay while the sun shines,’ he wrote to Watt. That summer, James Boswell, whose Life (1791) of Samuel Johnson would cement his fame, came to Soho and wrote up his encounter with its ‘iron-chieftain’: ‘The vastness and the contrivance of some of the machinery would have “matched his mighty mind”. I shall never forget Mr Bo[u]lton’s expression to me. “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have – POWER”.’77

Boulton’s appetite for steam was whetted. In a letter to Watt in February 1776, he averred: ‘I have fixed my mind upon making from twelve to fifteen reciprocating and fifty rotative engines per annum. I assure you that of all the toys and trinkets which we manufacture at Soho, none shall take the place of fire-engines in respect of my attention.’78 For the next decade, Boulton & Watt took orders for ten engines a year79 – the vast majority from Cornwall, where the boom in brass had triggered a search for the deep-lying Cornish copper.*15 Far from coal, and with their mines constantly flooding, the Cornish mine-captains had been early customers of the haphazard Newcomen engine, of which sixty were installed across the county. Boulton and Watt knew how important the Cornish market would prove, and when the first order for an engine arrived from the Tingtang mine, near Redruth, Watt moved south to set up shop among the obstreperous, hard-drinking, hard-bargaining miners to deliver his engine personally. It was tough work. ‘Certainly,’ Watt wrote to Boulton, ‘they [the mine-captains] have the most ungracious manners of any people I have ever yet been amongst.’80

Constantly vexed by wrong parts and shoddy work, Watt took until September 1777 to get the engine running. Soon, though, the orders began to quicken from other mines – Tregurtha Downs, Chacewater, Hallamanning, Poldice, Wheal Chance and United.81 The Chacewater engine in particular proved spectacular. ‘All the world are agape to see what it can do,’ wrote Watt to Boulton in 1777; ‘we have had many spectators and several have already become converts’. The new converts included foreigners, for in the following year the first engines for export were sold, to France.

Orders did not, however, mean financial comfort. Boulton’s cash-flow became seriously stretched, such that by the summer of 1778 the business was in crisis. A fire had wrecked his Soho workshops, and creditors were multiplying. Fothergill was going so far as to urge his partner to declare the Boulton & Watt venture bankrupt. With his back against the wall, Boulton fought like never before. Some 550 of his 700 staff were laid off; huge new loans of £17,000 were secured on the back of his engine patent, and new fixed-price deals were agreed with the Cornish mine-owners to secure some certain cash. Boulton’s engine-pricing policy had proved unwise for an undercapitalized business: the owners paid for the components, and then Boulton & Watt assembled them, taking payment as an annual royalty calculated on the savings to the mine-owners’ coal bill.

As stability returned, Boulton made a breakthrough. Not with a new machine, but rather with two new men. A former glass manufacturer, James Keir, also a Lunar Society member, was enticed to Soho in 1777, and slowly he brought order to Boulton & Watt’s appalling accounting.*1682 Two years later, William Murdoch, the son of an Ayrshire millwright and a hugely talented engineer, arrived bringing both machine skills and people skills.*17 He was dispatched to Cornwall in 1779 – and stayed for another twenty-one years.

Together, the new team steered the business through the rapids. By the summer of 1780, Boulton and Watt had sold forty engines – half of them in Cornwall.83 But Boulton had to become a partner in four mines, to help keep the business going, while in 1781 Boulton & Watt had to borrow from Boulton & Fothergill to pay the Christmas balances and the workmen’s wages. Over the years, relations between Boulton and Fothergill had been getting worse. In November 1781, Boulton had to sack Fothergill, claiming that he had been cheated.*18

*

It was not until the early 1780s that Boulton & Watt was at last turning a profit.84 By now, it was clear to Boulton that the bigger market would not be engines for mines, but for mills, and this would require harnessing the steam engine not to a pump but to a wheel. On Midsummer Day 1781, Boulton wrote to Watt in Cornwall: ‘I do think in the course of a month or two, we should determine to take out a patent for certain methods of producing rotative motions from the vibrating or reciprocating motion of the fire engine.’85

Watt was not keen. But slowly, innovation came. Murdoch devised a clever ‘sun and planets’ movement. Watt added a double-acting design, in which steam was manipulated into both pushing and pulling a piston. By the spring of 1783, the first rotary engine was grinding corn in Ketley, Northamptonshire, and orders soon followed from the great brewers Goodwyn and Whitbread in London. George III himself visited their installation and pronounced himself much impressed. In 1784, both Boulton and Watt were elected to the Royal Society.

Boulton’s instinct was right: rotary motion was exactly what mill owners wanted, and with the Albion Mill, Soho won the chance to build the greatest factory in London and the largest mill in Europe. Begun in 1783, it was the capital’s first engine-powered mill, using the first rotary engine with a parallel motion. Rounding up enough shareholders, Boulton applied for a charter for it in 1784 – but such was the novelty and potential power of this monster mill, that it was refused, and instead the mill was constituted as a partnership. Undeterred, Boulton was determined not to undersell the new venture, even organizing a masked ball in the mill to celebrate its opening in spring 1786, much to Watt’s irritation: ‘What have dukes, lords and ladies to do with masquerading in a flour-mill?’86 Supervised by the great engineer John Rennie, the Albion Mill shattered the price of flour across the capital. By the end of 1786, Boulton & Watt was finally in profit.

And yet this was to be no annus mirabilis. The summer was scorching. Never had a month been hotter than July. On 11 July, a maid carrying beer to haymakers in the meadow at Soho noticed Ann Boulton walking by the pool. Ten minutes later, as the maid strolled back, she spied Ann ‘upon her face on the water in a shallow part of it’.87 Anne had often complained of giddiness. She may have had a massive stroke. Boulton, who had been on business in Coventry, was greeted in Soho’s garden with the news upon his return. ‘The scene’, he later wrote, ‘is not describable by pen or tongue.’88 She was buried in the family vault in Whittington, near Lichfield. Boulton’s health collapsed, and in August he attempted to combat the gloom by disappearing to Dublin, Edinburgh, London and Cornwall. ‘I think if we could but keep our spirits up and be active we might vanquish all the host,’ he wrote.89

The health of his business, by contrast, was much improved. Now in profit, Boulton & Watt was poised on the threshold of its greatest era – booming into the business of powering mills, and, literally, minting money.

*

Boulton’s experience as a coin maker and medallist dated back many years. In 1772, he was commissioned by the Admiralty to produce 2,000 medals for Captain Cook to take on his second voyage, to the Pacific. Boulton’s engineers had acquired a legendary speed and flexibility. When George III ordered 200 silver medals to celebrate his wife’s birthday, Boulton was given just days’ notice; but the king had been told it could not be done except by Boulton, ‘as nothing was impossible with him’.90

Boulton had acquired something of a copper mountain from his Cornish mine customers in the early 1780s, and now, in search of a use for it, saw an obvious opportunity: to create the world’s first steam-powered mint. It was housed 100 yards from the Soho Manufactory to keep it secret. A new watermill, built in 1785, allowed a new rolling mill to roll out sheets of copper. New steam engines were designed to power the presses, and a warehouse was built in 1787, in Birmingham’s Livery Street. Boulton constantly experimented with novel configurations of machines, new methods for hardening dies, and different techniques for rolling copper and burnishing blanks. Alongside raw materials and machines, Boulton assembled artists and engineers. Expert engravers, including some of the best in the world, were employed to produce beautiful designs. Some of the craftsmen had trained at Soho but others, such as Jean-Pierre Droz, hailed from Paris, and his successor Conrad Heinrich Küchler (who produced the dies for the regal coinage), Rambert Dumarest and Noel-Alexandre Ponthon were all recruited abroad by Boulton. By 1789, Boulton’s new venture had cost him some £8,000.91

Boulton’s first order was to strike 100 tonnes of copper coins for the East India Company, for its trading posts in Sumatra, complete with inscriptions stamped around the rim, drawing on techniques he had seen in Paris. More requests for trade tokens followed for companies nationwide, along with further medals and commemorative medallions, including one to mark the recovery of George III’s health in 1789. Soon, the new mills were rolling copper ingots into sheets for new machines to cut out blanks, before six presses thumped out copper coins for the American colonies, pennies for Bermuda, silver for Sierra Leone, and faluces for Madras.

Orders from His Majesty’s Government were, however, harder to secure. For years, the shortage of small change vexed the business community of Britain which had to pay the wages of a burgeoning working class, and the problem of organizing his own weekly wage bill kept the matter before Boulton. Very few low-value copper coins had been issued since 1754, and as far back as 1771 industrialists were complaining that ‘the scarcity of cash in this part and for many miles round us has been for some time past greater than I ever remember’.92 In 1788, the government finally started talking. Boulton reported to his son that he ‘was sent for to Town by Mr Pitt [the Younger] and the Privy Council about a new copper coinage which I have agreed for, but at a very low price... I am building a mint and new manufacture for it in my farm yard behind the menagerie at Soho.’93 But it took another ten years for the order to arrive.

In the meantime, Boulton had other problems to solve. His interests in Cornish copper mines initially provided him with plenty of raw materials, but as coin production boomed, securing adequate supplies at steady cost proved a huge headache. Much of it came up from Cornwall via Bristol, and then on barges along the River Severn to Stourport, before arriving in Birmingham on the local canals. But by the end of the 1790s, Boulton was tracking copper prices as far away as Calcutta and Basra, and the business had to juggle the challenge of delivering casks, containing tonnes of coins, by road or canal to Liverpool or Hull, or down the Severn to Bristol, or to Oxford and along the Thames for the East India Company docks at St Botolph’s, in London. The enterprise meant managing an array of costs and challenges: exchange rates, the credit-worthiness of foreign factors, insurance, customs, wharfage and the constant threat of French privateers.

Luckily for Boulton, the market for steam engines, slowly growing for twenty years, was now about to blossom. As France began to descend into political revolution, a very different kind of revolution was about to transform Birmingham’s northerly neighbour, Manchester. The cotton revolution was gathering pace, and among the revolutionaries would be more than a few new customers for Boulton & Watt.

Boulton had foreseen that Manchester would one day offer rich pickings: ‘The Manchester folk will now erect cotton mills enough but want engines to work them.’94 It was not long before the partners had some helpful advocates on the ground. Much to his father’s frustration, Watt’s son, also called James Watt, had – after much agonizing – decided not to join his father and Boulton in the engine business. Breaking the news to his father in August 1788, the younger Watt wrote: ‘My education has been general and not such as to fit me for any particular business... You made your way in the world without fortune! Why should not I?’95 And so it was agreed that he would take an apprenticeship with a fustian maker, printer and dyer in Manchester – where, as fate would have it, he would help deliver Boulton & Watt’s breakthrough technology into the booming Manchester cotton business.

For some years, Boulton and his friends had been trying to persuade the magnate Richard Arkwright to take a steam engine to power his textile mills, but to no avail. In correspondence with Boulton, Erasmus Darwin had reported Arkwright’s view that ‘Mr B’s engine was so subject to disorder and so complex’.96 But the conversations continued. In the view of Gilbert Hamilton, reporting from the Glasgow cotton-spinning boom, Arkwright seemed admiring of Watt but somewhat uninformed of the potential for savings.97 The breakthrough came instead in 1785, in some unusual circumstances. The Robinson family’s mills at Papplewick, Northamptonshire, were contending with a temperamental river flow to drive their factory wheels: up-river, Lord Byron was building ornamental ponds on which to stage naval battles with his servants. Starved of the river’s flow, the Robinsons became, therefore, the first mill owners to order an engine to help pump water for their wheel.*1998 More orders followed, and by November 1788 Boulton & Watt had supplied some eight engines for textile mills, and had a rough idea of how many spindles an engine could drive. A year later came the Manchester breakthrough.

In the extraordinary archives atop the magnificent Library of Birmingham, in the city’s Centenary Square, is housed the vast collection of papers, technical diagrams and thousands upon thousands of letters from the Boulton & Watt business. It is an incredible vat of information and data, describing how one of the first industrial businesses in the world ran day-to-day. And deep in the archives are the letters between Watt, his son, Boulton and the first merchant to buy a steam engine for a Manchester cotton factory.

Peter Drinkwater hailed from a family of fustian makers.99 The pioneering Robert Owen, who worked for him in Manchester, described him as a ‘a good fustian manufacturer and a first-rate foreign merchant’, who shifted during the 1780s from his position as a textile middleman into manufacturing, creating his own cotton factory in Northwich. He now wanted an engine for his four-storeyed Bank Top Mill, in Manchester’s Piccadilly, ‘for finer spinning’.100

A steam engine from Boulton & Watt was not cheap.*20 Indeed, cost – and the temptation of securing a semi-legal alternative engine, or an old-style and far less efficient Newcomen engine – limited Boulton & Watt’s sales. Moreover, the shortage of engineers capable of designing and installing the magnificent machines meant that lead-times were long.101 As the younger Watt noted to his father, the ‘gross sum which your engines cost at first startles all the lesser manufacturers here (Manchester), and it is scarcely possible to make them comprehend the advantage’.102 For many, water power would prove cheaper for some years to come.

Nevertheless, on 3 April 1789, in his spidery copper-plate, Drinkwater declared to Boulton and Watt his ambition ‘respecting a fire (or steam) engine which I wish you to furnish me to use in the cotton manufactory’. Apologizing for his ignorance of the mechanics, he went on: ‘The engine it would set out with – is one with a power equal to six horses.’103

In the nine letters that followed over the course of 1789 – including the enormous and magnificent contract signed and sealed by Drinkwater, Watt and Boulton, and scribbled all over with corrections to various terms – we get a flavour of the complexity of assembling the engines and getting them running.

On 4 April 1789, the younger Watt reported that ‘Mr Drinkwater... is now come to a full determination to have one of your engines, he has called upon me twice to enquire about sundry matters... where I could I have answered him’.104 Crucially, he advised his father that a successful engine at Drinkwater’s would do wonders for Manchester sales, as it was ‘universally known that he [Drinkwater] is a man of judgement’.105 In fact, Watt’s son, it seems, was a highly effective Manchester-based sales agent, able to provide his father and Boulton with news of Drinkwater’s trials and tribulations. Drinkwater’s obstacles included his neighbours, for ‘the public yet are not all inclin’d to believe otherwise than that a steam engine of any sort must be highly offensive’ – and he was forced to move his proposed factory several hundred yards further out of town.

In May, Boulton & Watt dispatched twenty-six carefully annotated cartridge-paper plans for ‘one of the earliest sun and planet engines with wooden beam and wooden connecting rod, the air pump being worked from the valve operating plug rod’.106 Exquisitely coloured, the plans laid out details and measurements for the engine, its framing, its firehouse, its ashpit and condenser, its pump, its cranks and mechanisms, each marked carefully on the back: ‘This drawing (the property of Boulton and Watt) to be kept clean and returned as the engine is finished’.

Over the course of the year, detailed discussions and letters followed, tweaking the specifications – including raising the factory floor, refining the regulators and adjusting the pump – as well as providing assurances (for the engine proposed was very different to the one Drinkwater had seen in Warrington and which had so impressed him) and agreeing the pricing.

Follow-on success was far from instantaneous. Indeed, in 1791, a neighbouring merchant, Benjamin Lees, was advising Boulton and Watt that ‘a great number of factories are now erecting in this town, the greatest part of which are intended for fire engines of the old construction[;] it is quite evident to me yours are very much preferable to them, but I think they are not generally known here’. He suggested advertising in the newspapers, ‘and if you was to refer the public to look at that of Mr Drinkwaters... it might bring them to be generally used in the cotton & woollen branches.... I have taken several good mechanics to look at Mr D’s engine who all agree that one of them is worth all the rest put together on the old principle.’107

Slowly but surely, from the breakthrough in Piccadilly, Boulton & Watt’s business grew. Between 1785 and 1800, perhaps ninety-two Boulton & Watt engines were sold to cotton factories, with a combined 1,513 horsepower: indeed they made up nearly half of all the engines sold in Lancashire.108 By 1789, Boulton & Watt had sold 162 steam engines – more than double the installed base of five years previously.109

Rotary engines had hitherto been only a third of sales. By contrast, in the years after the sale to Drinkwater, and despite the new difficulties of war with France, rotary engines began to power the partners’ business.*21 From 1790, order books expanded. But as the firm hired more workers, manufacturing losses grew.110 Production needed new methods. Bills needed calling in. The fire at Albion Mills in 1791 had cost a fortune – a loss estimated at £10,000, of which Boulton was on the hook for £6,000.111 By the mid-1790s Boulton knew he needed to modernize both his firm and his factory.112

In October 1794, Boulton’s son, another Matthew, along with the younger James Watt and the nineteen-year-old Gregory Watt were admitted to the partnership, and the firm’s name changed to Boulton, Watt and Sons. William Murdoch was recalled from Cornwall to help. The mill-owners’ demand for steam called for different pre-built engines, and in big numbers. So Boulton now embarked on creating the world’s first steam-engine factory.

On 30 January 1796, the Soho Foundry was opened, a mile from Soho House and the Manufactory, on the banks of the Birmingham Canal, replete with smithy, forge, boring mill and turning shops, and capable of producing its own engine cylinders and fitting them to engines. On the occasion, ‘When the dinner was over,’ reported Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, ‘the founder of Soho entered, and consecrated this new branch of it by sprinkling the walls with wine, and then in the name of Vulcan, all the Gods and Goddesses of Fire and Water, pronounced the name of SOHO FOUNDRY, and all the people cried amen’.113

The bill for the foundry was £20,000, and the money would not be recouped for another fifteen years.114 To fill the hole, Boulton and Watt now embarked on a host of court battles led by the younger partners to sue patent infringers (cashing in on the burgeoning demand for power) and poor-paying mine owners. Often the threat of court was enough to prompt a cheque. But the Cornish fought hard, and in 1795 a challenge to Boulton and Watt’s patent went all the way to the High Court. In January 1799, the Court of the King’s Bench unanimously decided for Boulton &Watt: a colossal estimated £162,052 (between £180 million and £228 million today) in royalties were now owing to the company.115

*

Over the course of the 1790s, Boulton’s mint continued to churn out millions of coins for Sumatra and the presidencies of Bombay and Madras, silver coins for Sierra Leone, pennies for the Isle of Man, and trade tokens for industrialists, along with endless medals, before, finally, in 1797 came the great government order for coinage.

The French Revolution had divided the members of Birmingham’s old Lunar Society, but for Boulton the trouble was good for business. He offered the French National Assembly a deal to mint the country’s new coinage; when that failed, he did a healthy trade supplying private coinage, until it was outlawed in 1793. When France and Britain fell to war once more, pressure grew on Britain’s finances, and the Bank of England’s gold reserves began to fall. The Privy Council suspended the convertibility of bank notes into gold to ensure that no gold left the kingdom, and with extraordinary speed the Bank was ordered to start issuing new £5 notes, restamp Spanish gold coins – and commission from Matthew Boulton 46 million halfpennies and farthings. Boulton was summoned to see the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, on 3 March 1797. He also attended the Privy Council on 7 March. By the end of the month, the order was his and, by the end of August 1797, the first coins to be embossed with Britannia holding a trident (rather than a spear) rolled off the production line.

As his final years approached, Boulton was rich in fame and fortune but poor in health. A kidney problem grew worse. And yet, his failing constitution could not stifle his curiosity or his civic flair. His fascination with science never flagged; in January 1801, his daughter was pleading with him not to spend quite so much time gazing through his telescope in the cold. The steam-engine business was in good health, employing in 1802 some fifty-four men, and from the 1790s customers could pay an upfront bill rather than an annual licence. The mint remained his great love – in 1800, he personally foiled a robbery there, lying in wait with an armed band of workers, following a tip-off. In his later years, he loved nothing more than to be carried down the hill in his chair to sit and watch the presses. ‘Of all the mechanical subjects I ever entered upon,’ he later wrote, ‘there is none in which I ever engaged with so much ardour as that of bringing to perfection the art of coining.’116 Between 1797 and 1807, over 20 million blanks were stamped for the new cents and half-cents of the young United States of America. ‘Had Mr B done nothing more in the world than what he has done in improving coinage,’ wrote his partner James Watt, ‘his fame would have deserved to be immortalised.’117

The most illustrious leaders of the day beat a path to Boulton’s door. He entertained with style. In 1794, after careful analysis, he bought the freehold of the Soho land, and in 1796 he commissioned James Wyatt to comprehensively remodel the house, with no care for expense. He led the campaign to uphold the quality standards of buttons, culminating in the Button Act of 1796. And his great Soho Manufactory continued to pioneer breathtaking new technology. In 1802, William Murdoch succeeded in lighting the entire works in a blaze of gas-light, a ‘grand illumination’ to mark the short-lived Peace of Amiens with France. That same year, Horatio Nelson arrived in person at Soho House, greeting the sick Boulton in his bed; three years later, the Soho mint struck a special Trafalgar medal to be awarded to every man who fought at the battle. In 1807, Boulton helped enliven his city by leading, and winning, the fight to open Birmingham’s first theatre, in the teeth of much opposition from the city’s Non-conformists.

Matthew Boulton’s final days were spent at home. On 11 March 1809, in his last letter, he wrote in a shaking hand to his daughter Anne, who was in Bath: ‘If you wish to see me living pray come soon for I am very ill.’ He died not long before his eighty-first birthday, on 17 August 1809.118

The city Boulton helped to build laid down its tools to honour him. An old friend of Watt, then in Glasgow, relayed the scene of that August morning when 10,000 people lined the roads to watch ten coaches escort the great entrepreneur on his final journey to St Mary’s Church, in Handsworth. ‘The entrance to Soho & the road thence to Handsworth Church was lined with spectators on foot, on horseback & in carriages... Although the church was crowded in every part & multitudes remained without... the utmost stillness and solemnity prevailed.’ Five hundred and thirty memorial tokens were struck for the ‘Attendants and Workmen’, with silver medals for the coffin-bearers, who were Soho’s oldest, longest-serving workers. The men retired to public houses, where food and drink had been arranged. And there, in the words of the younger James Watt, after ‘drinking the memory of their departed benefactor standing & in silence, they all repaired to their respective homes, and not a Soho man was to be seen upon the road for the remainder of the day’.119

*1 Whitehall’s Lane is now called Steelhouse Lane.

*2 Local builder William Wesley produced the first-known plan of the city in 1731.

*3 Sarehole Mill was later immortalized as The Shire by J. R. R. Tolkien in his book The Hobbit.

*4 Smiles also notes that Anne’s friends offered some opposition on account of Boulton’s trade in Smiles, Lives of Boulton and Watt, op. cit., p. 166.

*5 The pamphlet was John Fry’s ‘The Case of Marriage Between Near Kindred’, published in 1756.

*6 John Taylor later founded the Birmingham Bank, which would become Lloyds Bank.

*7 Fothergill moved into the manor house on the hill above the rolling mill in 1762.

*8 Erasmus was the grandfather of Charles Darwin. He moved to Lichfield to open a medical practice in 1756.

*9 In 1739, there some 551 coffee houses in London – ten times more than in Vienna. It was in these coffee houses and clubs that great men held court: John Dryden and Alexander Pope at Will’s, in Covent Garden; thespians at the Bedford; artists at Old Slaughter’s; Tories at Smyrna in Pall Mall, all part of a scene that boasted more than 2,000 clubs and societies, from the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, to the Kit-Cat, or Dr Johnson’s Literary Club, the Spitalfields Mathematical Society and the burgeoning lodges of Freemasons, which boomed in the years after 1717.

*10 Ormolu derives from the French or moulu, meaning ‘ground gold’. Gold was ground to a powder to allow amalgamation with mercury, for use in fire-gilding metals.

*11 Today the office stands in the heart of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter and is the last Assay Office in Britain.

*12 Boulton had begun studying fire engines in 1766, writing to Benjamin Franklin (who was then in London) that: ‘My engagements since Christmas have not permitted me to make any further progress with my fire-engine; but, as the thirsty season is approaching apace, necessity will oblige me to set about it in good earnest.’ Smiles, Boulton and Watt, op. cit., p. 183.

*13 Darby won the Royal Society of Arts Gold Medal in 1788.

*14 Asa Briggs, A Social History of England (Penguin, 1991), p. 186. Other large iron firms included the Carron Iron Company, which was founded in 1759 and boasted a capital of £12,000; by 1773, it was worth £150,000. William Reynolds and Co. was worth £138,000 by 1793. Walkers of Masboro’, which started as a smithy in 1741, was worth £235,000 in 1801.

*15 The mines of the county were divided between two loose competing federations, eastern and western, owing allegiance to the bitter rival landlords Sir Francis Basset and Lord Falmouth.

*16 Keir’s incentive was an offer to run the factory for a quarter of the Boulton and Fothergill profits.

*17 Looking for work at the age of twenty-three, Murdoch had impressed Boulton with an oval wooden hat he had turned himself on a homemade lathe.

*18 Fothergill died a bankrupt the following year.

*19 As it happened, the firm won its lawsuit against Byron, and the engine was never used much.

*20 The 16 h.p. engine proposed for McConnel and Kennedy in 1797, for example, came in at £927s 5d, plus the cost of stalling the factory for six months while the engine was assembled. One horsepower could drive 350 spindles and there were few cotton factories with more than 4,000 spindles at work.

*21 For many, the costs of an atmospheric engine, used to pump water to drive a wheel, remained as economical as a rotary engine, which directly drove machinery.