This is an invaluable work on Boulton and Watt, an early British engineering and manufacturing firm in the business of designing and producing marine and stationary steam engines. It was founded in 1775 as a partnership between the Scottish engineer James Watt and the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton to exploit Watt's patent for a steam engine with a different condenser. The firm played a significant role in Industrial Revolution and evolved to be a prominent producer of steam engines in the 19th century. This work was a result of the memoirs of Boulton and Watt. The writer described the formation and evolution of the company as well as details on how they planned and carried out the operations in simple terms. It's a perfect read for people curious to learn about the engineering practices in the olden days.

The Life and Legend of James Wattoffers a deeper understanding of the work and character of the great eighteenth-century engineer. Stripping away layers of legend built over generations, David Philip Miller finds behind the heroic engineer a conflicted man often diffident about his achievements but also ruthless in protecting his inventions and ideas, and determined in pursuit of money and fame. A skilled and creative engineer, Watt was also a compulsive experimentalist drawn to natural philosophical inquiry, and a chemistry of heat underlay much of his work, including his steam engineering. But Watt pursued the business of natural philosophy in a way characteristic of his roots in the Scottish “improving” tradition that was in tension with Enlightenment sensibilities. As Miller demonstrates, Watt’s accomplishments relied heavily on collaborations, not always acknowledged, with business partners, employees, philosophical friends, and, not least, his wives, children, and wider family. The legend created in his later years and “afterlife” claimed too much of nineteenth-century technology for Watt, but that legend was, and remains, a powerful cultural force.

Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt (1736–1819) is best known for his pioneering work on the steam engine that became fundamental to the incredible changes and developments wrought by the Industrial Revolution. But in this new biography, Ben Russell tells a much bigger, richer story, peering over Watt’s shoulder to more fully explore the processes he used and how his ephemeral ideas were transformed into tangible artifacts. Over the course of the book, Russell reveals as much about the life of James Watt as he does a history of Britain’s early industrial transformation and the birth of professional engineering. To record this fascinating narrative, Russell draws on a wide range of resources—from archival material to three-dimensional objects to scholarship in a diversity of fields from ceramics to antique machine-making. He explores Watt’s early years and interest in chemistry and examines Watt’s partnership with Matthew Boulton, with whom he would become a successful and wealthy man. In addition to discussing Watt’s work and incredible contributions that changed societies around the world, Russell looks at Britain’s early industrial transformation. Published in association with the Science Museum London, and with seventy illustrations, James Watt is not only an intriguing exploration of the engineer’s life, but also an illuminating journey into the broader practices of invention in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Published in association with the Science Museum, London

This 1936 study of the life and work of Watt places his achievements in the context of the Industrial Revolution.

Discusses the life of scientist James Watt, inventor of the separate-condenser steam engine, and focuses on re-discovering steam, types of steam engines, manufacturing and marketing a steam engine.