int. j. for the history of eng. & tech., Vol. 81 No.

1, January, 2011, 129–50

The Mysterious Case of James Watt’s

‘“1785” Steam Indicator’: Forgery
or Folklore in the History of an
Instrument?
David Philip Miller
University of New South Wales, Australia

Investigation of nineteenth-century accounts, and displays, of a recording

steam indicator attributed to James Watt and dated 1785 led to the discovery
of an instrument engraved with that date. Other sources show that the first
recording indicator in fact dates from the mid-1790s. The paper investigates
the provenance of the ‘1785 recording indicator’, its origins in either forgery
or folklore, and discusses its significance with regard to ideas about James
Watt’s understanding of the nature of heat and the operation of the steam
engine.

keywords steam, indicator, James Watt, history, thermodynamics

Introduction
The relationship between theory and practice in the development of James Watt’s
steam engine is a classical bone of contention among historians of science and
technology. An earlier generation of historians of science, such as A. R. Hall, were
adamant that there was no clear relation between theoretical science and the inven-
tion of the separate condenser.1 Others, however, have painted a more equivocal
picture, or even asserted a strong relationship between Watt’s natural philosophical
investigations, particularly of heat, and the foundations of the steam age.2 Whilst
these days there is a greater willingness to accept the historically close relations
between theory and practice — of a sort that has led Peter M. Jones to describe
Boulton and Watt (the individuals) as ‘savants-fabricants’ — the precise character of
that theory remains a matter of some disagreement.3 Another aspect of this broad
question concerns the conceptual underpinnings of a device known as a steam indica-
tor. It is perfectly legitimate to argue, as a number of historians have done,4 that
inventions such as the steam indicator, the indicator diagram that it produced and
the related concept of expansive working of a steam engine were crucial resources for

© The Newcomen Society for the Study of the DOI 10.1179/175812110X12869022260231

History of Engineering & Technology 2011
130 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

the later development of ideas within thermodynamics and the science of energy. This
is undoubtedly the case. However, it is unwise to take the further step of reading such
ideas back into the minds of those making the earlier inventions, including Watt. Yet
this is what many nineteenth-century engineers did, in taking a course that some
modern historians have been tempted to follow.
The apparent ease with which the indicator diagram can be identified with the
‘diagram of energy’ in thermodynamics means that the dating of the recording steam
indicator, which produces the indicator diagram, is a matter of some historical
moment. If Watt could be attributed with the invention of the recording indicator
then it would be much easier to credit him with partial anticipations of the science
of energy and thermodynamics. If that invention were dated to the early or
mid-1780s, when Watt was engaged in intense conceptual and experimental work,
including that on expansive working of the steam engine, then the case would be
more compelling.
Although the history of the recording steam indicator, and its part in the practical
and theoretical development of steam power, is now reasonably well understood,5
and, as we will see, precludes attribution of the device to Watt, for much of the nine-
teenth century that history was clouded and confused, thanks in part to the fact that
in its early years the device was a closely-guarded secret. However, it seems that
beyond secrecy there was also obfuscation. This paper discusses an example of such
misdirection — an instrument claimed by some to be Watt’s original steam indicator,
a recording instrument dated to 1785. I tell the story of my discovery of various
representations and exhibitions of this instrument in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. The mystery of this inscribed instrument is revealed but not
resolved. I canvass various possibilities for its origins.
Preliminary to all this, however, it is necessary to examine our current understand-
ing of the origins and development of the steam indicator and also to outline its
emergent links with the science of heat, including thermodynamics. Having done this,
both the significance of the claim about the existence of a recording indicator in
Watt’s hands in 1785, and the sorts of conclusions people might draw from it, can
be better appreciated. My inquiry then proceeds into the possible origins of this
curiously dated device in either forgery or folklore.

The recording indicator and its later thermodynamic interpretation

The earliest, until recently unnoticed, attempt by James Watt to diagnose experimen-
tally the state of the steam inside a ‘working engine’ is described in an eyewitness
report by the great natural philosopher Henry Cavendish. In early August 1785,
Cavendish and his assistant Charles Blagden visited the Soho works of Boulton &
Watt (the firm) at Birmingham. They were shown Watt’s latest experiments on the
steam engine and Cavendish recorded the experience thus:
Mr Watt mentioned, that having found that some steam is condensed in the cylinder of
the Steam engine, tho’ surrounded with steam, he made an experiment to discover what
happened. He threw steam into a Glass vessel close at the top (By making it communicate
with that part of the cylinder of this fire engine in which there is alternately Steam and
Vacuum) and found that upon making the Vacuum some of the steam condensed on the
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’ 131

sides of the Glass Vessel; and having heated the sides of this Vessel, so that none could
condense upon them, he observed the condensation take place, so as to render the Steam
visible in the middle of the Glass vessel [. . .] a cloud began to appear at each Vacuum
[. . .]6

In this way, Watt made visible the behaviour of the steam in the cylinder as pressure
varied. He was trying to gain access to what was happening during the cycle of the
steam engine. But, of course, such literal insight provided no measure of what was
going on. In pursuit of such a measure Watt subsequently constructed his first indica-
tors as such, which were pressure gauges in the form of barometers attached to the
cylinder of the engine. They gave some indication of the varying pressure inside the
cylinder at various stages of the engine cycle, but these devices were difficult to read
because of the erratic movements of the surface of the mercury. Less transparent but
more stable were the pressure gauges that Watt subsequently constructed, consisting
of a small piston with spring attachment. These were modified to give a pointer read-
ing as in the example shown in Figure 1 (L). With the slow-moving engines of that

figure 1 Two early indicators. (L) Watt’s pointer indicator; (R) an early nineteenth-century
version of Southern’s recording indicator of type devised c. 1796.
Figure 1(L) reproduced from H. W. Dickinson and R. Jenkins, James Watt and the Steam Engine
(1927), p. 229; Figure 1(R) reproduced with permission from Science Museum, London,
Science and Society Picture Library
132 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

day it was possible, using a pointer indicator connected to the cylinder, to take down
pressure readings by hand for different parts of the cycle of the engine. The next type
of indicator developed was the first recording indicator, which produced a trace
through the cycle of the engine. This was done by first attaching a pencil to the small
piston of the indicator, which worked against a spring. This moved in the vertical
axis according to the pressure in the cylinder. The crucial innovation was to include
a platen that moved horizontally in synchronization with the motion of the piston of
the main cylinder of the engine, and was returned by a weight mechanism (Figure 1
(R)). The resulting trace was a closed figure, the area of which was recognized as
a measure of the work performed by the engine. It was also quickly realized that
fine features of the indicator diagram could be correlated with other aspects of the
working of the engine such as the valve settings, enabling the diagram to be used for
diagnosing faults and ‘tuning’ the engine. Though often attributed to Watt, this
recording indicator was the work of his assistant John Southern in 1796 or there-
abouts. We know this because in correspondence internal to the firm, Southern both
claimed the invention and showed his command of it. All modern historical authori-
ties grant the invention to Southern.7 The firm of Boulton & Watt equipped its engine
erectors with indicators of this type, which were used in the setting up and tuning of
their engines beginning in the later 1790s. However, great care was taken to ensure
that the precise nature of the device was not publicized.
Despite the secrecy, details of the design of the recording indicator did leak out
and by the 1830s instruments were being manufactured by a number of individuals.
During the course of the century many modifications of the recording indicator were
made but the essential nature of the device remained the same.
The scientific career of the indicator, that is the development of the physical
theory accounting for its operation, had a number of phases. The first involved the
understandings of it within the Boulton & Watt circle in the 1790s, the very earliest
years of its conception and use. I have argued elsewhere that the early understanding
of the indicator was as a tool to diagnose the ‘strength’ of the steam in the engine.
The pressure of the steam was, for Watt, a function of the amount of latent heat
chemically combined within it. For this reason, to treat Watt’s own use of the indica-
tor as that of a proto-thermodynamicist is quite mistaken.8 By means of these early
indicators, and using the early versions of the indicator diagram, Watt was pursuing
a ‘steam economy’. This would provide information, for example, about how much
cold water to inject into the cylinder. Also, as Watt’s close friend John Robison put
it in a more or less contemporary account:
By knowing the internal state of the cylinder in machines of very different goodness, we
learn the connection between that state of the steam and the performance of the machine;
and it is very possible that the result of a full examination may be, that in situations where
fuel is expensive, it may be proper to employ a weak steam which will expend less fuel,
although less work is performed by it.9

Although a semi-abstract identification of the indicator diagram with the work

performed by an engine was made once the recording indicator became available in
the mid-1790s, this was still part of the practical discipline of designing and adjusting
engines so as to achieve the optimum steam economy. In that sense it was closer to
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’ 133

Watt’s initial attempts to diagnose by literally ‘seeing inside’ the engine than it was
to the indicator diagram of thermodynamic principle. Indeed Richard Hills notes this
in his discussion of the detailed adjustments to Thomas Houldsworth’s machine in
1803 using indicator diagrams: ‘[. . .] this indicator diagram shows that, with the final
setting of the valves, there was little expansion of the steam during the working stroke
and a high terminal pressure so no fall in temperature at the end. This points to the
engine being regarded as working by pressure and not the transformation of heat’.10
For Watt at this time, heat was what, by chemical means, gave elasticity to the steam
and created the pressure that worked the engine. There was no mechanical equivalent
of heat involved in his deliberations.
The indicator diagram did, of course, subsequently acquire an important place in
the development of the science of thermodynamics. This was the second phase in the
scientific career of the indicator. In 1834 something looking, as an inscription, very
much like the indicator diagram appeared in a paper published by Benoît-Pierre-Emile
Clapeyron in the Journal de l’Ecole Polytechnique.11 In the history of thermodynam-
ics, this paper is regarded as having given effective voice for the first time to the
key ideas of Sadi Carnot, upon which later figures, notably William Thomson and
Rankine would build. In Clapeyron’s hands the indicator diagram became an abstract
representation of the cycle of a heat engine.
There is some circumstantial evidence linking Clapeyron to the indicator diagram
as used by Boulton & Watt employees. Clapeyron was in Russia in the 1820s and,
like John Farey before him, he may have learned there about the indicator diagram
from Boulton & Watt engineers working in St Petersburg.12 It was certainly whilst
in Russia that Clapeyron learned of Carnot’s Réflexions sur la puissance motrice
du feu.13 Clapeyron planned his ‘Mémoire’ whilst in St Petersburg. Cardwell sees
the ‘Mémoire’ as a crucial bridge between the work of Watt and that of the
sophisticated theoreticians of a later generation. There is no doubt that later theorists,
including William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), were very familiar with the practicalities
of Watt’s steam engines and, indeed, with the use of the indicator diagram, in its
mature form, to measure ‘power’.14 In their publications in the 1850s these men
decisively secured the link between thermodynamic and energy concepts, on the one
hand, and the practical operation of the steam indicator on the other. A detailed and
influential treatment of the indicator within the framework of a newly developing
‘engineering science’ was given by W. J. Macquorn Rankine, in his A Manual of the
Steam Engine (1859). Rankine not only reconceptualized the indicator diagram as
what he called the ‘diagram of energy’, but also offered a substantial scientific
account of how departures of real indicator diagrams from the ideal could be linked
to operating characteristics of engines and of the indicator itself.15 For Rankine, this
treatment of the indicator was an important exemplar of ‘engineering science’ in
action.
The key point to be considered, however, is the relationship, if any, of Watt’s own
understanding of the indicator and its diagram to the understanding promulgated in
the mid-nineteenth century in the form of energy physics and thermodynamics. Some
historians, including Donald Cardwell, and particularly Arnold Pacey, have argued
strenuously, and in my view tenuously, that the use of the indicator in its early days
was informed by what we might call proto-thermodynamic ideas, as Pacey puts it,
134 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

that elements of the heat engine concept were ‘present as ideas before the time of
Carnot and not only as inventions’.16 On the contrary, however, as already noted,
the steam engine was long conceived of, quite reasonably, as a pressure engine,
worked by the pressure of steam, not as a heat engine. For this reason, the meaning
of the indicator diagram was transformed once the concept of the heat engine was
established. For Clapeyron it was an idealized descriptive device, and had to be so
because Clapeyron worked with the caloric theory of heat. For Watt the indicator
diagram was even further removed from nineteenth-century theoretical significances
because he subscribed to a chemical theory of heat in which steam was a chemical
combination of water and material heat. For Watt the pressure of the steam in a
steam engine depended upon the quantity of latent heat combined in the steam — this
was the deep physical reality behind the indicator for him.
Nineteenth-century engineers were often, and understandably, inclined to minimize
the conceptual distance between their own ideas and those of their hero James Watt.
The way that new discoveries in thermodynamics were announced sometimes encour-
aged this. Thus, in 1854 when W. J. M. Rankine published his famous paper in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ‘On the Geometrical Representation
of the Expansive Action of Heat, and the Theory of Thermodynamic Engines’, its
first section stated straightforwardly:
The first application of a geometrical diagram to represent the expansive action of Heat
was made by JAMES WATT, when he contrived the well-known Steam-Engine Indicator,
subsequently improved and altered by others in various ways. As the diagram described
by WATT’s indicator is the type of all diagrams representing the expansive action of heat,
its general nature is represented in fig. 1.17

This shorthand recognition of Watt — a literary device typical in the construction

of a scientific paper — elides the differences between Watt’s conceptual world and
Rankine’s. Furthermore, in the same year that Rankine’s paper appeared James
Patrick Muirhead published in The Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions
of James Watt a famous diagram that had first appeared in Watt’s 1782 patent in
which, among other things, Watt explained the expansive working of steam engines.
The diagram charts what Watt considered would happen to the pressure of the steam
in the cylinder of an engine when the injection of steam was cut off early in the
expansion phase (see Figure 2).
The superficial similarity between this theoretically derived representation in the
Watt patent and Rankine’s ‘diagram of energy’ might encourage the idea that Watt
had anticipated the latter and, therefore, had the modern scientific interpretation of
the indicator diagram before he then realized it practically with the recording indica-
tor. Were people thinking such thoughts about Watt to then find that Watt had, in
fact, developed the recording indicator in 1785, or thereabouts, rather than Southern
doing so in 1796, that would make for a stronger case that Watt’s conceptions in the
1780s had anticipated mid-nineteenth-century thinking. A number of engineers in the
nineteenth century believed that such a 1785 indicator had indeed been identified.
I will recount now my discovery of these engineers and of the recording indicator in
question.
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’ 135

figure 2 Diagram of
expansive working from
Watt’s 1782 patent.
Reproduced from J. P.
Muirhead, The Origin and
Progress of the Mechanical
Inventions of James Watt, 3
(London, 1854), pl viii

Discovering the ‘“1785” steam indicator’

The Watt Monument Library in Greenock, Watt’s birthplace, was founded by James
Watt Jr as one of a number of memorials to his father. There was a tradition in
Greenock, dating from the 1820s, of holding a dinner on the anniversary of Watt’s
death to celebrate his life and accomplishments as the town’s most famous son.18
From 1865 the Greenock Philosophical Society formally instituted a Watt Anniver-
sary Lecture. The first lecture was given by none other than James Prescott Joule and
he was followed at the lectern by many of the most eminent scientists and engineers
of late Victorian Britain. The Library has a bound volume containing a number
of the lectures, including that delivered in 1897 by William Henry Preece, who was
chief engineer of the Post Office and deeply involved as an electrical engineer in the
development of electrification and telephone communication in Britain.
Preece’s lecture, like many of the other Anniversary Lectures, had an understand-
able tendency to praise Watt’s accomplishments, his perspicacity and his anticipation
of ideas about energy and thermodynamics of the nineteenth century. However as
the centrepiece of his lecture Preece displayed to his audience what he claimed to be
Watt’s ‘original’ steam indicator. Preece spoke of this as being ‘112 years old’ thus
136 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

dating it to 1785.19 The diagram of the instrument published in Preece’s paper shows
us why he made this statement — the instrument is depicted as having an inscription
‘“1785”’ on its cylinder (see Figure 3). Here was an interesting claim indeed — that
Watt had produced the recording indicator (which this device clearly was because of
its platen) in the mid-1780s. Preece was clear in his own mind about the significance
of this:
The conception and development of this apparatus showed that Watt was a long way
before his time in grasping the doctrine of energy and applying the practice of graphics.
He commenced in 1782 by designing an instrument to indicate vacuum alone [the
pointer indicator] and then, passing through the work done by steam, he reached the
indicator.20

figure 3 Illlustration of the ‘1785 Indicator’ from Preece’s Watt Anniversary lecture (left)
compared with the indicator in the Thinktank, Birmingham, today (right).
Diagram from W. H. Preece, Watt and the Measurement of Power. Being the Watt Anniver-
sary Lecture delivered before the Greenwich Philosophical Society, 5 February 1897 (London,
1897), p. 4. Photograph courtesy of the Thinktank Trust
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’ 137

Preece showed his audience two instruments side by side, Watt’s ‘original’ instrument
and ‘the most recent form’, the clear implication being their essential similarity. He
then explained further:
In his patent of 1782, describing his application of the principle of expansion to the
economical working of the steam-engine, Watt drew a diagram [. . .] showing how much
he was before his time in the use of graphics, and in the conception of the principle of
energy. It is quite clear that this mode of looking at the work done in the cylinder led him
to consider its automatic record.21

Where did Preece get this supposedly 112-year-old instrument? He thanks Mr

George Tangye for loaning it to him. Now George Tangye,22 of Tangye Brothers,
had purchased the Boulton & Watt papers and sundry Watt ‘relics’ when the assets
of James Watt & Co. (formerly Boulton, Watt & Co.) were sold in 1895.23 Presum-
ably, then, Tangye had acquired the ‘original’ indicator as part of this purchase. This
was the indicator that had been loaned to Preece for his Anniversary Address. Just
when it had been decided that it was the original indicator, who decided that, and
who took the trouble to engrave the year 1785 on its cylinder, remained a mystery.
Perhaps it had been done at the time of the sale of James Watt & Co.? The answer
to that question remained up in the air.
Meanwhile a chance encounter with an indicator provided me with another
piece of the puzzle. After a workshop in Birmingham as part of the lead up to the
celebration of the bicentenary of the death of Matthew Boulton, Dr Jim Andrew, at
‘Thinktank’ (Birmingham Science Museum), asked if I would like to see an indicator
that was held in the Museum’s collection. First we examined the Watt engine held
there (the ‘Smethwick Engine’) and then the indicator, which it was good to see but
was otherwise unremarkable, looking like a common-or-garden recording indicator
from the early nineteenth century. Subsequently Dr Andrew took photographs of the
device for me.
When I was pondering the diagram in Preece’s Watt Anniversary Address I
decided to compare it with the photographs of the Birmingham indicator (Figure 3).
I was struck immediately by the many similarities between the two images, down to
quite incidental aspects of design such as the screws at the corners of the platen.
I emailed Dr Andrew asking him to take a close look at the Birmingham indicator
and to check whether it had anything engraved on the cylinder. His advice was that
indeed it does have the digits 1785 faintly engraved just below the small window
on the front of the cylinder.24 Further checking of the Museum’s records concerning
this artefact confirmed what was already suspected — that the instrument had been
acquired from Birmingham Council via the Central Library, which had been the
recipient in 1911, from George Tangye, of the Boulton & Watt archive and
associated ‘relics’. In making investigations about Tangye, I found on the ‘Digital
Handsworth’ website a photograph of the ‘Watt Museum’ that Tangye Brothers
had constructed at their Cornwall Works in Birmingham. There in the middle of
the photograph was a glass case containing what must be the ‘original’ indicator
(Figure 4). Another photograph, from the same source, a close-up, allowed the
identification to be confirmed.
So the circle was closed. Preece displayed in 1897 an instrument loaned to him from
the ‘Watt Museum’ of George Tangye, which had come originally from James Watt
138 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

figure 4 The ‘Watt Museum’ at Tangye Brothers’ Cornwall Works, Birmingham, with the
1785 indicator in case at centre of display.
Reproduced by permission of Birmingham Libraries & Archives

& Co. Subsequently Tangye had given the papers and relics to Birmingham Corpora-
tion. They were established in the Boulton & Watt Room of the Central Library
in Birmingham. The indicator was then transferred to the Birmingham Museum of
Science and Industry in 1950, where it remains.
Further investigations have revealed that besides its trip to Greenock the ‘“1785”
steam indicator’ had other outings when it was displayed, used, and identified as
Watt’s ‘original’ device. Two of these pre-dated the Greenock outing. In the Cantor
Lectures given to the Society of Arts by H. Graham Harris in 1889 I found another
depiction of the inscribed indicator.25 In fact, like Preece, Harris presented the actual
indicator to his audience: ‘Through the kindness of Mr Wollaston Blake, of Messrs.
James Watt and Co., the successors of the original firm of Boulton and (sic) Watt,
I have here for you to see the actual instrument made and used 104 or 105 years ago
(judging from the date upon it) by James Watt [. . .]’.26 Blake lent the device to Har-
ris again two years later for a lecture to the Corps of Royal Engineers, in which its
display was linked to a statement about Watt’s prescience in understanding energy.
Harris linked the theory and practice of expansive working via Watt and also in Watt.
Thus he noted that Watt’s 1782 patent contained ‘the very earliest diagram of energy
with which I am acquainted’ and then presented the ‘“1785” indicator’ as enabling
the practical test of that theoretical notion. Thus he made exactly the connection that
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’ 139

the simultaneous publications in 1854 by Rankine and Muirhead encouraged. Harris

also remarked on the continuity between Watt’s original indicator and later devices,
saying of Richards’ indicator — then the most popular design in use — that its
principle was ‘exactly the principle of the “Watt” indicator’.27
The story of the 1785 indicator continued into the twentieth century, when at
least two further references to, or exhibitions of, it took place. The first was at the
joint meeting of the American Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the British
Institution in 1910. A souvenir of the meeting was issued to participants with the
compliments of The Crosby Steam Gage and Valve Company, who described them-
selves as ‘The Patentees and Manufacturers of the latest improvements in Engine
Indicators’. One page of the souvenir (see Figure 5) juxtaposed pictures of the Crosby
indicator and Watt’s supposed original (identifiably the instrument that Tangye was
about to present to Birmingham Corporation), which is described as being from
‘about 1785’.28
The second additional occasion when the 1785 indicator was prominently deployed,
apparently without any questioning of its vaunted antiquity, was at the Watt Cente-
nary Celebrations in Birmingham in 1919. Held over three days (16–18 September),
these were an elaborate affair with many activities and events.29 On two of the days

figure 5 Juxtaposition of ‘original’ steam engine indicator with Crosby indicator (1910).
Reproduced by permission of Birmingham Libraries & Archives
140 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

those attending were able to take motor transport to Ocker Hill, at Tipton, nine miles
outside Birmingham, where the Boulton & Watt built ‘Smethwick Engine’ had been
reconstructed.30 The engine was started up and, under the watchful eye of F. W.
Burstall, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Birmingham,
indicator diagrams were taken on special souvenir cards. The example illustrated (see
Figure 6) was found in the papers of an Australian Army Major, S. H. E. Barraclough,
who was Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Sydney University, and who
attended the 1919 Watt Celebrations. Barraclough was in England, having supervised
the Australian munitions workers employed there during the war effort.31 The key
point about the souvenir card is, of course, its statement that: ‘The Indicator used
on this occasion is the First made by James Watt in 1785, lent from the Boulton &
Watt relics presented to the BIRMINGHAM CORPORATION by George Tangye
Esq.’. The account of the occasion published in Engineering observed that on the
Wednesday afternoon ‘nearly 200 visitors’ inspected the engine and most of them
took a diagram.32
Taken together, these various outings of the ‘“1785” steam indicator’ in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries must have impressed on the minds of many
engineers the notion that Watt had indeed invented the recording indicator and that
he had done so in the mid-1780s. Such supposed knowledge would, in its turn,
encourage its possessors to draw conclusions similar to those drawn by Preece and
Harris, and to attribute greater prescience to Watt in matters relating to energy and
thermodynamics than was justified.

figure 6 Souvenir indicator diagram from Watt Centenary celebrations, September 1919.
Reproduced by permission of University of Sydney Archives
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’ 141

Forgery or folklore?
We know that Preece was not responsible for the inscription on the indicator because
it was already there when he borrowed the device from Tangye. Was Tangye the
culprit? At first I thought that this was quite possible and that the inscription was a
genuine mistake. It is easy to imagine that on the occasion of the sale of the James
Watt & Co. equipment, in 1895, someone asked about the indicator, was informed
that it dated from 1785, and inscribed it thus. Maybe the crime was not a crime after
all but just a casual piece of inventory making, based on even more casual workshop
folklore? But discovery of the 1785 indicator on display in Harris’s Cantor lectures
in 1889 shows that the inscription significantly predated the sale. So, whether the
inscription was forgery or folklore the sale in 1895 was not the occasion for it.
The inscribed indicator was in the possession of James Watt & Co. well before the
time of the 1895 sale. The then head of that company Mr Wollaston Blake must have
endorsed its authenticity. Blake had become a partner in James Watt & Co. in 1841.
At that time Watt Jr’s health was failing and he wanted to make provision for the
continuation of the Company. Watt Jr had never married and the bulk of his estates
were to pass to a nephew James Gibson, who changed his name in the process to
James Gibson Watt. But James Gibson was too young to be entrusted with the
engineering business even if he had been inclined to enter it. Watt Jr had always
treated the Company as an important memorial to his father and in his declining
years he selected Wollaston Blake to take charge of it.33
Once again it is always possible that the inscription was added to the indicator by
Wollaston Blake or, more likely, one of his subordinates sometime between the 1840s
and the 1880s, either as a deliberate deceit or as a result of hazy Company tradition.
We know that James Watt & Co. gave considerable care and attention to the ‘Watt
relics’, as they became known. The ‘Watt Museum’ that George Tangye established
at the Tangyes’ Cornwall Works in Birmingham was in many respects simply a
relocation of a ‘Watt Room’ (pictured in Figure 7) that had been put together and
maintained by James Watt & Co. An employee of the Company, William Henry
Darlington, who had risen to the position of General Manager during its final years,
had been responsible for the construction and preservation of this ‘shrine’ to the
founder of the enterprise.34 A newspaper report at the time of the sale of James Watt
& Co. noted the character of the ‘Records of Soho’, the extent of the historic letters,
drawings and relics:
Most of these have been unseen and unknown, and might readily have been lost, but some
years ago the manager (Mr W Henry Darlington) collected and arranged the mass of
papers, drawings, and relics, and placed them in a special room, where they were over-
hauled and preserved — a record-room which is unrivalled and which will be found to
be not only curious, but a unique summary of industrial history and of national
progress.35

This seems to unequivocally identify Darlington as responsible for the original set-up
of the ‘Watt Room’, for the overhauling and preservation of its contents (which could
have included the dating of some of the artefacts), and for the display of the ‘“1785”
indicator’. We also know that Darlington had claims to knowledge of the history of
other Boulton & Watt relics, though not perhaps always well-founded ones. Thus
142 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

figure 7 The ‘Watt Room’ at James Watt & Co., pictured just before the 1895 sale of Soho
Foundry to W. & T. Avery. Note the ‘1785 steam indicator’ in case at lower right.
Reproduced by permission of Birmingham Libraries & Archives

Dickinson and Jenkins mention with considerable scepticism Darlington’s views on

the engine known as ‘Old Bess’, given in a letter of 1887.36 Correspondence between
Darlington and local Birmingham worthy, and historian, Samuel Timmins, at the
time of the sale of the Soho Foundry reveals considerable anxiety for the fate of the
‘Watt Room’. They both feared that an American millionaire might snap it up.37
Darlington, as the enthusiastic chief custodian of the relics would probably have been
able to tell us how the supposedly original indicator came to be, even if he had not
produced it himself when setting up the ‘Watt Room’.
There was one person associated with James Watt & Co., however, who certainly
knew the truth about the history of the steam indicator, and knew it first hand —
James Watt Jr. Could it be that the misdating of the indicator originated with him?

The circumstantial case against Watt Jr amidst contending histories

Watt Jr certainly had the motive to attribute a 1785 indicator to his father. He had
made a life’s work out of defending and promoting his father’s reputation, and he
went to great lengths in doing this. He was active in organizing responses to any
criticism of the great engineer that appeared in print. He orchestrated the long-
running campaign to have his father, rather than Cavendish or Lavoisier, credited
with the discovery of the composition of water.38 Such enthusiasm and devotion is
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’ 143

no crime, but there is evidence in the case of documents relating to the kettle myth
that Watt Jr ‘adjusted’ the historical record in a way that he calculated would be
advantageous to his father’s reputation — in that case by giving weight to the claim
that Watt had discovered the phenomenon of latent heat independently of Joseph
Black.39
Watt Jr’s interventions in the history of the indicator have to be considered in the
context of other writings about it. There was considerable confusion in the early
nineteenth century about the history of the indicator, much of it caused by the Watt
camp’s decision to protect the device by secrecy rather than patent. At the very time
that the indicator was developed, in the 1790s, Boulton & Watt were engaged in long
and expensive litigation over the original engine patent, and evidently not in the
mood to rely on that way of protecting their ‘intellectual property’. When Boulton &
Watt engine erectors used indicators in tuning engines, care was taken that the
devices not fall into the hands of others. Even in the 1830s Watt Jr was refusing
to loan instruments out. When the elder Watt did describe the indicator, in his
revelatory notes to Robison’s System of Mechanical Philosophy, written in 1814, but
published posthumously in 1822, he omitted a key aspect of the device, namely the
platen, or the recording aspect, of the indicator. Although one might expect this to
have led people to attribute a non-recording device to Watt, in fact it may well have
done the reverse. Having decided that Watt was hiding something about his design,
and then knowing that what was missing was the recording system, people may well
have concluded that that was what Watt was hiding and so his original indicator must
have incorporated that feature.
An example of someone who did reason in this way is Joseph Hopkinson. In his
1854 book on the indicator, Hopkinson certainly attributed the first recording device
to Watt rather than to John Southern. He in fact credited an indicator with a record-
ing drum to Southern: ‘In principle it [the steam indicator] is as it left the hands
of Watt: it is only in detail where alterations and improvements have been made.
Mr Southern [. . .] added the revolving cylinder with its attached paper and pencil, in
place of the former traversing board [. . .]’.40 One can only imagine that Hopkinson
knew that Southern had further developed the indicator beyond Watt’s model and,
given — as he thought — that Watt had already supplied the recording device,
Southern must have been responsible for the next improvement, which was the
replacement of the platen by a drum recorder. This line of reasoning placed the
indicator with moving platen in Watt’s hands more or less at the beginning. The lack
of knowledge of the very early history of the indicator, together with surmise about
what it was that Watt had kept under wraps could easily lead, in this way, to the
conclusion that Watt himself had developed the recording indicator.
Given that Watt Jr is a suspect in the creation of the ‘original’ indicator, then it is
important to examine the publications about his father with which he was involved
in order to see what approach they took to the indicator. The first of these, the
biographical entry written by Watt Jr, anonymously, for the Supplement to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica in 182441 made no mention at all of the indicator. Limita-
tions of space may have been the reason for this, but the omission was also consistent
with the Watt camp’s policy of secrecy about the indicator. François Arago’s Eloge
of Watt, published in 1839, and minutely overseen by Watt Jr, discussed the indicator
only in very general terms:
144 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

There are few inventions, great or small, of all those which are found so admirably
united in the steam-engine, which are not the development of some of the first ideas of
Watt [. . . who] when it was much wanted applied to a hole in the lid of the principal
cylinder of the engine a little apparatus, the indicator, so contrived as to make the law of
the evacuation of the steam be exactly known in its relations with the piston [and to be
a measure of the power] &c &c.42

While fudging the matter of the exact design of Watt’s original indicator, this passage
associates it with a generalized scientific view of the law-like relationship between
steam pressure and volume, and also with exact empirical knowledge, which to the
informed reader in the late 1830s would have conjured up the indicator diagram
produced by the recording indicator.
J. P. Muirhead, Watt Jr’s relation and literary assistant, had translated Arago’s
Eloge and he produced other volumes about the ‘Great Steamer’ in the 1840s and the
1850s. In The Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt (1854),
strangely, there is no discussion at all of the steam indicator and its development.
In his Life of James Watt (1858), Muirhead quotes from an earlier account of the
pressure indicator, neglecting to make clear the subsequent career of the device.
Whilst we cannot conclude from this that Watt Jr and his literary associates were
anything but lazy in their accounts of the indicator, it is certainly true that publica-
tions produced under Watt Jr’s auspices did nothing, when they might have done
much, to clarify both the design and the authorship of the recording version of the
device.
Other literature, even from quite an early date, suggested, or at least raised the
possibility, that Watt did not invent the recording indicator. Thus, John Farey, in
1827, made it clear that in his view Watt was not responsible for the platen. After a
lengthy account of the use of the pressure indicator, Farey went on to describe the
recording indicator, and commented:
The author has not been able to learn who was the inventor of this ingenious device, of
tracing a card by the indicator; but he has seen cards made in that way which are said to
have been taken 25 and 30 years ago. Mr Watt has briefly described the indicator, in his
Appendix to Dr Robison’s article Steam Engine; but as he makes no mention of the card,
it may be concluded that it was added to his indicator by some other person, and did not,
therefore, come within the account of his own inventions.43

We know that in preparing the brief account of the indicator that appeared in Arago’s
Eloge, both Arago and Watt Jr read Farey’s account in the Treatise. Watt Jr, who,
despite ill health, was in Paris to oversee the final drafting of the Eloge, advised
Arago:
Farey also describes the Indicator on p. 481–5, and promises a drawing and further
description, which he has not given. I hope you will have no difficulty in making out a
Notice of it, which may be very short. If I can be of any use to you in that, or any thing
else, please to say at what time I shall call on you.44

Part of the brevity of the account finally given lay in leaving out Farey’s account
of the origins of the recording indicator, and his conclusion that Watt was not
responsible for it.
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’ 145

John Bourne, writing in 1847 in a highly successful and widely distributed treatise
on the steam engine, was another doubter: ‘The indicator is an invention of Watt’s,
but it does not very clearly appear who it was that first applied the pencil to trace a
curve. The application was, however, first made at Soho, probably by Mr Southern
or Mr Creighton’.45 By 1876, when Frederick Bramwell, the prominent engineer,
wrote the entry for Watt in the Dictionary of National Biography, he could be
more categorical in giving John Southern credit while at the same time noting the
widespread lack of appreciation of that fact, ‘the whole invention’ of the recording
indicator being ‘commonly but erroneously attributed to Watt’.46
Against this background it seems rather odd that well-trained engineers like Harris
(who had a long working and business partnership with Bramwell) held and propa-
gated contradictory views about Watt and the recording indicator. Why did Preece,
who must also have been familiar with contrary evidence, endorse the ‘1785’ record-
ing indicator as genuinely Watt’s original device? Perhaps because even though
Bramwell plumped for Southern, other authorities in the 1880s ignored him and gave
a very different impression. Thus, Edward A. Cowper made no mention of Southern
in connection with the indicator in his detailed account of Watt’s inventions pre-
sented to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1883. Perhaps tellingly, Cowper’s
discussion of the indicator is interpolated into his description of the 1782 patent
and the conception of expansive working that it contained, thus connecting the latter
with the conception of the indicator in a way that would encourage seeing them
as contemporaneous, just as Harris and Preece were to do. Cowper also seems to
minimize the ‘distance’, conceptual and otherwise between Watt’s early indicators,
the recording indicator, and modern practice. Having described Watt’s pressure
indicator (what I have called the ‘pointer indicator’), Cowper continues:
[. . .] if the pipe below was connected to an engine cylinder, and the cock opened, the
degree of vacuum in the cylinder would at once be indicated. It only remains now to
attach a pencil to the top of the piston rod of this indicator, and move a sheet of paper
on a board in front of it, to and fro, as the main piston of the engine moved, and we have
‘Watt’s Indicator’, as used by himself and all his people for very many years, in fact up
to the author’s time, when he saw the instrument in Mr William Bennett’s possession in
Manchester.47

Bennett had worked originally at Soho and then moved to Manchester to join ‘Mr
Wren’, becoming Boulton & Watt’s agent in that city. Cowper notes that Mr Henry
Wren had made him a present of ‘one of these indicators’, that is one used by Bennett
for indicating engines on behalf of Boulton & Watt. Cowper exhibited the indicator
to his audience with the words ‘you will see that it is just like the engravings of Watt’s
indicator in the Encylopaedias’.48 Here was another instrument being touted as like
Watt’s original, but without the benefit of a date engraved upon it.

Conclusion
Despite what some historians knew, it does seem that many engineers in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have been persuadable that the
1785 indicator was genuinely Watt’s original instrument. A modest job of engraving
146 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

probably did do something to apparently clarify the contending and patchy accounts
of the early history of the indicator and so to promote the association of James Watt
with thermodynamic insight. That this was an achievement of his dutiful son might
be reasonably suspected, though may never be demonstrated. Watt Jr died in 1848
before the publication, from the early 1850s, of the seminal works that directly linked
the indicator diagram and the emerging science of thermodynamics. So the younger
Watt could not have been activated by the desire to claim anticipation of those
specific ideas for his father. Nevertheless, it was apparent earlier that the indicator
diagram had broader theoretical significances, and Watt Jr may have sought to gain
Watt credit for this by salting away a marked device among his father’s relics, as well
as by economical written accounts of its origins. More straightforwardly, dating his
father’s original indicator, with the platen, to 1785 may simply have been intended to
create evidence supporting Watt’s claims to its invention over John Southern’s. It
remains possible also, however, that Watt Jr went to his grave having had nothing
to do with the ‘“1785” steam indicator’ and that it was Blake, or, more likely,
Darlington, who created it out of the materials of company folklore. Final resolution
of the mystery will have to wait upon new evidence. Even without resolution, how-
ever, the case, apart from being interesting in its own right, highlights the need for
caution in the use of nineteenth-century sources when trying to unravel eighteenth-
century engineering history.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Dr Jim Andrew for his material assistance in my indicator
investigations. He and Professor Peter M. Jones read an earlier version of this essay
and gave me valuable commentary upon it. Debbie Rudder of the Powerhouse
Museum, Sydney also gave me the benefit of her expertise. The views expressed here
are, however, entirely my own. Fiona Tait of the Archives of Soho at Birmingham
Central Library was of great assistance to me and I am most grateful to her, as
also to archivists at the University of Sydney and librarians at the Watt Monument
Library, Greenock. This research was partially supported by a Discovery Grant from
the Australian Research Council.

Notes
Abbreviation
TNS Transactions of the Newcomen Society
1 A. R. Hall, ‘What Did the Industrial Revolu-
tion in Britain Owe to Science?’, in Histori-
cal Perspectives: Studies in English Thought
and Society in Honour of J.H. Plumb, ed. by
Neil McKendrick (London: Europa, 1974),
pp. 129–51.
2 See, for example, the detailed account in A.
Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the
Scottish Enlightenment. The Doctrines and
Discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph
Black (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1975), and the more programmatic
statement in M. C. Jacob and L. Stewart,
Practical Matter. Newton’s Science in the
Service of Industry and Empire 1687–1851
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004).
3 P. M. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment:
Science, Technology and Culture in Birming-
ham and the West Midlands, 1760–1820
(Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2008), pp. 16–17; R. L. Hills, ‘The Origin of
James Watt’s Perfect Engine’, TNS, 68
(1996–97), pp. 85–107; idem., ‘How James
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’
Watt Invented the Separate Condenser’,
Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society,
57 (1998), pp. 26–29, and 58 (1998), pp. 6–
10; D. P. Miller, James Watt, Chemist:
Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age
(London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).
4 See, for example, T. S. Kuhn, ‘Engineering
Precedent for the Work of Sadi Carnot’,
Archives Internationales D’Histoire des
Sciences, 13 (1960), pp. 251–55; D. S. L.
Cardwell, ‘Steam Engine Theory in the
Nineteenth Century: from Duty to Thermal
Efficiency; from Parkes to Sankey’, TNS,
65 (1993–94), pp. 117–28; R. Fox, ‘Watt’s
Expansive Principle in the Work of Sadi
Carnot and Nicolas Clément’, Notes and
Records of the Royal Society, 24 (1970),
pp. 233–53, and, more recently, C. Smith,
The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of
Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (London:
The Athlone Press, 1998), pp. 159–64, who
stresses the cultural as well as the material
origins of thermodynamics.
5 Modern studies of the indicator are few. The
most comprehensive and detailed study of
indicator design is J. Walter, The Engine
Indicator: A Short History of the Autographic
Patterns from 1800 to the Present Day
(Calgary: The Canadian Museum of Mining,
2008), at http://www.archivingindustry.com/
indicator/contentback.htm. An excellent
overview of its scientific role and experimen-
tal development is P. Zoller, ‘The Steam
Engine Indicator: Nineteenth Century Tool
of Science and Stethoscope of the Engineer’,
Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society,
67 (2000), pp. 9–22. Also crucial are R. L.
Hills, Power from Steam: A History of
the Stationary Steam Engine (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993) and R. L.
Hills and A. J. Pacey, ‘The Measurement
of Power in Early Steam-Driven Textile
Mills’, Technology and Culture, 13 (1972),
pp. 25–43.
6 Henry Cavendish and Charles Blagden,
‘Computations and Observations in Journey
1785’, Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth,
Cavendish MSS X(a) 4, pp. 36–37.
7 H. W. Dickinson and R. Jenkins, James
Watt and the Steam Engine (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1927), pp. 228–33; R. L.
Hills, James Watt, Volume 3: Triumph
147
through Adversity (Ashbourne: Landmark
Publishing, 2006), pp. 83–86.
8 Miller, op. cit., ch. 6. See also, and compare,
D. Baird, Thing Knowledge. A Philosophy of
Scientific Instruments (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2004), pp. 170–88.
9 J. Robison, ‘Steam-Engine’, Encyclopaedia
Britannica, third ed. (1797), vol. 17, pp. 758–
59.
10 Hills, James Watt, p. 87 (my italics).
11 É. Clapeyron, ‘Mémoire sur la puissance
motrice de la chaleur’, Journal de l’Ecole
Polytechnique, 23.14 (1834), pp. 153–90. An
edited translation of this paper is available in
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire by
Sadi Carnot and other Papers on the Second
Law of Thermodynamics by É. Clapeyron
and R. Clausius, ed. by Eric Mendoza
(New York: Dover Publications, 1960),
pp. 71–105.
12 D. S. L. Cardwell, From Watt to Clausius.
The Rise of Thermodynamics in the Early
Industrial Age (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1971), pp. 220–21 is convinced that
Clapeyron had encountered the indicator
diagram but is not sure how. On Clapeyron’s
presence and activities in Russia at this time
see M. Bradley, ‘Franco-Russian Engineering
Links: The Careers of Lamé and Clapeyron,
1820–1830’, Annals of Science, 38 (1981),
pp. 291–312.
13 N. L. S. Carnot, Réflexions sur la puissance
motrice du feu et sur les machines propres a
developer cette puissance (Paris, 1824).
14 See C. Smith and M. N. Wise, Energy and
Empire. A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), pp. 53, 290–91 and 357–58.
15 W. J. M. Rankine, A Manual of the Steam
Engine and other Prime Movers (London:
Richard Griffin, 1859), pp. 47–52, 417–25.
For the cultural context of Rankine’s
work see C. Smith, The Science of Energy.
A Cultural History of Energy Physics in
Victorian Britain (London: The Athlone
Press, 1998), pp. 150–66, and B. Marsden,
‘Engineering Science in Glasgow: Economy,
Efficiency and Measurement as Prime
Movers in the Differentiation of an Academic
Discipline’, The British Journal for the
History of Science, 25 (1992), pp. 319–46.
16 A. J. Pacey, ‘Some Early Heat Engine
Concepts and the Conservation of Heat’,
148 DAVID PHILIP MILLER
The British Journal for the History of
Science, 7 (1974), pp. 135–45 at p. 135.
17 W. J. M. Rankine, ‘On the Geometrical
Representation of the Expansive Action of
Heat, and the Theory of Thermodynamic
Engines’, Philosophical Transactions (1854),
pp. 115–76, at p. 115.
18 On Greenock’s celebrations and commemo-
rations of Watt see C. MacLeod, Heroes
of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and
British Identity, 1750–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 115,
347, and R. M. Smith, The History of
Greenock (Greenock: Orr, Pollock & Co.,
1921), pp. 331–40.
19 W. H. Preece, Watt and the Measurement of
Power. Being the Watt Anniversary Lecture
delivered before the Greenock Philosophical
Society, 5 February 1897 (London: William
Clowes & Son, 1897), p. 4. On Preece see
E. C. Baker, Sir William Preece, F.R.S.,
Victorian Engineer Extraordinary (London:
Hutchinson, 1976), and B. J. Hunt, ‘Preece,
Sir William Henry (1834–1913)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford
University Press, 2004) <http://www.
oxforddnb.com/view/article/35605>.
20 Preece, pp. 3–4.
21 Ibid., pp. 4–5.
22 George Tangye (1835–1920) was part of a
famous engineering family and partnership
and among the leading philanthropists in
Birmingham civic culture. For many years he
also held the lease on Watt’s former resi-
dence, Heathfield Hall, and preserved Watt’s
famous garret workshop, which he showed
to interested parties, including the Watt
Centenary celebrants in 1919. An overview
of George and the family is given in J. F.
Parker, ‘Some Notes on the Tangye Family’,
TNS, 45 (1972–73), pp. 191–204.
23 See W. K. V. Gale, ‘Soho Foundry: Some
Facts and Fallacies’, TNS, 34 (1961–62),
pp. 73–87 at 84; L. Ince, ‘The Soho Engine
Works 1796–1895’, Stationary Power: The
Journal of the International Stationary Steam
Engine Society, 16, (2000). W. & T. Avery
of Birmingham acquired the premises, plant
and goodwill of Soho Foundry.
24 Dr Andrew’s full response was: ‘The indica-
tor in our display does have the digits
1785 faintly engraved just below the small
window on the front of the cylinder on the
page 4 diagram [Preece’s diagram] and on
my photo — i.e. much closer to the window
than on the page 4 diagram. The word
“Horizontal” is faintly engraved vertically
on the right of that window “H” at the top,
and “Perpendicular” faintly engraved verti-
cally to the left with “P” at the top’ (pers.
comm., 3 September 2008).
25 H. G. Harris, ‘Cantor Lectures. Heat
Engines other than Steam. Lecture II’,
Journal of the Society of Arts, 26 July 1889,
pp. 712–19. This publication by Harris
allows us to make sense of Preece’s thanks to
him for use of the diagram of the instrument
(see Preece, p. 4, n. 1). Harris (1850–1910)
became an engineer by apprenticeship. He
was chief assistant to Sir Frederick Bramwell
from 1874 and taken into partnership in
1892 to form Messrs Bramwell and Harris,
Consulting Engineers (Obituary, Minutes
and Proceedings of the Institution of Civil
Engineers, 18 (1911), p. 449).
26 Harris, ‘Cantor Lectures’, p. 714.
27 H. G. Harris, ‘Petroleum as a Producer of
Energy’, Professional Papers of the Corps of
Royal Engineers, Royal Engineers Institute,
Occasional Papers, 16 (1890), pp. 182–222,
at pp. 194–96. On the Richards Indicator see
Walter, ch. 2, and C. T. Porter, Engineering
Reminiscences (New York: John Wiley &
Sons, 1908), pp. 58–92.
28 Pamphlet, ‘James Watt Souvenir. “The
Inventor of the Steam Engine Indicator”’,
Archives of Soho, Birmingham Central
Library, MS 3147/32/34 Parcel III/20.
29 See C. MacLeod and J. Tann, ‘From Engi-
neer to Scientist: Reinventing Invention in
the Watt and Faraday Centenaries, 1919–31’,
The British Journal for the History of
Science, 40 (2007), pp. 389–411. A good
contemporary account is ‘The James Watt
Centenary’, Engineering, 19 September 1919,
p. 385 and 26 September 1919, pp. 415–16.
See also Dickinson, pp. 402–03.
30 This is the engine, previously mentioned,
now held in the Birmingham Science
Museum (Thinktank). On its history and the
excavation of the original engine house see
J. H. Andrew, ‘The Smethwick Engine’,
Industrial Archaeology Review, 8 (1985),
pp. 7–27.
31 S. H. E. Barraclough Papers, University of
Sydney Archives, P.010, Series 14. The
 THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JAMES WATT’S ‘“1785” STEAM INDICATOR’
papers also contain interesting correspon-
dence between Barraclough and the organiz-
ers of the Watt Centenary celebrations. On
Barraclough see J. M. Antill, ‘Barraclough,
Sir Samuel Henry Egerton (1871–1958)’,
Australian Dictionary of Biography, 7 (1979),
pp. 184–85, and, on the broader context of
the munitions effort, R. M. MacLeod, ‘The
“Arsenal” in the Strand: Australian Chemists
in the British Munitions Effort 1916–1919’,
Annals of Science, 46 (1989), pp. 45–67. I am
most grateful to Debbie Rudder of the
Powerhouse, Sydney, Australia, who alerted
me to the existence of the souvenir in the
Barraclough Papers.
32 See ‘The James Watt Centenary’, Engineer-
ing, 26 September 1919, pp. 415–16 at p. 416.
On p. 415 this account reproduces one of the
indicator diagrams in outline and relays the
information that the indicator used dated
from 1785.
33 On the problem of succession and the
recruitment of Blake, see Miller, Discovering
Water, pp. 89, 243; Gale, p. 83; Ince,
pp. 35–36. Blake (1815–99) is best known as
a Director of the Bank of England, but he
had a remarkable scientific pedigree and
qualifications. His father was William Blake
FRS, of Portland Place, London, his
godmother was Mrs Marcet, the famous
scientific writer, and the celebrated chemist
William Hyde Wollaston was one of his
godfathers. Blake graduated from Trinity
College, Cambridge in 1833, was an accom-
plished mathematician and subsequently a
member of the Institutions of Civil and
Mechanical Engineers, and also FRS (1843).
He pursued a career in business and was
a director of a number of other companies
besides James Watt & Co. At the time of its
sale in 1895, Blake was sole owner of James
Watt & Co., and the paltry sum that he
left at his death suggests that he may have
squandered his fortune in attempts to stem
the Company’s slide into liquidation
(Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical
Engineers (1899), pp. 467–70).
34 Ince, pp. 101–02.
35 ‘Records of “Soho”’, Birmingham Daily
Post, 2 April 1895.
36 Darlington to Col. H. Stuart-Wortley, 26
January 1887, quoted in Dickinson, p. 123.
Stuart-Wortley was in charge of the Patent
Office Museum.
149
37 See W. H. Darlington to S. Timmins, 15
March 1895, Archives of Soho, MS 3147/32/18
folder 3. Other correspondence between
these men at this location reveals that they
were keen to have the City of Birmingham
purchase the relics in the ‘Watt Room’. In
the event Tangye’s purchase of the relics was
accompanied, apparently, by a promise that
they would be given to the City in due
course.
38 See J. P. Muirhead (ed.), Correspondence
of the Late James Watt on his Discovery of
the Theory of the Composition of Water
(London: John Murray, 1846), the produc-
tion of which was overseen in minute detail
by Watt Jr, who provided the documentary
resources and also a prefatory letter to the
publication.
39 D. P. Miller, ‘True Myths: James Watt’s
Kettle, his Condenser and his Chemistry’,
History of Science, 42 (2004), pp. 333–60.
For further evidence of the Watt camp’s lack
of scruples in such matters see H. Torrens,
‘Jonathan Hornblower (1753–1815) and the
Steam Engine: A Historiographic Analysis’,
in Perceptions of Great Engineers: Fact and
Fantasy, ed. by D. Smith (London: Science
Museum for the Newcomen Society, Nation-
al Museums and Galleries on Merseyside
and University of Liverpool, 1994), pp. 23–
34.
40 J. Hopkinson, The Working of the Steam
Engine Explained by the Use of the Indicator
(London: John Weale, 1854), p. 2. This story
must have been durable since Dickinson and
Jenkins went to the trouble of singling it out
as a common error: see Dickinson, op. cit.,
p. 233.
41 Anon [J. Watt Jr], ‘James Watt’, Supplement
to the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Editions of
the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6 (1824),
pp. 778–85.
42 D. F. J. Arago, Historical Eloge of James
Watt . . . Translated from the French with
Additional Notes and an Appendix by James
Patrick Muirhead (London: John Murray,
1839), pp. 89–90.
43 J. Farey, A Treatise on the Steam Engine,
1 (1827), pp. 481–85, quotation on p. 485.
44 J. Watt Jr to D. F. J. Arago, Paris, 4 June
1839, Archives of Soho, James Watt Papers,
MS 3219/6/106. Watt Jr had evidently taken
150 DAVID PHILIP MILLER

steps to have available full descriptive details
of the recording indicator since a document
was sent to him in Paris on 27 May 1839 that
provided such a description of ‘Mr Watt’s
Indicator’. This information emerges inci-
dentally from Dickinson and Jenkins’ use of
an adaptation of the document sent to Paris
to convey to their readers the design of the
indicator c. 1840 (See Dickinson, op. cit.,
pp. 231–32). Why, we might ask, did Watt
Jr arm himself at this precise juncture in
Paris with a document fully describing the
recording indicator? One reasonable conclu-
sion is that he intended to offer it to Arago
as an account of his father’s invention should
Arago decide to describe the indicator in
more detail.
45 J. Bourne, A Treatise on the Steam Engine
in its Application to Mines, Mills, Steam
Navigation, and Railways. By the Artizan
Club, second ed. (London: Longman, Brown,
Green and Longmans, 1847), p. 171.
46 F. Bramwell, ‘Watt, James’, Dictionary of
National Biography 60, pp. 51–62, at p. 58.
47 E. A. Cowper, ‘The Inventions of James
Watt, and his Models Preserved at Hand-
sworth and South Kensington’, Proceedings
of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers,
34 (1883), pp. 599–631 + 90 pls, at pp. 611–
12.
48 Ibid., p. 612. The indicator that Cowper
displayed is almost certainly the instrument
pictured in Figure 1 (R), which is in the
Science Museum collection.

Notes on contributor
David Philip Miller is Associate Professor (Reader) in History & Philosophy of
Science at the University of New South Wales. After a first degree at Manchester, he
obtained his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. He is FRHistS and on the
Editorial Boards of The British Journal for the History of Science, Metascience and
History of Science. His publications include Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry
Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Water Controversy’ (Ashgate, 2004), James
Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age (Pickering & Chatto,
2009) and over forty papers in major journals, many recently on James Watt.
Correspondence to: David Philip Miller, Program in HPS, School of History &
Philosophy, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Email: dp.miller@unsw.edu.au