James Watt, (born January 19, 1736, Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland—

died August 25, 1819, Heathfield Hall, near Birmingham, Warwick, England), Scottish
instrument maker and inventor whose steam engine contributed substantially to
the Industrial Revolution. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1785.

A delicate child, Watt was taught for a time at home by his mother; later, in grammar
school, he learned Latin, Greek, and mathematics.

At the age of 17, Watt first went to Glasgow, where one of his mother’s relatives taught at
the university, and then, in 1755, to London, where he found a master to train him. He met
many scientists and became a friend of British chemist and physicist Joseph Black, who
developed the concept of latent heat. In 1764 he married his cousin Margaret Miller, who,
before she died nine years later, bore him six children.

While repairing a model Newcomen steam engine in 1764, Watt was impressed by its
waste of steam. In May 1765, after wrestling with the problem of improving it, he suddenly
came upon a solution—the separate condenser, his first and greatest invention.He
entered into partnership with John Roebuck, the founder of the Carron Works, in 1768,
after having made a small test engine with the help of loans from Joseph Black. The
following year Watt took out the famous patent for “A New Invented Method of Lessening
the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire Engines.”
Meanwhile, Watt in 1766 became a land surveyor; for the next eight years he was
continuously busy marking out routes for canals in Scotland. Bored with surveying and
with Scotland, Watt immigrated to Birmingham in 1774.
In 1776, two engines were installed—one for pumping water in a Staffordshire colliery, the
other for blowing air into the furnaces of British industrialist John Wilkinson, the famous
ironmaster. That year Watt married again; his second wife, Ann MacGregor, bore him two
more children.
By 1790 Watt was a wealthy man, having received £76,000 in royalties on his patents in
11 years. The steam engine did not absorb all his attention, however. He was a member
of the Lunar Society in Birmingham, a group of writers and scientists who wished to
advance the sciences and the arts.
Watt’s long retirement was saddened by the death of a son by his second marriage,
Gregory, and the deaths of many of his close friends. Nevertheless, he traveled with his
wife to Scotland and to France and Germany when the Peace of Amiens was signed in
1802 and continued to work in the garret of his house, which he had equipped as a
workshop. There he invented a sculpturing machine with which he reproduced original
busts and figures for his friends. He also acted as consultant to the Glasgow Water
Company. His achievements were amply recognized in his lifetime: he was made doctor
of laws of the University of Glasgow in 1806 and a foreign associate of the French
Academy of Sciences in 1814 and was offered a baronetcy, which he declined.