THE AUNT WITH THE KETTLE

Introduction

There are various references to an account, dated 1798, about the early years of James Watt, the Scottish engineer who revolutionised the steam engine. It was dictated by his cousin Mrs Marion Campbell to her daughter Jane Campbell who sent the manuscript to James Watt Junior in the 1830s. He had it copied for Watt’s early biographers while the original passed down through descendants of James Watt until coming up for auction in 2003.

Among the stories it recounts is the incident of the kettle, which Marion Campbell claimed to have witnessed at the tea-table of her mother, Mrs Muirhead: Sitting one evening with his aunt Mrs Muirhead at the tea-table, she said ‘Jamie Watt, I never saw such an idle boy, take a book or employ yourself usefully: for the last hour you have not spoken a word, but taken off the lid of the kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam watching how it rises from the spout and catching and collecting the drops of hot water it falls into’. It appears that when thus blamed – for idleness – his active mind was employed in investigating the power of steam; he was then fifteen.

By the time Marion Campbell came to tell this tale, James Watt was a household name as the man who so improved the steam engine as to be one of the fathers of the industrial revolution.

His fame almost certainly moulded Marion Campbell’s telling of the tale. Rather than his idly playing with the kettle’s steam, she presented it as a testament to his youthful genius. In the process she did what millions of others would subsequently do – think his dabbling in a kettle’s steam related to the power of steam. It took James Watt Junior to correct this to properties. Watt’s contribution to the efficiency of steam engines was the introduction of a separate vessel (condenser) away from the main body of the engine – just as the cup and spoon had been separate from the kettle – where steam condenses.

It is unlikely that the fifteen-year-old James Watt had an ‘active mind’ when he held spoon or cup in the steam. At the time he was probably doing just what his aunt surmised, idly messing about. Only after he’d worked seriously with