James Watt: Making the World Anew

(Hardback)

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Description

Traditional biographies of Watt have concentrated on the steam engine, but in this book Ben Russell tells a richer story, exploring the processes by which ephemeral ideas were transformed into tangible artefacts and the multifaceted world of production upon which Britain's industrial revolution depended. Generously illustrated, James Watt is a unique, expansive exploration of the engineer's life, not as an end in itself but as a lens through which the broader practices of making and manufacturing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries can be explored.

Reviews

"In 1924, London's Science Museum acquired the entire workshop of engineer James Watt, left almost untouched in the attic of his house in Birmingham since his death more than a century before. The museum put a recreation of the workshop on permanent display in 2011. This workshop inspired Russell, the Science Museum's curator of mechanical engineering, to write his engaging James Watt: Making the World Anew. . . . The diversity of Watt's interests and activities was astonishing, even when compared with the achievements of his Enlightenment contemporaries." -- "Nature"
"The first engineer to be commemorated in Westminster Abbey, Watt was long celebrated as a heroic figure who arrived at his epochal discoveries by virtue of lonely genius. Russell helps correct that picture by celebrating Watt as a doer and a maker, rooted in the artisanal culture of his times. Steeped in scholarship, as well as nitty-gritty knowledge of the artefacts of the Industrial Revolution, James Watt: Making the World Anew will prove fascinating to anyone who wants to know how and why steam engines were made." -- "Times Literary Supplement"

Author Bio

Ben Russell is Curator of Mechanical Engineering at the Science Museum, London.