Meantime the pot had to be kept boiling! He looked into the future, and he saw great things steam might yet be made to do, but there was bread and butter needed for the present. So he went bravely in for surveying, though there was little enough to be made by that. He had still ill-health to struggle against. "I am still plagued with headaches," he wrote about this time, "and sometimes heartaches."
But after a time a gleam of hope shone through the clouds. After failures and difficulties he at last succeeded in finding someone willing to risk his money. So in 1769 he patented his engine, and began to build it. In six months it was finished, and as it neared completion Watt could hardly sleep. Then, and for long still in the future, he was to suffer from bad, incapable workmen, and this accounted for his partial failure.
"It was," he said, "a clumsy job." Watt grew depressed.
In 1770 he wrote: "I enter on my thirty-fifth year, and I think I have hardly yet done thirty-five pence worth of good in the world."
A friend, seeing him cast down and unhappy, advised him to give up inventing. As well might he have advised the sun not to shine or living man to cease from breathing. Meantime the years went on. Watt was often, as he said, "heart-sick." Long years after, remembering this weary time, he said, "The public only look at my success." He stinted himself in everything but bare necessaries, for as yet his engine had paid him nothing and cost enormously. But light again arose in the darkness when he got as a partner Boulton, of Birmingham, and from that day onwards matters mended. Six of the fourteen years' patent were gone, but he succeeded in getting a renewal of it for twenty-four years by Act of Parliament, in spite of grumbling discontent of men who wanted to steal the fruit of his brain, and were thus prevented.
Now he set to work in earnest. His first engine was made to blow the bellows of ironworks. His second to pump water out of the mines in Cornwall. In 1776 this was set up, and worked perfectly. "There it was, 'forking water' as never engine before had been known 'to fork.'"
"All the world are agape," he said, "to see what it can do."
And it did well. And now the "voice of the country was in its favour." So the first step was taken. The others followed in quick succession. The partners worked together perfectly. Watt understood engines, but not men. He grew impatient, irritable, peevish if a workman were inefficient, and would have dismissed him on the spot. Boulton was wiser, and never failed to oil the wheels. Watt was despondent, easily cast down; Boulton was his "backbone."