A man after a single discovery not seldom rests on his laurels for life. This man is still in his prime, and we cannot tell yet what product of his brain will still astonish us, and we cannot touch here on a tithe of what he has done. He lives sometimes in his northern home, in New Jersey, sometimes at Orange.
As a man he shows the same genial, kindly sympathy which, as a boy, never failed to win the hearts of his fellow-clerks, the same modesty that disarmed their jealousy. These things chain his workmen to him to-day with links of love. Now that men praise and laud him all over the world he shows the same good-natured indifference to name and fame he has shown all through. And he has lost nothing of the tireless energy that used to support him through hard work and long night-sittings as a boy--this man who, as someone has it, "has kept the path to the patent office red-hot with his footsteps--this wonder-worker of the modern world."
There is perhaps no inventor's name with which the British boy is more familiar than with that of James Watt. In every college of mechanics or engineers we are met in bust or print by the kindly, shrewd, benevolent face of the great inventor of the Condensing Steam Engine.
It is difficult for us to picture what the world must have been before James Watt came into it--before, as it were, steam took its place and while yet men and horses and wind and water struggled feebly to do what steam now does with such apparent ease.
On the west coast of Scotland stands what is to-day the busy, thriving, seaport town of Greenock--the birthplace of James Watt. But in 1736, more than 150 years ago, it was little more than a picturesque fishing-village, looking out on a peaceful, smiling bay, where a few modest fishing-craft were to be seen, and beyond to the hills of Argyllshire, before smoke and funnels blotted the fairness of the landscape.
In an unpretentious little house in a Greenock by-street James Watt first saw the light. His father was by trade a carpenter, an undertaker, a general "merchant," for there was little competition in those simple days, and men often "professed" more than one trade. In the course of a few years little James was left the sole surviving child of five, and perhaps on that account was specially precious to his parents. Neither as the years went on did he grow into a sturdy, lusty country boy, but rather struggled up slowly, anxiously overlooked by a mother's care, a prey to ill-health and headache, even in his baby years. So that most of his early education fell to his parents, his mother opening up to him the beginnings of reading, his father those of writing and arithmetic.