Company
DissolvedBoulton & Watt
Birmingham · 1775 – 1895
The Soho engine business was sold off in 1895. The partnership that had rented steam power to the country was already long over.
James Watt had a patent on a steam engine with a separate condenser, which wasted far less coal than the Newcomen engines mines were already using. He did not have a factory. Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer with a taste for scale, did. They became partners in 1775, the year Parliament extended Watt's patent.
They did not at first sell engines. They installed them and took a royalty equal to a share of the fuel the customer saved. The customer needed the engine. Boulton and Watt needed the customer to keep operating, so their men stayed involved. It was a service contract attached to a machine.
Soho as a school
The Soho Manufactory and later the Soho Foundry trained erectors who traveled Britain installing engines and teaching the local mechanic how not to destroy one. Drawings were standardized. Parts began to be made to fit a specification rather than a particular engine, which is a quiet revolution in what a craftsman is for. The partnership employed millwrights, founders, and clerks who billed the royalty. A new machine created a new itinerant profession: the man who arrives, assembles, and leaves.
After the patent
The patent expired in 1800. Watt and Boulton's sons carried on a conventional engine-building business, competing with former workmen who had learned the method and left. The Soho Foundry's engine business was sold in 1895. By then the steam engine was an industry, not a partnership. The firm that had made it portable was one supplier among many.
The work it organized
- Engine erector
- Founder
- Draftsman
- Royalty clerk
On the timeline
Related
- The Coalbrookdale worksAbsorbed
- Arkwright's millsDissolved