2024/06/04 by Russell, Ben
#James Watt #Matthew Boulton #curation #engineer #engineering #exhibition #industry #micrometer #museum #scientific instrument #steam engine #workshop
paper · doi:10.60875/bpej-v545
A significant item among the Science Museum’s holdings pertaining to the Scottish engineer James Watt is a micrometer, alleged to have been constructed by him c.1776. It has been described as possibly the first micrometer used for industrial purposes, and it came to the museum in 1876, when it was placed on loan by James Watt & Co. for display at the Special Loan Exhibition held that year. This paper will describe the instrument, and its known history, with reference to the locations which are in theory associated with the micrometer. Most recent first, these are the Science Museum in South Kensington, the 1876 Special Loan Exhibition also held in South Kensington, the Watt Museum operated by James Watt & Co at Soho, Birmingham, and Watt’s workshop from his home ‘Heathfield’, at Handsworth just outside Birmingham. The nature of the association between the instrument and each location differs. The workshop provides artefacts against which the instrument can be compared. The other three contextualise the micrometer as part of the myth-making around Watt as a heroic nineteenth century figure. This paper’s opening gambit is to suggest that each of these locations provides a step in what can be described as a process of ‘ventriloquism’ around the instrument. This term was coined by Tom Ritchie in his PhD thesis about Douglas Hartree’s Differential Analyser, which I helped to supervise. In the thesis, Tom explored how description and interpretation of that machine subtly changed over time during its life in the museum, to describe something that the object ultimately wasn’t. The question this paper explores is whether we can see a similar process of ventriloquism occurring with Watt’s micrometer.