Watt Anniversaries

Figure 6.4. Preeces Diagram of Indicator Compared with Indicator in Collection of the Thinktank, Birmingham Science Museum. [Diagram reproduced from W. H. Preece, Watt and the Measurement of Power. Being the Watt Anniversary Lecture... (London William Clowes Sons, 1897), p. 4. Photograph by permission of Thinktank Trust]...

This was mainly in nationalistic Scottish literature such as W. Anderson s The Scottish Nation, 9 vols, 1882 [entry for Watt in vol. 9, pp. 613-22]. Notable in this regard, but thoroughly unreliable, is Carnegie, James Watt which makes the claim for Watt while managing to make no mention at all of Cavendish. An interesting scholarly treatment of the question late in the nineteenth century was T. E. Thorpes Watt Anniversary Lecture of 1898, published in Thorpes Essays in Historical Chemistry (London Macmillan Co. Ltd, 1902) and also in Nature, 57 (7 April 1898), pp. 546-51. 

Glasgow James Watt Anniversary Dinner) Scotsman, 24 January 1898, p. 10. 

Russell, J. S. On the Application of the Inventions of Watt to Modern Steam Navigation [The Watt Anniversary Address for 1867], Papers of the Greenock Philosophical Society - No. 3, in Publications of the Greenock Philosophical Society (Greenock The Society, 1887). 

Fig. 5.15 Speakers and friends of Peter Pauson s gathering at the Annual Congress of the Royal Society of Chemistry in Glasgow in 1976, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the discovery of ferrocene (from the left Ernst Otto Fischer, Stephen Davies, Francois Mathey, Wolfgang Herrmann, Michael Lappert, Jack Lewis, William Watts, Peter Pauson, myself, Myron Rosenblum and Malcolm Green)...

In ten years time we will mark the 200th anniversary of Watt s death. The 100th Anniversary in 1919 recognized only the mechanical Watt. Perhaps the next commemoration will do more justice to the complexity of the remarkable achievements of a man who was, I suggest, a stranger to our usual ways of understanding him. 

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