Boulton and Watt

Assembled from 24 blocks · 1 evidence · 17 related

1. Story
2. The Birmingham partnership formed in 1775 between Matthew Boulton, proprietor of the Soho Manufactory, and James Watt, and one of the most instructive business models of the period because the firm largely did not sell engines. It sold the right to use the patent, and charged a premium calculated as a share — customarily a third — of the value of the coal the customer saved by using a Watt engine rather than a Newcomen engine of equal duty. That is a royalty priced on measured thermodynamic performance, which required both parties to agree a method of measuring engine duty, and it made the firm's income a direct function of the fuel economy of its own design. Boulton supplied what Watt could not: capital, a workforce of skilled metal trades, and the political competence to obtain the 1775 Act extending the patent to 1800. The partnership is also the clearest case of the period's intellectual networks doing real work, both men being members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham alongside Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin.
3. Knowledge
4. The steam engine
5. Boulton and Watt
6. Birmingham
7. Connections
8. James Watt
9. The steam engine
10. Birmingham
11. Boulton and Watt form their partnership
12. The rotative engine turns a shaft
13. The Newcomen atmospheric engine
14. Cromford Mill
15. James Watt
16. Boulton and Watt
17. Manchester
18. Watt patents the separate condenser
19. The rotative engine turns a shaft
20. Boulton and Watt
21. Manchester
22. Boulton and Watt form their partnership
23. Evidence
24. Supports the separate-condenser priority date, the extension of the monopoly to 1800, and the Boulton and Watt licensing model. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted — legislation.gov.uk is blocked from this session. The patent number and the regnal citation of the extending Act are deliberately omitted rather than reconstructed from memory.