Matthew Boulton

• 1. Introduction

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  Matthew Boulton stood at the furnace of the modern world. Born in Birmingham on the 3rd of September 1728, he spent his life turning that city into something the world had never seen: a place where steam did the work of thousands of hands, where coins were struck by machine at the rate of dozens per minute, and where a circle of friends met by moonlight to dream up the Industrial Revolution.

  He was a silversmith and a toymaker by trade, but also an inventor, an engineer, a civic organiser, and the business partner of James Watt. Together they installed hundreds of steam engines across Britain and beyond. Boulton alone reformed the nation's coinage at a moment when two-thirds of the coins in circulation were counterfeit. He founded a mint, lobbied Parliament, charmed royalty, and still found time to record observations on the boiling point of mercury in his notebooks.

  How did the son of a small Birmingham buckle-maker become the man who, in Watt's own words, conducted the reform of British coinage more like a sovereign than a private manufacturer? And what does the circle of thinkers he gathered around him tell us about how an era of transformation actually happens?

• 2. Birmingham's Toy Trade

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  Long before Boulton arrived on the scene, Birmingham had built its reputation on small things. Metalworkers there concentrated on producing buttons, buckles, and what the trade called "toys" - not children's playthings, but small decorative metal objects of modest individual value and enormous collective demand. A French visitor named Alexander remarked that while he had seen excellent cane heads and snuff boxes in Milan, the same could be had "cheaper and better in Birmingham".

  The shift from charcoal to coke in iron smelting during the early 18th century made metal production cheaper and faster. Large coal deposits in nearby Warwickshire and Staffordshire sped the transition. With Birmingham far from the sea and the great rivers, and before canals were built, producers found their competitive advantage in compact, high-value goods that could travel overland without undue cost.

  Boulton's father, also named Matthew, was born in 1700 and had moved to Birmingham from Lichfield to learn his trade. He married Christiana Piers in 1723 and built a small workshop specialising in buckles. When young Matthew was born in 1728, he was the third child and the second to carry that name; a first Matthew had died at the age of two in 1726. By the time the boy was 17, he had already invented a technique for inlaying enamels in buckles that proved popular enough to be exported to France and then reimported to Britain as though they were French goods.

• 3. Building Soho

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  In 1761 Boulton leased 13 acres at Soho, just inside Staffordshire, along with a rolling mill and a residence called Soho House. By 1765 the Soho Manufactory had risen on the site. Its principal building carried a Palladian front with 19 bays for loading and unloading, and was designed by local architect William Wyatt at a time when industrial structures were typically the work of engineers rather than architects. The original estimate for the principal building alone was £2,000; the final cost came to five times that figure. Including all buildings and equipment, the partnership spent over £20,000, meeting the balance only through heavy borrowing.

  At Soho, Boulton pursued an unusually wide range of goods. He pioneered the large-scale production of sterling silver plate and old Sheffield plate in Birmingham, a city that had not previously made such items in significant quantities. The need to have silver goods assayed created a major practical obstacle: the nearest assay office was at Chester, over 70 miles away, with London as the alternative but at the risk of designs being copied by competitors. Boulton wrote in 1771 that he was determined not to expand in silver unless powers could be obtained to establish a marking hall in Birmingham. His petition to Parliament succeeded, creating assay offices in both Birmingham and Sheffield over fierce opposition from London goldsmiths.

  Boulton also chased the wealthy market for ormolu-decorated vases - milled gold amalgamated with mercury and applied to marble or stone, a technique previously a French speciality. He sold vases to Queen Charlotte in March 1770 and ran annual sales at Christie's in 1771 and 1772. The sales raised his profile considerably but left many works unsold or sold below cost. When fashionable enthusiasm for vases faded in the early 1770s, much of the remaining stock was disposed of in a single large sale to Catherine the Great of Russia, who judged them superior to French ormolu and cheaper as well.

  Among the more durable successes were small Wedgwood products mounted in ormolu or cut steel: cameo brooches, jasper ware buttons and plaques that combined Wedgwood's distinctive ceramics with Boulton's metalwork. Josiah Wedgwood wrote of Boulton that having "the first Manufacturer in England" as a rival doubled his courage. In the 1770s Boulton also introduced an insurance system for his workers, the first of its kind at any large establishment: employees paid one-sixtieth of their wages into the Soho Friendly Society, with membership made mandatory.

• 4. Watt and the Age of Steam

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  Boulton's Soho site had a chronic weakness: insufficient water power, especially in summer when the millstream slowed. He began corresponding with James Watt in 1766, first met him two years later, and soon saw in Watt's 1769 patent - an engine with a separate condenser - not merely a solution to his own power problem but a potentially vast commercial enterprise.

  The path to partnership ran through debt. Watt's original backer, Dr. John Roebuck, ran into financial difficulties in 1772. Roebuck owed Boulton £1,200, and Boulton accepted Roebuck's two-thirds share of Watt's patent as settlement. Six of the original 14 years of that patent had already elapsed by the time Boulton persuaded Parliament to extend it until 1800, buying the firm the time it needed. With the assistance of ironmaster John Wilkinson, brother-in-law of Lunar Society member Joseph Priestley, they made the engine commercially viable.

  The firm's business model was unusual. Rather than manufacturing engines at Soho, it had purchasers acquire parts from various suppliers, then assembled each engine on site under Soho supervision. Profit came not from the hardware but from a levy of one-third of the coal savings compared with a Newcomen engine, collected annually for 25 years. This arrangement bred disputes: mine owners resented the annual payments and sometimes used low-grade unmarketable coal in the engines, reducing the measurable savings.

  Cornwall became the firm's largest single market. Its mines were rich in minerals but coal had to be imported from Wales at high cost, making Watt's fuel-efficient engines especially attractive. The problems of dealing with local rivalries and unruly mine owners required Boulton and Watt to spend long stretches there each year until 1779, when engineer William Murdoch joined the firm and took over on-site management.

  The rotative engine, which converted the reciprocating motion of a pumping engine into the turning motion that mills and factories required, opened an entirely new market. Boulton had pressed Watt to develop it, writing in a letter that there was "no other Cornwall to be found" and that mills were "certainly an extensive field". George III visited the Whitbread brewery in London and saw one of the firm's engines in operation. Boulton demonstrated two engines grinding wheat at the rate of 150 bushels per hour at his Albion Mill in London. Historian Jenny Uglow later called it "a publicity stunt par excellence". Before the mill burned down in 1791, orders for rotative engines were arriving from the United States and the West Indies as well as from Britain. Between 1775 and 1800 the firm produced approximately 450 engines. Boulton told the diarist James Boswell on a visit to Soho: "I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have - POWER."

• 5. The Cartwheel Coinage

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  By 1786, two-thirds of the coins in circulation in Britain were counterfeit. The Royal Mint had responded to the crisis by shutting itself down, making things worse. Lightweight copper fakes replaced even the copper coins, which were melted for the metal. The Mint struck no copper coins for 48 years, from 1773 to 1821, and the gap was filled with privately struck merchant tokens.

  Boulton had turned his attention to coinage in the mid-1780s, viewing coins as simply another small metal product. He also held shares in several Cornish copper mines and had a personal stock of copper he had bought when the mines could not sell it elsewhere. In 1788 he established the Soho Mint within his industrial plant. Its eight steam-driven presses could each strike between 70 and 84 coins per minute. On the 14th of April 1789, Boulton wrote to Lord Hawkesbury, the Master of the Mint, describing how he received two-thirds counterfeit halfpennies as change at toll-gates on an average journey, and estimating that manufacturers were purchasing 36 shillings' worth of copper tokens for 20 shillings' worth of genuine coin.

  Lobbying in London took years. In June 1790 the Pitt Government postponed any decision on recoinage indefinitely. Meanwhile, Boulton kept the Soho Mint busy with contracts for the East India Company, Sierra Leone, and Russia, and sent over 20 million blank planchets to Philadelphia for the United States Mint. Mint Director Elias Boudinot found them "perfect and beautifully polished".

  The breakthrough came in February 1797, when the Bank of England stopped redeeming its bills for gold. Lord Hawkesbury summoned Boulton to London on the 3rd of March 1797, and four days later Boulton attended a Privy Council meeting. A contract was awarded at the end of that month. A proclamation dated the 26th of July 1797 authorised penny and twopenny coins whose weights - one and two ounces respectively - brought their intrinsic copper value close to their face value.

  Designer Heinrich Küchler gave the coins a raised rim with incuse lettering difficult for counterfeiters to replicate. The twopenny piece measured exactly an inch and a half across; 16 pennies in a line would reach two feet. These exact specifications made lightweight counterfeits easy to detect. The coins were nicknamed "cartwheels" for their size and broad rims. The penny was the first of its denomination struck in copper, and it continued to be coined in the same tradition until decimalisation in 1971.

  Counterfeiters nonetheless worked quickly. Copper-covered lead fakes appeared within a month of the coins' issuance. Much of the twopenny mintage was eventually melted down in 1800 when the copper price rose and the coins proved too heavy for everyday commerce. Boulton received further contracts in 1799 and 1806. He reduced counterfeiting by adding lines to coin edges and striking slightly concave planchets, pushing forgers toward the older pre-Soho pieces, which remained in circulation until a gradual withdrawal took place between 1814 and 1817. In retirement, even as his health declined, he had his servants carry him from Soho House to the mint floor, where he sat and watched the presses. In 1808 those presses struck almost 90 million pieces for the East India Company alone.

• 6. The Lunar Society

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  Boulton never received formal scientific training. His colleague James Keir eulogised him as proof of "how much scientific knowledge may be acquired without much regular study". From youth Boulton had kept notebooks recording observations on the freezing and boiling point of mercury, on pulse rates at different ages, on the movements of planets, and on how to make sealing wax and disappearing ink.

  In 1758 the Pennsylvania printer Benjamin Franklin, then the leading experimenter in electricity, visited Birmingham during one of his extended stays in Britain. Boulton met him and worked with him on efforts to contain electricity within a Leyden jar. When Franklin needed new glass for his "glassychord" - a mechanised version of musical glasses - Boulton supplied it.

  The circle of Birmingham enthusiasts that included Boulton, Watt, Keir, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, and the clergyman-chemist Joseph Priestley had been meeting informally since the late 1750s. Their gatherings evolved into monthly dinners timed to the full moon, which gave them light to travel home afterward - a common arrangement for clubs of the period. They called themselves the Lunar Society. After the death of Dr. William Small in 1775, who had informally kept the members in contact, Boulton took steps to put the Society on a formal footing. Meetings were held on Sundays, beginning with dinner at 2 pm and continuing with discussions until at least 8 in the evening.

  Sir Joseph Banks, though not a formal member, was active in the Society's life. In 1768 Banks sailed with Captain James Cook to the South Pacific, taking green glass earrings made at Soho to give to the people they encountered. In 1776 Cook ordered a navigational instrument from Boulton. Boulton warned Cook that its completion might take years. Cook left in June 1776 on the voyage on which he was killed almost three years later, and Boulton's records show no further mention of the instrument.

  In 1785 both Boulton and Watt were elected Fellows of the Royal Society. According to John Whitehurst, not a single vote was cast against Boulton. The Society was dissolved in 1813, four years after Boulton's death, when remaining members were too few to continue. Historian Jenny Uglow later described its members as having done pioneering work in experimental chemistry, physics, engineering, and medicine, combined with manufacturing leadership and political ideals - blending the inherited skills of craftsmen with the theoretical advances of scholars in a way that she argued was a key factor in Britain's industrial lead over the rest of Europe.

• 7. Legacy and Remembrance

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  Boulton died at Soho House on the 17th of August 1809, having long suffered from kidney stones that lodged in his bladder. He was buried in the graveyard of St. Mary's Church, Handsworth, though the church was later extended over the site of his grave. Inside the church, on the north wall of the sanctuary, stands a large marble monument commissioned by his son and sculpted by John Flaxman, featuring a bust of Boulton set above two putti, one holding an engraving of the Soho Manufactory.

  His grandson, Matthew Piers Watt Boulton, gained posthumous recognition of a different kind: he invented the aileron, the flight control surface now found on virtually every fixed-wing aircraft.

  Soho House, Boulton's home from 1766 until his death, is now a museum, as is his first workshop, Sarehole Mill. The family papers, the records of James Watt and family, and the archives of the firm of Boulton and Watt are held together as the Archives of Soho at the Library of Birmingham. A gilded bronze statue of Boulton, Watt, and William Murdoch, sculpted by William Bloye in 1956, stands opposite Centenary Square in central Birmingham. Matthew Boulton College was named for him in 1957.

  On the 29th of May 2009, the Bank of England announced that Boulton and Watt would appear together on a new £50 note - the first Bank of England note to carry a dual portrait. The note placed the two industrialists side by side with images of a steam engine and the Soho Manufactory, and inscribed a quote from each man. Boulton's words were taken from his boast to James Boswell: "I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have - POWER." The notes entered circulation on the 2nd of November 2011. A bronze memorial plaque to Boulton was unveiled at Westminster Abbey on the 17th of October 2014, beside the plaque to James Watt.