William Murdock

Scottish inventor

• Born: August 21, 1754
• Birthplace: Bellow Mill, near Old Cumnock, Ayrshire, Scotland
• Died: November 15, 1839
• Place of death: Birmingham, England

Through his experimentation, Murdock helped to establish gas lighting in England and made improvements in the steam engine.

Early Life

William Murdock came from a family of millers and millwrights. His father, John Murdoch, was responsible for having cast the first iron-toothed gear in Scotland. While the young Murdock seems to have received little formal schooling, he was trained in the family crafts. In 1777, he left Scotland to seek employment with the partnership of Boulton & Watt in Birmingham.

The company was formed by Matthew Boulton and James Watt in 1775 to purvey Watt’s new, more efficient steam engines. Watt had patented his engine in 1769, with a parliamentary extension granted in 1775. A popular story is often cited of Murdock appearing before Boulton as a diffident and awkward young Scot, a younger, less polished version of the later portraits showing a massive, craggy Scot of considerable physical presence. Murdock nervously fingered an oddly painted wooden hat, while Boulton, fascinated, recognized that milling such a hat on a personally built lathe spoke volumes about Murdock’s mechanical ability. He hired Murdock on the spot. The decision to hire Murdock was wise and fruitful for the firm, and for the next two years he served in a variety of mechanical capacities in the firm’s Soho factory. He also changed the spelling of his name to conform to English pronunciation and spelling.

In 1779, Murdock was sent by the firm to Cornwall to assist in the erection of the Watt steam engines to operate pumps in the mines and to supervise the company’s business. Watt engines—the first was installed in 1776—were rapidly replacing the older engines of Thomas Newcomen because of their greatly increased efficiency, from the use of a separate condenser, establishing a virtual monopoly of engines in Cornwall. British industrialization was placing heavy demands on Cornish mines, leading them to develop greater depths, in turn creating increased demand for pumps to empty the mines and steam engines to operate the pumps. Lacking local coal supplies, Cornish miners were forced to import coal, so the nearly two-thirds increase in efficiency offered by the Watt engines was a major incentive for their adoption. Boulton & Watt did not actually fabricate the engines; rather, it supervised construction by the owner, in a licensing operation, charging a royalty for the use of the company’s patented process. Therefore, the company needed a reliable engine erector and supervisor on the scene in Cornwall, the role that Murdock filled successfully for the next fifteen years. In this position, Murdock clearly showed qualities of initiative and innovation, traits that did not always please the conservative Watt but impressed Boulton.

Life’s Work

In Cornwall, William Murdock established his home at Redruth in the heart of the mining district, marrying the daughter of a local mine captain and rearing two sons, William and John. His wife died in 1790 at the age of twenty-four and he never remarried. He fit easily into the rough-and-tumble mining community, assisted by his reputed willingness to take on the local miners in physical combat if necessary. His reputation for hard work made him indispensable to the Cornish industry.

At Redruth, Murdock displayed an urge to invent and tinker, making continual improvements to the steam engines he was charged with supervising. The most dramatic evidence of this appeared sometime between 1784 and 1786, when he became fascinated with the idea of putting a steam engine on wheels, creating a steam carriage. By August, 1786, Murdock had constructed a small steam engine and applied it to a three-wheel carriage that attained speeds up to 7 miles per hour. A month later, apparently by accident, Boulton, on an inspection tour in Cornwall, met Murdock near Exeter making his way to London to patent his steam carriage. “However I prevaild upon him readily to return to Cornwall by the next days diligence,” Boulton wrote to Watt. “I think it fortunate that I met him as I am persuaded I can either cure him of the disorder or turn the evil to good—at least I shall prevent a Mischief that would have been the consequence of his journey to London,” he added.

Murdock was not completely dissuaded, for he seems to have built at least three versions of his carriage, one of which frightened the Redruth vicar late one evening as it charged along the main street belching fire and smoke. His employers, however, discouraged his experimentation, for as Watt wrote, “I am extremely sorry that W. M. still busies himself with the steam carriages.… I wish W. could be brought to do as we do, to mind the business in hand and let such as Symington and Sadler throw away their time and money hunting shadows.” It is interesting that Watt’s version of minding the business was to attain a steam carriage patent for himself, simply to cover future eventualities.

Steam carriage experiments were not Murdock’s only interests at this time, for he applied his practical knowledge and mechanical aptitude to every phase of steam engine operation. He is reputed to have played a role in the sun and planet motion for imparting rotary motion from the reciprocating motion of a steam engine, a process patented by Watt in 1781. He also constructed a wooden model of an oscillating engine in 1784. The range of Murdock’s innovative ideas is amply illustrated by a patent issued to him in 1799. Specifying a broad range of interests, the patent included a new machine for boring cylinders, an improved method for casting jacketed cylinders, and a new valve that later became a widely adopted industry standard known as the long D slide valve.

The 1790’s marked an important transition for Boulton & Watt, as well as Murdock. Direct responsibility for the factory and foundry businesses was passed to the partners’ sons, James and Gregory Watt and Matthew Boulton, and the new partnership of Boulton, Watt & Sons was formed in 1794. By 1800, the Watt steam engine patent had expired, opening the firm to increasing competition; Boulton and Watt’s formal partnership ended, and both partners substantially retired from active direction of the business. To ease the transition and to maintain some level of continuity at Soho, in the late 1790’s Murdock was recalled to Birmingham. Authorities differ on dates between 1794 and 1798 for the recall, but certainly he was permanently there in 1798. In this period of change to new management, Murdock was the stable link into the new management who kept the mechanical operation functioning smoothly. He had been a useful handyman in Cornwall, at a salary of one guinea per week. In 1800, he was named engineer and superintendent of the Soho works, with one percent of the partnership and a yearly salary of œ300. In 1810, in lieu of a full partnership, he was granted a salary of œ1,000 per year.

Murdock remained a key figure at Soho until his retirement in 1830. At that time he stepped forward in his own right as an innovator. As early as 1792 he had begun experimenting with the use of coal gas for lighting his home in Redruth; the exact date is open to some argument. Certainly no later than 1795, he had devised a method of heating coal and using the resulting gases to light at least a portion of his house, although at least one commentator believes that the extent of Murdock’s experiments has been exaggerated. Once returned to Soho, Murdock’s coal gas experiments caught the passing interest of the elder Watt, then in the process of marketing retorts for the production of oxygen and hydrogen as medicinal cures. No patent was applied for, however, and the whole gas project was allowed to molder.

Then, in 1801, Gregory Watt returned from Paris with news that Phillipe Lebon had just presented his first public demonstration of the production of coal gas and its utility for lighting and heating. Work at Soho then progressed rapidly, and in 1802 the factory was illuminated by the new gas lights, as part of Birmingham’s citywide illumination to celebrate the Treaty of Amiens. The following year, a portion of the factory was permanently lit by gas, and in 1805 the company received its first commercial order for a gas plant from George Augustus Lee of Phillips & Lee, cotton spinners of Manchester. The problem of lighting factories was a critical one, especially as the steam engine made extended working hours an economic reality and candle lighting was expensive, inefficient, and dangerous. By January, 1806, Murdock reported that the Phillips & Lee installation was working well as “we have lighted 50 lamps of the different kinds this night which have given the greatest satisfaction to Mr. Lee & the spinners.” He also noted that “there is no Soho stink,” and that “Mrs and the Misses Lee have visited it this night & their delicate noses have not been offended.” In February, 1808, Murdock read a paper on the “Economical Uses of Gas from Coal” to the Royal Society; subsequently, he received the society’s Rumford Gold Medal, which had been established in 1800 specifically to recognize discovery in the area of heat and light.

The production of gas for illumination from individual plants was soon challenged by companies offering to manufacture gas at a central location and distribute it to customers. By 1809, the National Heat and Light Company of Frederick Albert Winsor was applying to Parliament for incorporation. Gregory Watt and Murdock were among those appearing before Parliament to oppose the incorporation, and Murdock issued “A Letter to a Member of Parliament… in Vindication of his Character and Claims” to defend his prior rights. A mechanic rather than a scholar, this “Letter” and the Royal Society paper constitute his entire literary effort. In 1812, the London and Westminster Chartered Gas Light and Coke Company was incorporated, and gas lighting quickly became a function of centralized distribution and manufacturing, rather than the individual Boulton, Watt & Sons model. Greater efficiency of scale, ability to purify the gas, and the subsequent sale of the resulting coke all made the company model more practical. Soon after 1810, the Boulton, Watt & Sons gas business had substantially disappeared.

Murdock continued to be active inventing through this period. His fellow engineer John Southern expressed it as “the torrent of ingenuity which Murdock’s genius pours forth.” In 1802, with Southern, he made the first freestanding steam engine, the bell-crank engine, requiring no separate engine building. Valves worked by eccentrics, special paint for ship bottoms, machines for cutting stone water pipes, a steam gun and iron cement made of sal-ammoniac and iron filings provide only a small indication of his creativity.

Significance

William Murdock was the type of British workingman without whom the Industrial Revolution could never have progressed as rapidly as it did and who was fundamental to its success. Lacking formal schooling yet gifted with precise, capable hands and fertile mechanical imaginations, individuals such as Murdock were able to maintain the newly introduced machinery simply on the basis of experience and in many cases intuition. Never satisfied with any mechanical solution, always searching for the simplest and easiest way of doing anything, these men tinkered their way into a new world.

Murdock’s master, employer, and fellow Scot, James Watt, serves as a primary example of the inventive tinkerer in spurring the Industrial Revolution. His membership in the Royal Society aside, Watt was essentially craft trained and bereft of formal education. He created his inventions through pragmatic experimentation, rather than through the formal application of science. Watt was frequently unwilling to present his inventions to the public, lacked a clear sense of how to market them, and was always more concerned with perfecting inventions than placing them in operation. Only the entrepreneurial skills of Matthew Boulton made Watt a business success. Murdock lacked only the fortuitous partnership with an entrepreneurial genius such as Boulton to have made his own fortune, and to the end he remained a hired hand rather than an independent businessman. While Watt often seems to have worried about Murdock, possibly sensing an inventive rival, the two men remained close until Watt’s death in 1819, with Murdock even assisting Watt in building a sculpture-duplicating machine in the last years.

Bibliography

Dickinson, Henry W. James Watt and the Industrial Revolution. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1927. Provides a thorough technical background and context.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. James Watt, Craftsman and Engineer. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1935. Rev. ed. New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967. The standard scholarly biography. As in all biographies of Watt, there are passing mentions of Murdock’s role and personality.

Falkus, M. E. “The Early Development of the British Gas Industry, 1790-1815.” Economic History Review 35 (May, 1982): 217-234. A general survey of Murdock competing to get his model of individual generators in each home or factory and the eventually more successful distribution company model. Also good on the industrial need for gas lighting. While technical, still readable and accessible.

Griffiths, John. The Third Man: The Life and Times of William Murdock, 1754-1839, the Inventor of Gas Lighting. London: A. Deutsch, 1992. The only biography of Murdock, recounting his life, inventions, and role in the Industrial Revolution.

Rolt, L. T. C. James Watt. London: B. T. Batsford, 1962. This short biography is one of the best. Clearly written, with good detail while maintaining an interesting narrative.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Lighting in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Angela Davies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. A paperback edition of an already classic work on the mass development of street lighting. Although it focuses on the nineteenth century, this work offers necessary historical background. Originally published in 1983 in German.

Smiles, Samuel. Lives of the Engineers: Boulton and Watt. London: John Murray, 1904. A popular biography in the Victorian tradition of lauding the virtues of hard work and upright honesty. A didactic look at Watt, although Murdock may come across as the better model. Widely available in innumerable editions.

Williams, Trevor I. A History of the British Gas Industry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Includes information about gas lighting.