COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS CHRISTIE’S IMAGES/CORBIS CHRISTIE’S

James Eckford Lauder’s James with the Newcomen (1855), painted after the late engineer had become a celebrated figure.

HISTORY OF ENGINEERING Wonder maker Andrew Robinson delves into a study inspired by James Watt’s fascinating workshop.

n 1924, ’s Science Museum makes it hard to cat- James Watt: the steam, creating a partial vacuum that acquired the entire workshop of engineer egorize the contents Making the World allowed atmospheric pressure to push the James Watt, left almost untouched in the against any one of Anew down. In 1765, in , Watt had BEN RUSSELL Iattic of his house in , UK, since the labels which have a “major leap of imagination”, as Russell puts Reaktion: 2014. his death more than a century before. The been applied to Watt it: the idea of building a separate condenser, museum put a recreation of the workshop over time: philosopher or craftsman pri- so that cylinder and piston did not lose heat. on permanent display in 2011. Among the marily, but engineer and chemist, as well.” By patenting the principles of the condenser 8,434 items left by the Scotsman, best known The diversity of Watt’s interests and activi- and not the means of applying them, Watt for his innovative , is an enor- ties was astonishing, even when compared and his business partner mous range of tools, including the earliest with the achievements of his Enlightenment became wealthy, although not without a long known circular saws. There are also math- contemporaries. Chemist, inventor and legal battle against their rivals in the 1790s. ematical instruments, optical experiments, Royal Society president , for Their engine — its defined in horse- minerals and chemicals, pottery and ceram- instance, called him a “modern Archimedes” power, a unit invented by Watt and today ics made by Watt, busts of famous figures whose had made industrialized most commonly converted as 746 — waiting to be copied in plaster of Paris, and Britain remarkably powerful for such a small became an industry standard by 1800, for engine-related objects — such as a box con- nation. pumping water from mines and driving taining the fragments of his attempts to make Watt’s first steam engine, which began machinery in mills and factories. an engine that used pure rotary motion. operating in 1776, was successful because From 1804, Watt moved from steam to This workshop inspired Ben Russell, the it had three times the coal-combustion sculpture, creating plaster of Paris cop- Science Museum’s curator of mechanical efficiency of the existing engine designed ies of busts, then much in demand among engineering, to write his engaging James by , introduced in the wealthy. His ‘sculpture ’ was a Watt: Making the World Anew. He explains 1712. The steam cylinder in Newcomen’s three-dimensional pantograph, powered that the volume of material, “crossing the ‘atmospheric’ engine had to be sprayed by a treadle and worked by means of linked boundaries between philosophy and craft, with cold water at each cycle to condense and geared arms, one ending in a probe

134 | NATURE | VOL 512 | 14 AUGUST 2014 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT and one in a high-speed, rotating cutting tool. As the probe traced the surface of the original bust, the tool duplicated its motion Books in brief and cut a plaster block. Today, about 400 of Watt’s sculptures are in storage at the Science The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Museum, including casts, busts, depictions Promoting Resilience of contemporaries including the chemist Kathleen Tierney Stanford University Press (2014) , and copies of Boulton’s 1809 The origins of disaster lie in “the ordinary everyday workings of death mask. After his own death in 1819, society”, avers sociologist Kathleen Tierney in this brilliant treatise. Watt became the first engineer to be com- Drawing on a trove of timely case studies, Tierney analyses how memorated in . For the factors such as speculative finance and rampant development allow Victorians, Russell shows, Watt was “a new natural and economic blips to tip more easily into catastrophe. kind of industrial hero” whose stature was Resilience, she argues, is rooted in sustainable ecological and social comparable to Isaac ’s as a . development. It is transformative risk reduction, not bailouts, that As Russell admits, there is no shortage of will help humanity to weather coming upheavals. recently published studies of Watt, such as Richard Hills’s three- “Watt was volume biography Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think ‘a new kind James Watt (Land- Paul Dolan Hudson Street (2014) of industrial mark, 2002–06) and The science of happiness has been with us since at least the 1940s, hero’ whose James Watt, Chemist when Abraham Maslow’s ideas opened up a psychology based stature was by David Miller on feeding the potential for positivity rather than simply treating comparable to (Pickering & Chatto, symptoms. To this now-crowded table, behavioural scientist Paul ’s 2009). But where Rus- Dolan brings a feast of US and European research, and some as a physicist.” sell focuses on Watt significant insights. Dolan argues that happiness depends on where as a man able “not just we focus our attention, and on how well we balance purpose and to think but to do: to use tools, techniques pleasure. His action-oriented outline for achieving that equilibrium and materials, to create tangible things draws in part on work with eminent psychologist Daniel Kahneman. across a range of activities”, most studies tend to emphasize his capacity as a thinker. Perhaps that tendency is inevitable. Scien- Great Minds: Reflections of 111 Top Scientists tists and science historians generally revere Balazs Hargittai, Magdolna Hargittai and Istvan Hargittai original theories with unforeseeable con- Oxford University Press (2014) sequences more than practical inventions Over two decades, chemists Balazs, Magdolna and Istvan Hargittai with immediate applications — Newton interviewed hundreds of prominent scientists, including 68 Nobel and Albert Einstein more than Christopher laureates. This distillation features excerpts from 111 of these frank Wren, Watt and Thomas Edison. For all the conversations. Featured are mathematician John Conway on how his wonderful creativity on display in his work- discovery of surreal numbers was like finding a palace after drifting shop, Watt was essentially earthbound. Yet around a strange city; physicist Gerard ‘t Hooft on the improbability his life and work are decidedly relevant to of intelligent extraterrestrials; and physicist Mildred Dresselhaus, the debate about how scientific discoveries biologist Francis Crick, and more on the fascination of the life scientific. are best turned into marketable inventions. Watt’s way of working — with a business partner and a patentable purpose, whether Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a an efficient coal-driven means of pumping Medical Examiner flood water out of mineshafts or the mass Judy Melinek and T. J. Mitchell Scribner (2014) production of pottery — could hold lessons “A hard hat was still there, lying on its side in a pool of blood for any university or government keen to and brains, coffee and doughnuts.” Judy Melinek’s inside story promote technology transfer. on forensic-pathology training, written with her husband, writer Watt was born in , trained as an T. J. Mitchell, is inevitably big on gore. But Melinek, a “sunny optimist”, instrument maker in , made his offers more than cheap thrills. The flamboyant disclosures — how breakthrough with the steam engine in Scot- to handle rotting flesh or use pruning shears to snap ribs — are land, and began manufacturing it in Eng- balanced by her soul-baring account of identifying human remains in land, where he settled. Next month, there the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York on 11 September 2001. will be a referendum on Scottish independ- ence from the . Whatever the outcome, Watt’s remarkable life is a defi- The Wastewater Gardener: Preserving the Planet One nite benefit arising from the close economic, Flush at a Time intellectual and cultural union of Scotland Mark Nelson Synergetic (2014) and England. ■ It takes 1,000 tonnes of water to move 1 tonne of human faeces, notes engineer Mark Nelson. His alternative to costly, unsustainable Andrew Robinson is the author of The Last sanitation is constructed wetland — subsurface-flow gravel beds Man Who Knew Everything — a biography in which plant roots and microbial action purify wastewater for a of the polymath Thomas Young — and full range of uses. Nelson, a veteran of the 1990s US survivability editor of The Scientists. experiment Biosphere 2, has built “wastewater gardens” from e-mail: [email protected] Algeria to Australia, Mexico and beyond. Barbara Kiser

14 AUGUST 2014 | VOL 512 | NATURE | 135 © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved