James Watt, Jr

[1][3] He was then employed by the Manchester radical Thomas Walker, changing jobs just before the Priestley riots of July 1791.

[7] At this point Watt's interests were rather broad: Jacob Joseph Winterl the Hungarian chemist, Christoph Meiners, the Dictionary of Chemistry started by James Keir.

[1] Cooper, Jackson and Walker were radicals and abolitionists, prominent in founding the Manchester Constitutional Society in 1790.

[9] The whole radical group resigned en masse, in 1791, when the Literary and Philosophical Society refused to send a message of sympathy to Joseph Priestley, driven from his home in the riots.

[10] Watt went to Paris on a sales trip in France with Cooper in March 1792, at the time of the French Revolution.

[10][13] His activities in France, including taking part in pro-Jacobin demonstrations, would later complicate his return to Britain.

When prosecutions against Walker and Jackson failed, early in 1794, the shadow lifted, with high-level intervention by Matthew Boulton and a tacit agreement to curb his political activism probably assisting Watt's return.

[21][22] Returning to England in 1794, Watt gave up on plans of emigration to America: they had been very real in 1793, when Cooper was preparing to go, and Priestley was still encouraging him late in the following year.

[26] One problem was breaking into the steam engine market of the industrial north: Peter Ewart and Isaac Perrins had been tried as representatives, before the more satisfactory James Lawson was found.

[27] The younger generation of Watt and Boulton by the later 1790s had become serious adversaries of those firms who had reacted by infringing the company's patents in the north of England.

He became controlling of biographical references, where they suggested Watt senior had depended on the help of others, and of Henry Brougham's epitaph for Francis Chantrey's memorial in Westminster Abbey.

[20] An Australian author claims that he fathered seven children with a Margaret Redfern,[34] but birth and death records show that she lived in Belfast, and her husband was an Andrew Watt.