James Watt - Bradford, UK
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dtrebilc
N 53° 47.651 W 001° 45.131
30U E 582194 N 5961344
This stone bust of James Watt is number four of a series of thirteen busts of historic figures that adorn the walls of the former Wool Exchange in Bradford City Centre.
Waymark Code: WMX76V
Location: Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 12/06/2017
Views: 0
Historically Bradford was a a large textile city with many mills and at one time was considered the wool capital of the world.
Trading in wool was carried out in the wool exchange that was built in 1867 by architects Lockwood and Mawson. The design is similar to the great Flemish Cloth Halls on mainland Europe but the style is Venetian Gothic, particularly in the polychromy and the serrated openwork of the parapet cresting.
The building was intended to reflect the importance of Bradford as an important textile city.
On the façades facing Market Street and Bank Street are thirteen roundels with larger than life size carved busts of notable people: Facing Market Street Bradford industralists (Cobden, Salt and Lister), inventors of important machines for the Industrial Revolution (Stephenson, Watt, and Arkwright), and politicians (Gladstone and Palmerston); and facing Bank Street five explorers: Raleigh, Drake, Columbus, Cook and Anson.
James Watt
This bust is on Market Street near the centre of the facade and represents James Watt.
James Watt is sometimes credited with inventing the steam engine. However he did not invent them, but made them significantly more efficient. His original improvement was to introduce a separate condenser for producing the steam. This avoided having to constantly reheat the piston and so more energy was available for converting into mechanical energy.
He continued to improve the engines further and various innovations meant that compared to earlier steam engines his were up to 5 times more powerful.
Originally Watt intended to charge for his steam engines based on the savings compared to the older style engines. However some of his customers had never owned a steam engine before and so he needed another method of charging them. To do this he developed the concept of horsepower so he could compare the power of his engines with an equivalent number of horses to do the same work.
Later, in honour of his achievements, the SI unit of power, the watt was named after him.
The above details were extracted from
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