James Watt and the Steam Engine

This chapter investigates the role of non-conformist religious belief in James Watt’s up-bringing in Greenock, Scotland. Calvinism, it is suggested, facilitated ‘outside the box’ thinking and enabled absorption of the knowledge advances made during the Scientific Revolution. In the case of Watt the Calvinist outlook combined with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment in Glasgow and Birmingham to foster the development of technologies that significantly improved the efficiency of the Newcomen steam engine.