eded capital. His
profits one year were $3,000. The business had been removed in 1760 to
new quarters in the city, and Watt himself had rented a house outside
the university grounds. Having furnished it, Watt brought his young wife
and installed her there, July, 1764. We leave him there, happy in the
knowledge that he is to be carefully looked after, and, last but not
least, steadily encouraged and counselled not to give up the engine. As
we shall presently see, such encouragement was much needed at intervals.

The first step was to construct a model embodying all the inventions in
a working form. An old cellar was rented, and there the work began. To
prepare the plan was easy, but its execution was quite another story.
Watt's sad experience with indifferent work had not been lost upon him,
and he was determined that, come what may, this working model should not
fail from imperfect construction. His own handiwork had been of the
finest and most delicate kind, but, as he said, he had "very little
experience of mechanics _in great_." This model was a monster in those
days, and great was the difficulty of finding mechanics capable of
carrying out his designs. The only available men were blacksmiths and
tinsmiths, and these were most clumsy workmen, even in their own crafts.
Were Watt to revisit the earth to-day, he would not easily find a more
decided change or advance over 1764, in all that has been changed or
improved since then, than in this very department of applied mechanics.
To-day such a model as Watt constructed in the cellar would be simple
work indeed. Even the gasoline or the electric motor of to-day, though
complicated far beyond the steam model, is now produced by automatic
machinery. Skilled workmen do not have to fashion the parts. They only
stand looking on at machinery--itself made by automatic
tools--performing work of unerring accuracy. Had Watt had at his call
only a small part of the inventory resources of our day, his model steam
engine might have been named the Minerva, for Minerva-like, it would
have sprung forth complete, the creature of automatic machinery, the
workmen meanwhile smilingly looking on at these slaves of the mechanic
which had been brought forth and harnessed to do his bidding by the
exercise of godlike reason.

The model was ready after six months of unceasing labor, but
notwithstanding the scrupulous fastidiousness displayed by Watt in the
workmanship of all the parts, the machin