Boulton and Watt

Boulton and Watt was an early British engineering and manufacturing firm that designed and made marine and stationary steam engines. It was founded in the English West Midlands around Birmingham in 1775 as a partnership between the English manufacturer Matthew Boulton and the Scottish engineer James Watt, to exploit Watt's patent for a steam engine with a separate condenser, and it was first based at the Soho Manufactory near Boulton's Soho House. In 1795 it began to make engines itself at the Soho Foundry in Smethwick. Between 1775 and 1800 the partnership produced 496 engines, and the firm lasted over 120 years, renamed James Watt and Company in 1849 and sold to W and T Avery in 1895. In this atlas it appears as the engine manufactory where William Playfair worked as a draftsman and personal assistant to James Watt before he turned to statistical graphics.