His biographies of James Watt, Richard Arkwright and Josiah Wedgwood were held up as beacons to guide the working man through his difficult life.

The Frenchman Denis Papin had the idea for a steam engine almost a hundred years before James Watt was born, but Denis never had enough money to build one.

In the late 1700s James Watt designed an efficient and commercially viable steam engine that was soon applied to a variety of industrial uses as it became cheaper to use.