“Watt succeeded at the age of 29, where older and more experienced engineers had failed. We tend to think of Watt as he appears in this portrait, middle-aged – but his great breakthrough was made in his twenties. He was a young Turk who showed his elders how to do it.”
Professor Gordon Masterton, University of Edinburgh
“An explorer of many things, and a great man.”
Andrew Carnegie
“For the birth of something new, there has to be a happening. Newton saw an apple fall; James Watt watched a kettle boil; Roentgen fogged some photographic plates. And these people knew enough to translate ordinary happenings into something new.”
Sir Alexander Fleming
James Watt 