Matthew Boulton

Matthew Boulton (3 September 1728 – 17 August 1809) made his name as an English businessman, inventor, mechanical engineer, and silversmith. He is best known as the business partner of Scottish engineer James Watt. Together, during the last quarter of the 1700s, they installed hundreds of Boulton & Watt steam engines—machines that marked a major leap forward in technology and allowed factories and mills to become mechanised. Boulton also brought modern methods to coin minting, producing millions of coins for Britain and other nations, and outfitting the Royal Mint with up-to-date machinery. Born in Birmingham, he was the son of a local manufacturer of small metal goods. When Boulton was 31, his father died. By then, Boulton had already been running the business for several years, and he expanded it considerably after his father’s death. He centralised operations at the Soho Manufactory, which he built near Birmingham. There, he adopted the newest techniques and branched into silver plate, ormolu (gilt bronze), and other decorative arts. His connection with James Watt began when Watt’s business partner, John Roebuck, could not pay a debt to Boulton. Boulton accepted Roebuck’s share of Watt’s patent as settlement. He then successfully lobbied Parliament to extend Watt’s patent by 17 years, allowing the firm to market Watt’s steam engine. The company went on to install hundreds of these engines in Britain and abroad, first in mines and later in factories. Boulton was a key figure in the Lunar Society, a group of men from the Birmingham area who were prominent in the arts, sciences, and theology. Members included Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, and Joseph Priestley. The society met each month near the full moon. Its members are credited with developing ideas and methods in science, agriculture, manufacturing, mining, and transport that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. Boulton also founded the Soho Mint, which he soon adapted to run on steam power. He aimed to fix Britain’s poor coinage, and after several years of effort, he secured a contract in 1797 to produce the first British copper coins in 25 years. His “cartwheel” pieces were well designed and hard to counterfeit. They included the first striking of the large copper British penny, which continued to be minted until decimalisation in 1971. Boulton retired in 1800, though he kept running his mint, and died in 1809. His portrait appears alongside James Watt on the Bank of England’s Series F £50 note. Birmingham had long been a centre for ironworking. In the early 1700s, the town began to expand as ironworking became easier and cheaper when smelters switched from charcoal to coke. Deforestation in England and the discovery of large coal deposits in Warwickshire and Staffordshire sped up this change. Much of the iron was forged in small foundries near Birmingham, especially in the Black Country—towns like Smethwick and West Bromwich. The thin iron sheets were then taken to factories in and around Birmingham. Because the town was far from the sea and major rivers, and canals had not yet been built, metalworkers focused on making small, relatively valuable items, especially buttons and buckles. Frenchman Alexander Missen noted that while he had seen excellent cane heads, snuff boxes, and other metal objects in Milan, “the same can be had cheaper and better in Birmingham.” These small objects were called “toys,” and their makers were known as “toymakers.”

Boulton’s ancestors came from around Lichfield; his great-great-great-great-grandfather, Rev. Zachary Babington, had been Chancellor of Lichfield. Boulton’s father, also named Matthew, was born in 1700 and moved from Lichfield to Birmingham to serve an apprenticeship. In 1723 he married Christiana Piers. The elder Boulton was a toymaker with a small workshop that specialised in buckles. Matthew Boulton was born in 1728, the couple’s third child and the second to be named Matthew—the first had died at age two in 1726. After young Matthew’s birth, his father’s business prospered, and the family moved to the Snow Hill area of Birmingham, then a well-to-do neighbourhood with new houses. Since the local grammar school was in disrepair, Boulton was sent to an academy in Deritend, on the other side of town. He left school at 15, and by 17 he had invented a technique for inlaying enamels in buckles. The buckles became so popular that they were exported to France, then reimported to Britain and sold as the latest French fashion. On 3 March 1749, Boulton married Mary Robinson, a distant cousin and the daughter of a successful mercer; she was wealthy in her own right. They lived briefly with the bride’s mother in Lichfield, then moved to Birmingham, where the elder Matthew Boulton made his son a partner at age 21. Although the son signed business letters “from father and self,” by the mid-1750s he was effectively running the business. The elder Boulton retired in 1757 and died in 1759. The Boultons had three daughters in the early 1750s, but all died in infancy. Mary Boulton’s health declined, and she died in August 1759. Not long after, Boulton began to court her sister Anne. Marriage to a deceased wife’s sister was forbidden by ecclesiastical law, though allowed under common law. Nevertheless, they married on 25 June 1760 at St Mary’s Church, Rotherhithe. Eric Delieb, who wrote a book on Boulton’s silver with a biographical sketch, suggests that the marriage celebrant, Rev. James Penfold, an impoverished curate, was probably bribed.