In 1775 Boulton, recognising the potential in James Watt’s development work on the steam engine, offered the Scottish engineer a partnership at Soho. Not long afterwards another inventive Scot, William Murdock, joined them. Boulton & Watt engines became the driving force behind much of the emergent Industrial Revolution, in Britain and later across the world.

This is the oldest working steam engine in the world. It was designed by the firm of Boulton & Watt and installed on the Birmingham-Wolverhampton canal in 1779. It saved water by pumping it back up a series of canal locks at Smethwick.

The engine lifted the equivalent of 1,500 buckets of water each minute. The water refilled the canal at the top of the locks, so that 250 boats could pass through the locks every week.

The working engine can now be seen at Thinktank, Birmingham’s Museum of Science.