James Watt — "It is not worth my while to manufacture in three countries only; but I can find …"
It is not worth my while to manufacture in three countries only; but I can find it very worthwhile to make it for the whole world.
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More from James Watt
"About 6 or 8 years ago My Ingenious friend Mr John Robinson having [contrived] conceived that a fire engine might be made without a Lever—by Inverting the Cylinder & placing it above the mouth of the …"
"The steam engine is my child, and I shall see it grow."
"The people in London are all steam engine mad."
"I can think of nothing else than this machine."
"Nature can be conquered if we can but find her weak side."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Thinking small by limiting production to a few markets is wasteful of effort and potential. True ambition means designing and building for universal adoption — if something is worth doing, scale it to reach everyone. Narrow market focus constrains both impact and return, while global scope transforms the same effort into something exponentially more valuable.
Relevance to James Watt
Watt spent decades refining the steam engine not as a local curiosity but as a foundational industrial technology. His partnership with Matthew Boulton explicitly targeted global licensing and sales. Watt understood his condensing engine had universal applicability — mines, mills, factories worldwide — and he aggressively protected patents precisely to control that global market rather than cede it.
The era
The late 18th century saw Britain at the vanguard of industrialization, with expanding colonial trade networks and early globalization of manufacturing. The steam engine emerged as the era's transformative technology, enabling production at unprecedented scale. International trade was intensifying, patent law was maturing, and ambitious manufacturers recognized that mechanized production made global markets newly accessible and economically rational.
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