Matthew Boulton was born in Birmingham in 1728, a landlocked town that specialized in small metal goods called toys, such as buttons, snuff boxes and buckles. He left school at 15 to work in his father’s workshop, invented an inlaid enamel buckle by 17, and exported his buckles to France so they could be sold back in Britain as French fashion. A dowry from his wife Mary, then a quiet marriage to her sister Anne despite church law, and several inheritances gave him capital by 1764. He leased 13 acres of heath and built the Soho Manufactory behind a mansion-like facade, at roughly five times its 2,000 pound estimate, producing silver, Sheffield plate and ormolu.
When ormolu fell out of fashion he sold a large surplus to Catherine the Great, and in the 1770s he created the Soho Friendly Society, an insurance fund for sick or injured workers. Summer droughts stopped Soho’s water wheel, so Boulton accepted a two-thirds share in James Watt’s separate-condenser patent in place of a 1,200 pound debt, moved Watt to Birmingham, and won a 17-year extension to 1800. Cornish mine owners paid one third of the coal they saved, and in 1782 Boulton pushed Watt toward rotary motion. His steam-powered Soho Mint struck coins for the East India Company and blanks for the U.S. Mint, and after the Bank of England suspended cash payments in 1797 he won the contract for Britain’s cartwheel coinage.
- He lobbied Parliament for a Birmingham assay office to avoid hauling silver 70 miles to Chester or to London.
- He warned Watt that there is no other Cornwall to be found.
- Each steam press struck up to 84 coins a minute, and the two pence weighed two ounces so copper costs wiped out counterfeit profits.
- The Lunar Society, with Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley, met near the full moon for light on the roads home.
- Suffering from kidney stones, he had servants carry him to the mint, and he died in 1809 at 80.
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