| Description | A bundle of twenty-five letters to James Watt from John Roebuck.
There is a small bundle wrapper on which is written in red ink: ‘ 1765 — 1775 Correspondence of Dr Roebuck’ No 1 to 25 ’
The letters were numbered in red ink; except one (2 Nov. 1769) which was had no number. They had been numbered in chronological order.
A conspectus of old and new numbers is given at the end of the list.
The correspondent’s name and the date had been written on the letter by James Watt and a summary of the contents of the letters had been provided by James Watt jr.
Any summary in square brackets has given by the cataloguer.
Many of these letters have been partially transcribed for the ‘Extracts from Correspondence’ in James P. Muirhead's three volume work The Mechanical Inventions of James Watt, (London, 1854). The number of the published letter is given below at the end of the docket, as, for example, (Muirhead no.6).
Extracts from some of these letters also appear in James Watt and the Steam Revolution by Robinson and Musson, (1969). |