Matthew Boulton

Matthew Boulton was an English manufacturer who ran the Soho Manufactory near Birmingham and, from 1775, partnered with the Scottish engineer James Watt in the firm Boulton and Watt. Boulton supplied the capital, the skilled workshop and the business organization that turned Watt's improved steam engine design from a promising invention into a manufactured product sold across Britain and abroad, and he pressed Watt to keep refining the engine for the widest possible range of industrial uses, from pumping water out of mines to driving factory machinery. The partnership is generally credited with making steam power a commercially viable industry rather than a scattering of individual installations, a foundation the wider Industrial Revolution built on.