What we can be sure of is that Watt was not led to his famous inventions by looking at a kettle -- his inventions were things like a separate condenser, gearing systems and speed governors are not present in kettles. You can find more than you would ever want to know about the famous Kettle Myth here.
Executive summary is something like (I am taking gross liberties here but it is a long article).
Young James Watt discovered steam power by watching a kettle despite being scolded by an adult (either mother or aunt) for wasting his time. -- myth steam power well-known already bolstered by victorian paintings made years later.
Young James Watt investigated the physical nature of steam and water by watching a kettle boiling. -- myth put about by son to bolster father's claim as a scientist rather than technologist.
Young James Watt had a kettle which was part of the experimental apparatus he used to come up with his steam engine improvements -- true and recorded in his note books.
My point here, though, is that we can never be 100% sure of the truth of anything from the past. How do we even know that James Watt really existed, for example? His actions and life as we think we know them could actually be the result of an extremely clever series of forgeries.
Obviously we can weigh up the probabilities, and argue for what seems to be the most plausible case, but we can never achieve complete certainly about what 'really' did or didn't happen in the past. (Philosophers, of course, would add that we can't be any more certain about how 'real' anything we think we are experiencing in the present is either). This is one of the issues that time travel stories throw up - they invite us to compare our own situation with the hypothetical situation of a time traveller, thus underlining the limitations which restrict our knowledge of the past.
*laugh* Isn't that a rather dangerous position for a historian to take?
[Even if one time travels it could, of course, be argued that the James Watt looking eagerly at a kettle one encountered was merely an actor/hallucination/clever simulacrum and so on -- so you really still haven't proved it. Outside the realms of mathematics and philosophy I guess everything is pretty uncertain really.]
Kind of liberating too, though. It means you can start to say things like - well, since we will never know what actually happened in the past, let's focus instead on how people in the present have interpreted the past, and what that says about what is important to us today. That's great fun, and is part of what the author of the kettle article you linked to is doing, actually - and I meant to say before, thanks for the link, because that really is an excellent article.
Of course you're right that even a time traveller may not interpret what they're seeing correctly - and, to go back to the example from Doctor Who that sparked all this off, the Doctor could also be lying when he says that he met James Watt and saw his kettle experiments. It's totally in keeping with his character to do so - I think he lies about (or at least obscures) quite a lot of things.
since we will never know what actually happened in the past, let's focus instead on how people in the present have interpreted the past, and what that says about what is important to us today.
Hooray for historiography. If you study how historiography was studied in the past and what it says about what is important today then I've heard the worm Ouroborus rises to devour you but it happens very slowly indeed.
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/2004HisSc..42..333M/0000353.000.html
Executive summary is something like (I am taking gross liberties here but it is a long article).
Young James Watt discovered steam power by watching a kettle despite being scolded by an adult (either mother or aunt) for wasting his time. -- myth steam power well-known already bolstered by victorian paintings made years later.
Young James Watt investigated the physical nature of steam and water by watching a kettle boiling. -- myth put about by son to bolster father's claim as a scientist rather than technologist.
Young James Watt had a kettle which was part of the experimental apparatus he used to come up with his steam engine improvements -- true and recorded in his note books.
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Obviously we can weigh up the probabilities, and argue for what seems to be the most plausible case, but we can never achieve complete certainly about what 'really' did or didn't happen in the past. (Philosophers, of course, would add that we can't be any more certain about how 'real' anything we think we are experiencing in the present is either). This is one of the issues that time travel stories throw up - they invite us to compare our own situation with the hypothetical situation of a time traveller, thus underlining the limitations which restrict our knowledge of the past.
Reply
[Even if one time travels it could, of course, be argued that the James Watt looking eagerly at a kettle one encountered was merely an actor/hallucination/clever simulacrum and so on -- so you really still haven't proved it. Outside the realms of mathematics and philosophy I guess everything is pretty uncertain really.]
Reply
Of course you're right that even a time traveller may not interpret what they're seeing correctly - and, to go back to the example from Doctor Who that sparked all this off, the Doctor could also be lying when he says that he met James Watt and saw his kettle experiments. It's totally in keeping with his character to do so - I think he lies about (or at least obscures) quite a lot of things.
Reply
Hooray for historiography. If you study how historiography was studied in the past and what it says about what is important today then I've heard the worm Ouroborus rises to devour you but it happens very slowly indeed.
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