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Annie Watt liked things neat and tidy. So when she and her husband moved into their brand new house in Birmingham, she put her foot down. James Watt might be famous now but he wasn鈥檛 going to clutter up her home with his collection of tools, instruments and assorted bits of junk. If he insisted on keeping all this stuff, then it would have to go in the spare room over the kitchen. Later, when James retired from the steam engine business, he turned Annie鈥檚 鈥渓umber room鈥� into a workshop complete with lathe and home-made furnace.

After Watt died in 1819, his workshop remained undisturbed until the 1920s when it was dismantled to be recreated鈥攆loorboards, fireplace, furnace and all鈥攁t the Science Museum in London. After poking about among the thousands of bits and pieces Watt had squirrelled away, Michael Wright, the museum鈥檚 curator of mechanical engineering, has uncovered a furtive side to the pioneer of steam. As a young man, it seems, Watt was something of an opportunist鈥攁nd not above fleecing a few of his customers. In fact, Wright suspects he was operating a lucrative little scam鈥�

鈥淛AMES WATT, Has removed his shop from the Saltmercat, to Mr Buchannan鈥檚 land in the Trongate. Where he sells all sorts of Mathematical and Musical instruments, with variety of toys and other goods.鈥� In 1763, when Watt placed this advert in the Glasgow Journal, he had been in business for six years. He started out making mathematical instruments, the trade he had trained for. But before long he branched out into musical instruments.

Watt mended flutes and fiddles, and made parts such as keys and screws that required a mechanic鈥檚 skills. Soon he was making and selling whole instruments: flutes and fifes, fiddles, guitars and, being a Scot, bagpipes. He even made a barrel organ, the only instrument of his that survives.

What prompted this change of direction isn鈥檛 clear, as Watt had no particular interest in music. Perhaps demand for mathematical instruments wasn鈥檛 what he had expected, and he was forced to turn his hand to other work just to keep his business going. Or perhaps, knowing that he had the skills and the tools, people brought instruments to him for repair. Either way, Watt found there was plenty of demand for this sort of work and decided to cash in on it. By the 1760s, he was selling guitars and fiddles and large numbers of flutes.

In Watt鈥檚 day, the flute was the most popular of all wind instruments. Since the early 1700s it had been growing more respectable. It had been remodelled and now produced a sweeter, more versatile sound. Professional musicians, who had previously favoured the oboe, began to switch to the flute. Famous composers including Handel, Vivaldi and Bach broke with tradition and wrote music especially for solo flute players. By the middle of the century, flute playing was the hobby to have for fashionable young men.

From Frederick the Great down, young gentlemen of leisure tootled away. Some, like Frederick, were accomplished musicians. Most just dabbled. And while there were famous workshops in London and Paris which produced fine instruments for virtuoso flute players, there were plenty of others turning out cheap flutes for less discriminating clients.

Watt made cheap boxwood flutes, the sort that would have cost a few shillings. His workshop contains plenty of bits and pieces from his Glasgow days, before he moved to Birmingham in 1774 to join Matthew Boulton in the steam engine business. Among these objects, Wright has found a complete set of tools for making flutes, including reamers for gouging out the central bore and gauges for marking out the finger holes, and some unfinished pieces of flute. He also found something that made him suspect Watt was indulging in a spot of counterfeiting.

That something was a steel stamp for marking wooden goods with the maker鈥檚 name. The collection includes a stamp bearing Watt鈥檚 name, but this one bears the name of Thomas Lot, who was to flutes what Stradivarius was to violins. Even more suspiciously, while Watt鈥檚 own name stamp is well made and of a type he would have bought from a stamp-maker, the Thomas Lot stamp is amateurish, made up of loose letters, filed roughly to size and set in a lump of tin or lead. This stamp has four italic capital letters, T LOT. The real Monsieur Lot placed a little asterisk between the T and the L, but this stamp produces 鈥渁 very passable imitation鈥� of the real thing, says Wright.

What was it doing among Watt鈥檚 effects? Wright thinks he was deliberately trying to deceive. The way the stamp was made suggests it was 鈥渦nofficial鈥�, made by someone who didn鈥檛 want others to know about it.

Thomas Lot made the finest of instruments in his Paris workshop. He had been making flutes and other wind instruments since the 1730s, and had some illustrious clients. Most of the famous players of the time went to him for their flutes. And most of the noble families of Europe owned a Lot flute or two.

A Lot flute would fetch rather more than a few shillings. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not improbable that Watt thought there was an advantage in putting a famous name on his flutes,鈥� says Wright. Nor would it be too difficult to get away with it. A real musician would never mistake a Watt flute for a Lot flute, but an amateur might easily be taken in. 鈥淭here were plenty of gullible young gents about so there might have been a good market for fakes,鈥� says Wright.

So far, no one has found a flute carrying either James Watt鈥檚 name or the dubious T LOT mark. However, in the 1890s, Richard Rockstro, a renowned expert on flutes, was lent an instrument stamped with Lot鈥檚 name. As a fine player himself, he anticipated something that sounded rather special. He was badly disappointed. 鈥淭he tone can only be characterised as execrable,鈥� he wrote. When he inspected the instrument more closely, he found it wasn鈥檛 of the quality he would have expected. The central bore should have been smooth and continuous, but he found steps from one section to the next. Was it a fake? Could it have come from Watt鈥檚 workshop?

Unless someone tracks down the flute and checks the mark against Watt鈥檚 stamp, it鈥檚 unlikely we will ever know. But if Watt wasn鈥檛 trying to deceive why did he have the stamp? 鈥淭here may be other explanations,鈥� says Wright. 鈥淏ut it does look as if Watt may have attempted to pass off his work in a way that we would regard as dishonest.鈥�

Whether or not Watt was working a fiddle, he was applying those skills for which he later became famous, says Wright. Among his junk, Wright found a novel gadget for shaping the undersides of the flute鈥檚 finger holes鈥攖hree at a time instead of the usual one. 鈥淪o even if he was producing cheapskate products, possibly with fake labels, he was still using his brain to improve production methods.鈥�