In 1924, London's Science Museum acquired the entire workshop of engineer James Watt, left almost untouched in the attic of his house in Birmingham, UK, since his death more than a century before. The museum put a recreation of the workshop on permanent display in 2011. Among the 8,434 items left by the Scotsman, best known for his innovative steam engine, is an enormous range of tools, including the earliest known circular saws. There are also mathematical instruments, optical experiments, minerals and chemicals, pottery and ceramics made by Watt, busts of famous figures waiting to be copied in plaster of Paris, and engine-related objects-such as a box containing the fragments of his attempts to make an engine that used pure rotary motion.
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