ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with one of them, Augustin Betancourt, a Spanish engineer, inventor and traveller whose short visit to Matthew Boulton's undertakings in Birmingham and London in November 1788 has a particular resonance in the history of the Industrial Revolution. The three significant players in this story belong incontestably, even if to varying degrees, to this category of mediators who, by their curiosity, their mobility and especially their enlightened sociability, contributed to the development of the 'trade in knowledge' which opened the way to modernity. By treating Betancourt as a 'philosophical pirate' Watt Jr affirmed, in actual fact, the enlightened intellectualism of this man of action. It was in some way a measure of respect, a kind of implicit granting of 'civility', which could only be applied to an equal. A mechanic endowed with an exceptional creativity, whose mind was well-anchored in the British empirical tradition, he combined vocation and mission by marketing his talent.
