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Discover how James Watt’s brilliant marketing idea transformed the adoption of steam power and how it applies to speaking your customer’s language today.

In this first episode of 2026, Shawn and Mark are back and ready to help you grow your business story bank.

Shawn shares the story of James Watt, whose improvements to the steam engine were significant but his genius lay in how he sold it.

They discuss how this story illustrates the importance of speaking in the customer’s language; a fundamental for anyone in sales, product development, or communication roles.

Explore our upcoming events here: https://www.anecdote.com/events

For your story bank

Tags: Storytelling, Sales, Communication, Customers, Marketing

This story starts at 4:41

In the early 1700s, during the Industrial Revolution in the UK, a man named Thomas Newcomen invented an early version of the steam engine. It had an immediate impact on industry, particularly in mining. But it wasn’t until about 50 years later that a Scottish engineer, James Watt, came along and made significant improvements to the design.

But Watt’s biggest contribution wasn’t technical, it was how he sold the steam engine.

Watt realised that while his steam engine was technically superior, people wouldn’t buy it unless they could understand what it meant for them. His main customers were mine owners, whose biggest challenge was hauling coal out of deep mines. This job was done by pit ponies; small Shetland ponies that worked in shifts to drag coal up from underground.

Watt saw an opportunity. He figured that if he could translate the engine’s power into something mine owners could relate to, like the number of horses it could replace, they could immediately assess the value of the machine.

So he coined the term horsepower. He calculated how much work a pony could do in a day and used that as the baseline. One horsepower equalled one pony’s output. His engine delivered 10 horsepower, meaning it could do the work of 10 ponies in a shift. But since the ponies worked in three shifts, his engine could actually replace 30 ponies over a full day. And when you calculated the cost of feeding, housing, and caring for 30 ponies compared to running a single steam engine, the numbers were compelling.

It was an incredibly effective marketing move. Customers could now make an apples-to-apples comparison, and they understood exactly what Watt’s steam engine offered them. His competitors quickly followed suit and adopted the term. The idea stuck—so well, in fact, that we still rate engines in horsepower today.