Sir Benjamin, Count Rumford, a well-known natural philosopher and political economist, was born in 1753, at a village in New Hampshire, then called Rumford, and now Concord. His father died while he was very young, and his mother married another man, who banished him from her house almost in his infancy; he inherited only a small pittance from an uncle, who died soon after his father. A clergyman named Bernard showed him great kindness, and taught him some of the higher mathematics at an early age, so that at fourteen he was able to calculate and delineate an eclipse of the sun. He had been intended for some commercial employment, but he preferred the pursuit of literature in any form; he attended the lectures of Dr Williams, and afterwards those of Dr Winthrop the astronomer, at Harvard College; and while he was still a stripling, he was established in the temporary occupation of a village schoolmaster; hoping, however, for an early opportunity to engage in some more agreeable employment; and at nineteen, he was fortunate enough to obtain the hand of Mrs Rolfe, daughter of Mr Walker, a clergyman, who had been employed with considerable credit in conducting some public business. For a year or two he lived retired and happy; but having obtained a commission of major in the militia from the governor of the province, together with some other distinctions of a civil nature, he was consequently led to adhere to the party of the Royalists; and he was soon obliged, by the success of the Independent forces, to take refuge at Boston, then occupied by the English troops. It was in November 1773 that he secretly quitted his residence, leaving his wife, whom he never saw again, and his infant daughter, who joined him twenty years after in Europe. He was employed to raise a regiment for the king's service; but when Boston was evacuated in 1776, he was sent with some important despatches to England. Here he soon acquired the confidence of Lord George Germaine, then colonial secretary of state, and was appointed secretary of the province of Georgia, though he never exercised the office; but he remained attached to that department of the public service.
In 1777 he commenced his career as an experimental philosopher, by employing his leisure hours, during a visit to Bath, in making some experiments on the cohesive strength of different substances; and upon his return to London, he communicated them to Sir Joseph Banks, with whom he formed an intimate acquaintance, which he kept up throughout the remainder of his life. In 1778 he was admitted a fellow of the Royal Society, and he made in that year his first experiments on gunpowder. In order to pursue these experiments, he went, in 1779, on board of the Victory, of 110 guns, commanded by his friend Sir Charles Hardy. He passed the whole campaign on board the fleet; and the results of the observations which he then made, furnished the materials of a chapter which he contributed to Stalkart's Treatise on Naval Architecture. He added to it a code of signals for the navy, which was not published. In 1780 he was appointed under-secretary of state, and he was constantly employed, for some little time, in the office on the business of the war. He succeeded, by means of his American friends and agents, in raising a regiment of cavalry, called the King's American Dragoons, of
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1 Sir Tristram: a Metrical Romance of the thirteenth century; by Thomas of Erceldoune, called the Rhymers. Edited from the Auchinleck MS. by Walter Scott, Esq. The third edition. Edinb. 1811, 8vo. Tristan: Recueil de ce qui reste des Poèmes relatifs à ses Aventures composés en François, en Anglo-Normand, et en Grec, dans les XII et XIII siècles. Publié par Francisque Michel. Londres, 1833, 2 vol. 16to. Warton's History of English Poetry, vol. i. p. 184. Price's edit. Guest's History of English Rhythms, vol. ii. p. 173. Lond. 1838, 2 vol. 8vo. Maidens Notes on Syr Gawayne, p. 304. Lond. 1839, 4to. Foreign Review, vol. iv. p. 141. Thompson, which he was appointed lieutenant-colonel commandant; and this success induced him to go to America to serve with it. At Charlestown he was intrusted with the command of the remains of the cavalry of the British army. He speedily restored the discipline of the corps, and gained its confidence and attachment; he often led it against the enemy, and frequently with considerable success. He proceeded, in 1782, to New York, where he assumed the command of his own regiment, having received the colours from the hand of Prince William Henry. In the autumn, General Clinton was succeeded by Sir Guy Carlton, whose friendship and confidence he speedily obtained. His regiment was recruited from the fragments of several others, and he was sent for the winter to Huntingdon in Long Island. In 1783 he was chosen to conduct the defence of Jamaica, which was then threatened by the enemy; but the general peace superseded the necessity of the intended expedition.
After his return to England, he made great efforts in the cause of the loyalist officers, and he was successful in persuading the ministry to make a proper provision for them. He was himself raised to the rank of colonel, upon the recommendation of General Carlton, only two years after his appointment as lieutenant-colonel. He had acquired a strong predilection for a military life, and was desirous of being sent with his regiment to the East Indies; and when the regiment was reduced, he wished to serve with the Austrians in a war which was then meditated against the Turks. With this view he left England in September 1783, and on his passage to Boulogne, he had an agreeable shipmate in the person of Gibbon the historian, who did justice to his merits as a "soldier, philosopher, and statesman." At Strasburg, his appearance on the parade in his uniform excited the attention of the late king of Bavaria, then Prince Maximilian of Deux Ponts, who invited him to his table, and being delighted with the accuracy and extent of his military knowledge, gave him a strong recommendation to his uncle, then elector; and instead of a day or two, as he had intended, he staid a fortnight at Munich. He was also very cordially received at Vienna, and passed a part of the winter there; but the war against the Turks not taking place, he returned by Venice and the Tyrol to Munich, where he arrived in the winter of 1784; and being formally invited by the elector to enter his service, he went to London to ask leave to accept the proposal; and it was granted him, together with the honour of knighthood. On his return to Bavaria, he was made a colonel of cavalry, and aide-de-camp-general to the elector. The first four years of his residence at Munich were principally employed in acquiring information, and in preparing his plans of reform; and in the mean time he continued his physical researches. He made his first experiments on heat in 1786, during a journey to Manheim. In 1785 he was made chamberlain to the elector, and member of the academies of Munich and of Manheim; in 1786 he received from the king of Poland the order of St Stanislas; in 1787 he took a journey to Berlin, and was made a member of the Academy of Sciences of that city; in 1788 he was appointed major-general of the Bavarian cavalry, and privy counsellor of state; and he was placed at the head of the war department, in order to pursue his plans for the improvement of the army.
It was in 1789 that he established the House of Industry at Manheim. He founded also the Military Academy of Munich; he improved the military police of the country; he formed schools of industry for the wives and children of the soldiers; and he embellished the city by a new arrangement of the public gardens. The House of Industry at Munich, which he has described at large in his Essays, was founded in 1790; and from this period may be dated the total abolition of mendicity in Bavaria. His exertions were rewarded by the rank of lieutenant-general of the Bavarian armies, and by a regiment of artillery. In 1791 he was created a count of the holy Roman empire, and obtained the order of the white eagle. His health having suffered from constant application, he obtained permission to take a journey into Switzerland and Italy, and he returned to Bavaria in 1794. He had a severe illness at Naples, and he was not sufficiently recovered, upon his return, to resume his active duties; but he employed himself in writing the first five of his Essays. In 1795, he came to England in order to publish the Essays, and in hopes of exciting the public attention to the importance of attempting a similar reform among the lowest orders in Great Britain. He went to Dublin in 1796, to pay a visit to Lord Pelham, afterwards earl of Chichester, then secretary of state for Ireland; and he was of essential service in the arrangement of several of the public institutions of that country. He was made a member of the Royal Irish Academy, and of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts; and after having left the country, he received the public thanks of the grand jury of the county of Dublin, and of the lord mayor of that city, as well as of the lord lieutenant at the head of the government. Upon his return to London, he superintended some improvements at the Foundling Hospital, and presented several models of machines and implements to the board of agriculture; and he established two prizes, for discoveries relating to heat and light, by placing two sums of £1,000 in the British and in the American funds, to be adjudged biennially, for Europe by the Royal Society of London, and for America by the American Academy of Sciences.
He was recalled to Bavaria by the exigencies of the moment, which were such as to cause the elector to take refuge in Saxony; General Moreau having advanced with his army to the confines of Bavaria. After the battle of Friedberg, Count Rumford was left in command of the Bavarian army, with instructions to act according to his discretion under the circumstances that might occur; and his firmness was such as to prevent either the Austrians or the French from entering Munich. On the elector's return, he was placed at the head of the department of the general police of Bavaria. His exertions in this office were such as to impair the state of his health, and by way of an honourable retirement, he was sent to London in the capacity of envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary; but being a subject of the king of Britain, he was judged incapable of being received as the diplomatic agent of a foreign court, and he therefore continued to live in England as a private individual. He was very active about this period in projecting and superintending the establishment of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, which was more particularly intended for the application of science to the conveniences and comforts of civil and domestic life, but which has been no less successful in giving opportunity and facility to some of the most refined researches in chemistry and natural philosophy that have distinguished the age, than in serving as a medium for making the treasures of science accessible to the less studious part of the public, and as a model for a variety of other similar undertakings in different parts of the world.
Count Rumford was soon afterwards officially invited to America by the government of the United States, with an offer of an honourable establishment in a public situation; but he considered it as inconsistent with his engagements in Europe to accept the proposal. In the autumn of 1800, when he went to Scotland, a visit of ceremony was paid to him by the magistrates of Edinburgh. He was consulted respecting the abolition of mendicity, and the measures which he recommended were speedily executed with complete success. He was made an honorary member of the Royal Society and of the Royal College of Physicians of Edin- 3. New Experiments upon Heat. Phil. Trans. 1786, p. 273. These experiments relate principally to the conducting powers of various mediums for heat; but the results are unavoidably complicated with the effects of radiation, in consequence of which a vacuum is supposed to possess a conducting power more than half as great as that of common air.
4. Experiments on the Production of Dephlogisticated Air from Water with various Substances. Phil. Trans. 1787, p. 84. These experiments tend to show that the air obtained by Priestley and Ingenhousz, from plants under water, was derived rather from the water itself than from the substances immersed in it.
5. Experiments made to determine the Positive and Relative Quantities of Moisture absorbed from the Atmosphere by various Substances. P. 240. He finds that wool is more absorbent of moisture than any other substance compared with it; and hence explains the supposed advantage of woollen worn next the skin.
6. Experiments on Heat. Phil. Trans. 1792, p. 48. The author attributes the effect of loose substances in obstructing the passage of heat to their attraction for air, and to their impeding its circulation; and he supposes this to be the only manner in which elastic fluids communicate heat.
7. Account of a Method of Measuring the Comparative Intensity of Light emitted by Luminous Bodies. Phil. Trans. 1794, p. 67.
8. Letter announcing a Donation for a Prize Medal. Phil. Trans. 1797, p. 215.
9. Experiments to determine the Force of Fired Gunpowder. P. 272. This force he supposes to amount to between 20,000 and 50,000 atmospheres, instead of 10,000, as Bernoulli computed it; but he makes a great mistake in supposing that the whole of the water which can possibly be contained in the gunpowder would be sufficient to furnish as much steam as would be required, since steam, under a pressure of 20,000 atmospheres, must be considerably more dense than water itself.
10. Inquiry concerning the Source of the Heat excited by Friction. Phil. Trans. 1798, p. 80. The capacity of the chips of iron afforded by friction in boring a cannon, was found not to differ from that of the iron in its original state; hence it is inferred that the heat could not have been furnished by them, and that it must probably have been generated. Mr Haldalt afterwards repeated the experiment under circumstances still more decisive; and Sir Humphry Davy showed that two pieces of ice rubbed together, in a room below the freezing temperature, would melt each other.
11. Inquiry concerning the Chemical Properties that have been attributed to Light. P. 449. He attributes these properties to the effect of an intense heat confined to a small space; but the latter experiments on the chemical effects of the spectrum are sufficient to supersede this opinion.
13. An Account of a Curious Phenomenon observed on the Glaciers of Chamouny, with some Observations on the Propagation of Heat in Fluids. Phil. Trans. 1804, p. 23. An effect depending on the expansion of water in cooling near the freezing point.
14. Concerning the Nature of Heat, and the Mode of its Communication. P. 77. He conjectures that cold is a positive quality, capable of being propagated by radiation.
Several of these memoirs were reprinted under the title of Philosophical Papers, vol. i. Lond. 1802, 8vo.
15. The Essays constitute four volumes 8vo. Lond. 1795-1800. Reprinted 1800. In French, 2 v. 8. Genev. 1799. Recueil de Rapports... sur les Soupes. Par. 1801. They are eighteen in number. i. Account of an Establishment for the Poor at Munich. In Ital. 8. Venice, 1793. ii. On Establishments for the Poor in general. iii.