Count Rumford and his Remarkable Creation in Albemarle Street

Abstract

The American-born Sir Benjamin Thompson, otherwise known as Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire, was at one time the ‘Supremo’ of Munich in Bavaria, where he was both a successful social reformer, an incisive scientist and the creator of the English Garden in that city. Disappointed when he came to London in 1798, when King George IV refused to accept him as the Bavarian Ambassador to the Court of St. James, he decided to found the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He appointed two brilliant Englishmen—Humphry Davy and Thomas Young (of Milverton, Somerset), now regarded as the last person ‘who knew everything’. As well as his extraordinary linguistic skills—he helped decipher the Rosetta Stone—he was a physician, a physiologist, a philologist and a physicist. One of his experiments at the RI in 1801 disproved Newton’s views on the nature of light. Rumford’s final years in Paris entailed an unhappy marriage with the widow of Lavoisier.