Today we meet a Bavarian Count who was born in
Massachusetts. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Benjamin Thompson was raised
in pre-Revolutionary New England. He wrestled out a
homemade education in Boston and, when he was only
18, went off to Rumford, Massachusetts, as the new
schoolmaster. He soon married a wealthy 31-year-old
widow, and he took up spying on the colonies for the
British.
He deserted his wife and a new daughter to flee to
England when he was found out. Thompson devoted the
next several years to shameless social climbing that
eventually put him in a high-ranking position with
the Bavarian court in Munich. It was here that his
life took on a different coloration. He boldly
combined technical insight with social reforms that
were years before their time. He instituted public
works, military reforms, and poorhouses, and he
equipped them with radical kitchen, heating, and
lighting systems.
In 1792 he was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire,
and he took the name of his old town of Rumford. Our
main interest in Count Rumford arises out of
experiments he made five years later. His interest in
field artillery led him to study both the boring and
firing of cannons. Out of this work he saw that
mechanical power could be converted to heating --
that there was a direct equivalence between thermal
energy and mechanical work.
People at the time thought that heat energy was a
fluid -- a kind of ether -- called caloric, that
flowed in and out of materials. Caloric couldn't be
created by mechanical work, or by any other means. Of
course, Rumford's radical discovery flew in the teeth
of the caloric theory.
His story eventually took a last ironic turn. Caloric
had been given its name by the famous French chemist
Lavoisier, who was beheaded during the French
Revolution. When Rumford returned to England and
France, he became involved in a four-year affair with
Lavoisier's widow that ended in a disastrous and
short-lived marriage.
Before the marriage Rumford crowed: "I think I shall
live to drive caloric off the stage as the late
Lavoisier drove away the previous theory. What a
singular destiny for Madame Lavoisier!" He did,
indeed, drive caloric off the stage, but I suppose
it's no surprise that the marriage failed.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
