Benjamin Thompson, the son of a New England farmer, had little formal schooling. After being injured in a fireworks accident while serving as a merchant's apprentice, he became a teacher in Rumford (now Concord), New Hampshire. There at age 19 he married a wealthy widow, Sarah Walker Rolfe. During the American Revolution, Thompson was an active Tory who served the British king by spying on his countrymen. After the fall of Boston in 1775, he fled to England, leaving behind his wife and daughter. During the war, Thompson served as undersecretary of state for the colonies and briefly as a British lieutenant colonel. In 1783 he joined the court of the elector of Bavaria where he instituted numerous social reforms including workhouses for Munich beggars. Thompson also introduced Watt's steam engine and the potato to the continent. For his numerous services to Bavaria the elector made Thompson a count in the Holy Roman Empire in 1790, and he took the name Rumford in honor of his former home.
Thompson's greatest scientific discovery was an outgrowth of his interest in gunpowder and weapons. In Bavaria, where his job was to oversee the boring of cannons at the Munich Arsenal, he noticed that the metal got so hot it had to be constantly cooled with water. The prevalent theory of the day was that heat was a fluid called caloric which could be transferred from one substance to another, and during the process of boring the metal released caloric. Thompson, believing that the boring was removing far more caloric from the metal than it could possibly have contained, sought an explanation. Further experiments demonstrated that heat did not have weight, a characteristic of a fluid. In a paper to the Royal Society, "An Experimental Enquiry concerning the Source of Heat excited by Friction" (1798), he proposed that the mechanical work of the borer was generating the heat and that heat was a form of motion. The paper also included calculations on the amount of heat a quantity of mechanical energy produced, a value that, though too high, stood for a half century. During the early nineteenth century his theory of heat began challenging the caloric theory, but many physicists remained unconvinced that Thompson was correct until James Maxwell firmly established the kinetic theory of heat in 1871.
Thompson's interest in heat led to a study of convection and insulation. He demonstrated that convection was the principal means of heat loss that the best insulation inhibited convection currents, and that heat traveled through a vacuum only with great difficulty. Employing these principles, he improved fireplaces with the addition of an insulated box, invented a kitchen stove, a double boiler, and a drip coffee pot, and developed a calorimeter to measure heats of combustion of various fuels. His scientific interests included light, and among his inventions in this field were the shadow photometer and the Rumford lamp. For his achievements he was admitted to the Royal Society.
Thompson went to Paris in 1804 where he married the widow of Antoine Lavoisier. The marriage lasted only four years, and Thompson's daughter came to France to look after him until his death. In his later years, he attempted to reconcile with the United States, and though Thompson died in exile, he left most of his estate to his native land. Thompson's legacy reached beyond his theories and inventions. He started the Royal Institution in London in 1799 as a center for technological innovations and hired Humphrey Davy and Thomas Young as research scientists and lecturers. To encourage continued research in heat and light, he established the Rumford medals of the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Rumford professorship in physics at Harvard.
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