James Smithson.

When the Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846, the nation's "scientific capital" officially moved to Washington, D.C., the political capital. The money to establish the Smithsonian, oddly enough, was bequeathed to the U.S. government by an obscure British scientist named James Smithson, the illegitimate son of the duke of Northumberland. Smithson studied chemistry and mineralogy at Pembroke College, Oxford, and joined the Royal Society of London in 1787. He lived most of his adult life on the European continent, participated in geologic expeditions, and wrote more than two hundred scientific papers, twenty-seven of which were published.

An Unusual Bequest.

James Smithson never achieved fame in life, but apparently he consciously planned to make a name for himself after his death, at one point writing: "My name shall live in the memory of man when the titles of the Northumberlands. . . are extinct...