36 Facts About Benjamin Thompson

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, FRS was a British physicist, born in Colonial Massachusetts, and inventor whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the 19th-century revolution in thermodynamics.

Benjamin Thompson served as lieutenant-colonel of the King's American Dragoons, part of the British Loyalist forces, during the American Revolutionary War.

Benjamin Thompson later moved to Bavaria and entered government service there, being appointed Bavarian Army Minister and re-organizing the army, and, in 1792, was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire.

Benjamin Thompson was educated mainly at the village school, although he sometimes walked almost ten miles to Cambridge with the older Loammi Baldwin to attend lectures by Professor John Winthrop of Harvard College.

Benjamin Thompson excelled at his trade, and coming in contact with refined and well educated people for the first time, adopted many of their characteristics including an interest in science.

Benjamin Thompson's prospects were dim in 1772 but in that year they changed abruptly.

Benjamin Thompson met, charmed and married a rich and well-connected heiress named Sarah Rolfe.

Benjamin Thompson's father was a minister, and her late husband left her property at Rumford, Province of New Hampshire, which is today in the modern city of Concord.

Benjamin Thompson was active in recruiting loyalists to fight the rebels.

Benjamin Thompson fled to the British lines, abandoning his wife, as it turned out, permanently.

Benjamin Thompson was welcomed by the British to whom he gave valuable information about the American forces, and became an advisor to both General Gage and Lord George Germain.

Benjamin Thompson spent eleven years in Bavaria, reorganizing the army and establishing workhouses for the poor.

Benjamin Thompson invented Rumford's Soup, a soup for the poor, and established the cultivation of the potato in Bavaria.

Benjamin Thompson studied methods of cooking, heating, and lighting, including the relative costs and efficiencies of wax candles, tallow candles, and oil lamps.

Benjamin Thompson was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1789.

Benjamin Thompson took the name "Rumford" after the town of Rumford, New Hampshire, which was an older name for Concord where he had been married.

Benjamin Thompson devised a method for measuring the specific heat of a solid substance but was disappointed when Johan Wilcke published his parallel discovery first.

Benjamin Thompson next investigated the insulating properties of various materials, including fur, wool and feathers.

Benjamin Thompson correctly appreciated that the insulating properties of these natural materials arise from the fact that they inhibit the convection of air.

Benjamin Thompson then made the somewhat reckless, and incorrect, inference that air and, in fact, all gases, were perfect non-conductors of heat.

Benjamin Thompson further saw this as evidence of the argument from design, contending that divine providence had arranged for fur on animals in such a way as to guarantee their comfort.

Benjamin Thompson is considered the founder of the sous-vide food preparation method owing to his experiment with a mutton shoulder.

Benjamin Thompson described this method in one of his essays.

Benjamin Thompson showed that the water could be boiled within roughly two and a half hours and that the supply of frictional heat was seemingly inexhaustible.

Benjamin Thompson contended that the only thing communicated to the barrel was motion.

Benjamin Thompson explained Pictet's experiment, which demonstrates the reflection of cold, by supposing that all bodies emit invisible rays, undulations in the ethereal fluid.

Benjamin Thompson did experiments to support his theories of calorific and frigorific radiation and said the communication of heat was the net effect of calorific rays and frigorific rays and the rays emitted by the object.

Benjamin Thompson was an active and prolific inventor, developing improvements for chimneys, fireplaces and industrial furnaces, as well as inventing the double boiler, a kitchen range, and a drip coffeepot.

Benjamin Thompson invented a percolating coffee pot following his pioneering work with the Bavarian Army, where he improved the diet of the soldiers as well as their clothes.

Benjamin Thompson became a celebrity when news of his success spread.

Benjamin Thompson's work was very profitable, and much imitated when he published his analysis of the way chimneys worked.

Benjamin Thompson significantly improved the design of kilns used to produce quicklime, and Rumford furnaces were soon being constructed throughout Europe.

Benjamin Thompson made a photometer and introduced the standard candle, the predecessor of the candela, as a unit of luminous intensity.

Benjamin Thompson published studies of "illusory" or subjective complementary colours, induced by the shadows created by two lights, one white and one coloured; these observations were cited and generalized by Michel-Eugene Chevreul as his "law of simultaneous colour contrast" in 1839.

Benjamin Thompson endowed the Rumford medals of the Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and endowed the Rumford Chair of Physics at Harvard University.

Benjamin Thompson is buried in the small cemetery of Auteuil in Paris, just across from Adrien-Marie Legendre.