Sage and Scalawag

by Sanborn C. Brown '35

BENJAMIN THOMPSON, COUNT RUM FORDThe MIT Press, 1979. 354 pp. $19.95

Born into a simple farm family in Massachusetts, Benjamin Thompson (17531814) left a record of varied activity and accomplishment that in many ways overmatches that of his similarly endowed and illustrious forerunner, Benjamin Franklin. Schoolteacher and militia officer in New Hampshire when young, he acquired a knighthood in England and nobility in the Holy Roman Empire. His practical social reforms as adviser to the Elector of Bavaria were no less outstanding than his ingenious and sometimes incisive experiments on the nature of heat and of light, or his myriad inventions ranging from cannons to fireplaces, kitchen ovens, lamps, and drip coffee makers.

Why, then, is Rumford not better known as one of the 18th century's great universal men and as a great benefactor of humanity? Strict moralists, conveniently forgetting examples like Richard Wagner, would point to the man's invariably egoistic, opportunistic, and often unsavory character: Tory spy in his homeland, deserter of his wife and infant daughter, intimate favorite of a powerful and dissolute English lord, intriguer, womanizer, deliberate falsifier of his autobiography Thompson eminently qualifies as a moral monster and (they would argue) rightly deserves the neglect of posterity.

Sanborn Brown has been pursuing Rumford for some 40 years, during just about all of his professional life as an M.I.T. physics professor and dean, and the present book represents the scholarly culmination of these efforts. In an earlier short account aimed mainly at young students of science (Count Rumford, PhysicistExtraordinary) Brown in fact sided with the moralists, but in the new work he is more the detached professional historian, richly documenting his text from many letters that he personally unearthed, and which are now in the Dartmouth library.

The lives of scientists or inventors are so closely bound up with their works that it makes little sense to keep the "personal" and "intellectual" aspects separate. Brown knows this, of course, and so, for example, we follow Rumford's thoughts on the nature of heat, as inspired by his supervision of the boring of cannon barrels for his Bavarian patron, at the same time as we observe him adding the sisters Countess Baumgarten and Countess Nogarola to his collection of mistresses, planning workhouses to rid the country of beggars, and designing Munich's beautiful English Garden. A scientific training is not required to understand the nature of Rumford's technical achievements, for they were never of the type requiring mathematical treatment, and they are here described by a sympathetic teacher. However, it is possible to skip some of that material and yet follow a fascinating connected yarn.

There is no dearth of drama: how Rumford almost came back to his homeland to be the first commandant of the U.S. Military Academy; how he wooed, married, and later separated from the widow of the great French chemist Lavoisier, who had been guillotined during the Terror; how he and Napoleon engaged in scientific discussions; but how in all instances he sought by any available means to get more acclaim and gain than he deserved. Seen against the normal customs of the age in which he lived, Rumford's self-serving is not quite as unconscionable as it would seem today, and despite his undeniable villainies he does after all deserve to be recalled as a benefactor of humanity. The story begs for still further dramatization, and one can imagine a novel called Rumford on the shelf next to Burr. Who knows? Maybe that is the next project.

Walter Stockmayer is Albert W. Smithprofessor of chemistry emeritus at Dartmouth,and is still active in teaching and research. Healso is an adopted member of the class of 1925