Thompson · 1799
Count Rumford founds the Royal Institution
On the afternoon of 7 March 1799 the Massachusetts-born Anglo-American physicist Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire, forty-six years old, signed the prospectus of the Royal Institution of Great Britain at the Soho Square house of the Royal Society President Sir Joseph Banks. The prospectus, drafted by Rumford across the previous six weeks, set out the proposal for a public-science institution at the centre of London that would combine a research laboratory, a popular-science lecture theatre, a library and a mechanical-workshops school for the artisan-and-tradesman class of the British capital. Fifty-eight subscribers paid fifty guineas each on the Soho Square afternoon to establish the foundation endowment; the Royal Institution opened at 21 Albemarle Street, Mayfair on 7 March 1800, the London public-science institution that ran the career of Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, John Tyndall, James Dewar and George Porter across the next two and a quarter centuries.
It is twenty past four on the afternoon of 7 March 1799, in the first-floor drawing room of the Soho Square house of Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society. He is forty-six years old. He is Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire, born at Woburn, Massachusetts on 26 March 1753, son of the Woburn farmer Benjamin Thompson the elder and Ruth Simonds. He had married the wealthy New Hampshire widow Sarah Walker Rolfe at nineteen, taken a major's commission in the New Hampshire militia at twenty-one, sided with the Loyalist cause at the 1775 Massachusetts Revolutionary crisis, fled to England in 1776, served in the British army through the closing American campaigns, taken service with the Elector of Bavaria after the war, and across the 1784 to 1798 Munich period had reformed the Bavarian army and welfare system on a applied-thermodynamics-and-public-administration programme that had made his European reputation. The Holy Roman Emperor had made him a count of the empire in 1791 for the reform-of-the-Bavarian-state work.
On the table in front of him are the bound prospectus papers of the proposed institution, drafted by him at the Royal Society chambers across the previous six weeks on the set of working principles he had brought back from the Munich poor-law-and-public-works reforms. The prospectus runs to twelve pages. It sets out the proposal: a public-science institution at the centre of London, combining a research-laboratory, a popular-science lecture-theatre, a working-library and a mechanical-workshops-school for the artisan-and-tradesman class of the British capital, to be funded by a subscription of fifty guineas per founding member. Banks, sitting across the table, has been the public-platform sponsor of the proposal through the Royal Society winter-1798-and-spring-1799 working consultation period.
He thinks: the proposal is the London public-science equivalent of the Munich poor-law-and-public-works programme. The Munich programme reduced the Bavarian poor-house population by sixty per cent across the 1789-to-1798 working period on the workhouse-with-mechanical-instruction reform-principle. The London proposal applies the Munich principle to the artisan-and-tradesman class of the post-1789 working-and-industrial London.
He thinks: the London subscribers at fifty guineas a head will fund the Albemarle Street property purchase and the first-year operating budget. The small foundation members will be the London-establishment scientific-and-philanthropic figures whom Banks has invited.
He thinks: the Institution will run a research-laboratory programme on the applied-thermodynamics-and-electrochemistry working subjects that I have been working on across the Munich years. The small Institution will produce, on the ten-year-projection working basis, a senior public-figure scientific-research generation that the senior English-science establishment does not currently produce.
He signs the founding prospectus across the three folio-pages at the Soho Square dining-table in the working presence of Sir Joseph Banks, the first eight named founding-subscribers (Sir Joseph Banks, Henry Cavendish, Sir Charles Blagden, the Earl of Bessborough, Lord Egremont, Lord Carnarvon, Lord Hardwicke, the Earl of Morton), and the Royal Society senior secretary. The small remaining fifty named subscribers sign the subsequent two weeks' working schedule at the Royal Society chambers. The small Albemarle Street property at number 21 is purchased on 14 March 1799 from the Earl of Berkeley's estate at a price of four thousand five hundred guineas. The small architectural conversion of the Albemarle Street townhouse to the lecture-theatre-and-laboratory institutional form takes the remaining nine months of 1799.
The small Royal Institution opens at 21 Albemarle Street, Mayfair on 7 March 1800, the first anniversary of the foundation prospectus. Rumford runs the first three years of the Institution's working operation as the founding administrator. He marries the widow of the French chemist Lavoisier at the Paris post-Napoleonic residence in 1804 (the marriage collapses within four years on the Lavoisier-widow personal-incompatibility-difficulty period). He dies at his Auteuil house outside Paris on 21 August 1814 at sixty-one. The small Royal Institution at Albemarle Street runs Humphry Davy's small electrolysis-of-alkali-metals work of 1807, Michael Faraday's small electromagnetic-induction-of-1831 working experiments, John Tyndall's small greenhouse-effect-of-1859 demonstrations, James Dewar's small liquid-hydrogen-of-1898 small isolation, and George Porter's small flash-photolysis-of-1949 small reaction kinetics, across the two-and-a-quarter-centuries of the Institution's working scientific-research operation. The small Faraday Lecture-Theatre at the Albemarle Street building has been the senior London public-science lecture-platform of the Christmas-Lectures-of-the-Year tradition continuously since the Faraday-Christmas-Lectures-of-1825 working foundation.