Count Rumford founds the Royal Institution

Some institutions are founded by men who were born to the country that receives them. Others are founded by exiles, who arrive with a programme already worked out in another language and another climate, and who set it down in a drawing room as though laying a tool on a bench. The man who knows how a cooking-stove distributes heat through a barracks kitchen tends to know, by the same arithmetic, how a city distributes idleness through its poor.

THE LOYALIST FROM WOBURN

Sir Benjamin Thompson, by 1799 Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire, was born at Woburn, Massachusetts on 26 March 1753, son of a New England farmer and Ruth Simonds. He married a wealthy New Hampshire widow at nineteen, took a major's commission in the militia at twenty-one, and at the Massachusetts crisis of 1775 chose the Loyalist side. He fled to England in 1776, served the Crown through the closing American campaigns, and after the peace took service with the Elector of Bavaria. Across fourteen Munich years, from 1784 to 1798, he reformed the Bavarian army, set the beggars of Munich to useful work in a House of Industry, redesigned the soldier's ration, the chimney, the cooking-hearth, and the lamp, and proved by the friction of a brass cannon-borer that heat is not a fluid but a motion. The Emperor made him a count in 1791. He had reached the age of forty-six having governed a small German state by the application of measurement to charity, and now he was back in London with the method in his pocket.

THE AFTERNOON AT SOHO SQUARE

It is twenty past four on the afternoon of 7 March 1799. The light in the first-floor drawing room of Sir Joseph Banks's house in Soho Square is the thin grey of a London March, sufficient for reading without candles but not for ceremony. A coal fire burns in the chimney-piece Rumford himself has lately taught the city to build, throat narrowed, hearth shallow, the smoke drawn cleanly up. On the mahogany are the bound prospectus papers, twelve folio pages drafted across the previous six weeks at the Royal Society chambers in Somerset House. Banks, gout-swollen, presides from a wheeled chair. Cavendish is there, silent as always. Blagden, the Earl of Bessborough, Lord Egremont, Lord Carnarvon, Lord Hardwicke, the Earl of Morton: a small assembly of the philosophical and the propertied, drawn together by Banks across the winter of consultation. The afternoon's business is the founding of an institution that does not yet have a building, a charter, or a name in law.

THE SECOND BEFORE THE PEN

He has been a refugee twice, once from Massachusetts and once from Munich, and he has learned the trick of crossing a frontier with a working programme intact in his head. The Munich House of Industry had taken the beggars off the Bavarian streets and put them at the loom, and the figures were unanswerable: the poor-house population fallen, by his own count, by some three-fifths across the working decade. He knows this room is not Munich. The Elector could decree; Banks can only subscribe. So the proposal in front of him is a society of fifty-guinea founders rather than a department of state, and the artisan and tradesman of London will be reached not by a workhouse but by a lecture theatre. The reform, in the English climate, must wear the dress of philosophy. He notices the fire drawing well behind him, and takes a small private satisfaction in it. The aim, as he had set it down in the prospectus, is the application of science to the common purposes of life: a phrase he had weighed for some days, because the weight of an institution rests on the weight of its first sentence. A research laboratory under the same roof as a popular lecture theatre under the same roof as a mechanical school for the working tradesman: nothing in London yet does this, and nothing in London will refuse it if it is set down with the proper names beneath it. He picks up the pen.

THE SIGNING

He signs across the three folio pages in the working presence of Banks, of Cavendish, of Blagden, of Bessborough, Egremont, Carnarvon, Hardwicke, Morton, and the senior secretary of the Royal Society. The remaining fifty subscribers will sign in the schedule of the following fortnight at Somerset House, fifty guineas a head, fifty-eight names in all. On 14 March, one week later, the house at 21 Albemarle Street, Mayfair, is purchased from the estate of the Earl of Berkeley for four thousand five hundred guineas. Through the remaining nine months of 1799, the carpenters and plasterers convert the townhouse: the rear wall opened to take a steeply raked semicircular lecture theatre, a laboratory fitted in the basement, a library along the first floor. On 7 March 1800, the first anniversary of the Soho Square afternoon, the Royal Institution of Great Britain opens its doors at Albemarle Street.

THE QUIETER ROOM

Across town, in another drawing room that same spring, a young Cornishman of twenty-one named Humphry Davy is reading chemistry by candle in Bristol, unaware that an institution has been founded in London which will, within two years, send for him, set him before a paying audience, and within seven years let him pull potassium and sodium out of their alkalis by passing a current through them. The line from the Soho Square pen-stroke to the metallic gleam of an alkali metal in a dish runs through the new building at Albemarle Street, but it runs out of sight of the men who signed. Banks would not live to see Faraday. Rumford would not live to see Faraday at all.

THE MANAGERS' COMMITTEE

The first Managers met at Albemarle Street through 1800 and 1801 with Rumford as their working administrator, and the friction between the Count and the English gentlemen began at once. He wanted galleries for working men with a separate stair, so that the artisan need not climb past the carriage company; the Managers thought the separate stair an indignity and built one stair for all. He wanted the mechanical school he had drafted into the prospectus; the Managers, having taken his fifty-guinea subscriptions, found the school inconvenient and quietly let it lapse. By 1802 he was on the boat to France. The Institution he had drawn on twelve folio pages was already, in the English manner, becoming something other than the thing he had drawn, and would in the long run be the better and the narrower for it: a laboratory and a lecture theatre at the centre of London, without the workshop school for the trades.

THE LONG AFTERMATH

Rumford married the widow of the guillotined chemist Lavoisier in Paris in 1805, a marriage which collapsed within four years by mutual incompatibility, and he died at his house at Auteuil outside Paris on 21 August 1814, aged sixty-one. The Institution he had founded ran Davy's isolation of the alkali metals in 1807, Faraday's electromagnetic induction in 1831, Tyndall on the absorption of radiant heat by atmospheric gases through the 1860s, Dewar's liquefaction of hydrogen in 1898, and Porter's flash photolysis from 1949. The Christmas Lectures, begun by Faraday in 1825, have been delivered from the Albemarle Street theatre in almost every year since. The proposal signed at Soho Square on a March afternoon by a Massachusetts farmer's son, who had governed Bavaria by measuring the heat of a soldier's soup, is now in its third century of working operation.

CODA

An institution outlives its founder when it outgrows him, and the founder who designed his work to be outgrown is the rarer of the two species. The narrow brass plate at 21 Albemarle Street still names the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and behind the door, down a short flight of stairs, the small dark laboratory where Faraday wound his coils sits preserved as he left it, the wooden bench, the iron ring, the copper wire.