Count Rumford

Rumford, Count [Benjamin Thompson], An Inquiry Concerning the Source of the Heat which is Excited by Friction) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 88 (1798), pp. 80-102. 

Brown, S. C. (1952). Count Rumford s Concept ofllcat. American Journal of Physics 20 331-334. 

Brown, S. C. (1976). Thompson, Benjamin (Count Rumford). In Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. C. C. Gillispie, Vol. 13, pp. 350-352. New York Scribner. Brown, S. C. (1979). Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford. Cambridge, MA MIT Press. 

Wilson, M. (1960). Count Rumford, Scientific American 203 (Octobcr) 158-16S. 

British physicist Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) shows that work is convertible into heat and vice versa. 

The early notion that heat was a fluid called caloric was disproved in 1798 by Benjamin Thompson (later. Count Rumford). While minister of war in Bavaria and boring cannon, he observed that heat could be produced continuously and endlessly from a given mass of iron, and so it could not be a fluid. In one of his experiments, he used a team of two horses to turn a lathe that bored a hole in a 51-kg piece of cannon iron. The iron was immersed in a wooden box containing 18.77 lb. of water. The assembly was initially at 60.°F and 1.00 atm. 

His wife, Marie-Anne, studied drawing with the great painter Jacques-Louis David in order to transcribe her husband s laboratory notes and illustrate them. David s ravishing portrait of the Lavoisiers hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The son of Marie-Anne s longtime lover founded the E. I. Du Pont de Nemours Corporation in Delaware. Marie-Anne later married the American physicist, Benjamin Thomson. Later ennobled as the Count of Rumford, Thomson demonstrated the mechanical nature of heat. Marie-Anne had an excellent eye for scientific talent. 

In 1801 Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson) obtained for Davy a position as assistant lecturer on chemistry and director of the laboratory at the Royal Institution. In the Philosophical Magazine one finds the following description of Davy s first lecture, which was on galvanism ... 

Rumford s fortunes eventually led him to Bavaria, where he rose to prominence as a Count... 

Sanborn C. Brown. Count Rumford, Physicist Extraordinary (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1962).]... 

Around 1800, experimental challenges to caloric theory were being presented by Count Rumford (cannon boring) and Humphrey Davy (melting of ice by friction). It became apparent that heat could be produced from a body in unlimited quantity by friction, further stretching its credibility as a substance. By about 1840, caloric theory was overturned by the modem kinetic molecular theory of heat (Sidebar 2.7), which identified heat with the energy of random molecular motions. 

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