Rumford, Count Thompson

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, 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. 

The question at once arises as to how much work must be done to produce this much heat. This question was answered by experiments carried out in Manchester, England, between 1840 and 1878 by James Prescott Joule (1818-1889), after Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson, 1753-1814, an American Tory) had shown in 1798 that the friction of a blunt borer in a cannon caused an increase in temperature of the cannon. Joule s work led to essentially the value now accepted for the mechanical equivalent of heat, that is, the relation between heat and work ... 

Mrs. Fulhame made two, probably three, great discoveries. She was the first to demonstrate photoimaging and used salts of gold and other metals. The famous Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson—see pp 356-359) differed with her chemical interpretation as opposed to a purely physical one." He was wrong — the photochemical reduction of gold or silver ions to the respective metals is... 

Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson), Phil Trans., 88, 80 (1798). 

Count Rumford, Benjamin Thompson (1753-1814). (Courtesy of the Chemical Heritage... 

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. 

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. 

Humphry Davy was not only an exceptionally gifted scientist, he also had remarkable social talents, and it is typical of him that already as a young man his career was sponsored by such luminaries in British science as Sir Joseph Banks, Henry Cavendish and Benjamin Thompson (Count von Rumford). He was also a great communicator, who from an early age made a name for himself in the popularization of science. At the same time, he had an intuition in scientific matters that allowed him to select problems that would prove to be fruitful and important. His work on electrolysis using Alessandro Volta s newly invented pile is a good example of this. He was convinced that in electrolysis the current induced the separation of compounds into their elementary components rather than the synthesis of new substances, as many scientists believed at the time. 

JGeorge E. Ellis, Memoir of Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, with Notices of his Daughter" (Boston, 1873). 

Figure 222 is from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society ofLon don by Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) (1753-1814). A solid iron pipe (Fig. 1), normally bored to make a cannon, was machined to leave a short cylinder (9.8 inches in length and 7.75 inches in diameter) attached by a thin... 

Galvanism, and Strictures upon the Chemical Opinions of Messrs. Weiglet, Cruickshanks, Davy, Leslie, Count Rumford, and Dr. Thompson likewise Remarks upon Mr. Dalton s late Theory and other Observations, 1804. 

Some of the early experiments can be found in Thompson B, Count Rumford (1789) Phil Trans 88 80 Davy J (1839 0) The Collected Works of Sir Humphry Davy. London see also Joule JP, Thomson W (1854) Phil Trans Roy Soc, London 144 355. For the work of Gay-Lussac see Schimank H (1951) Naturwissenschaften 38 265. 

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