President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that "Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Franklin, and Count Rumford are the greatest minds that America
has produced," and indeed, Rumford was a peer of theirs, and arguably
contributed more to the scientific canon, and yet is nowhere near as
well known. Born in the British Americas as Benjamin Thompson, he died a
count and a knight, and lived a fascinating, eventful life in between,
founding the Royal Institution in London, inventing a better chimney
(still in widespread use) for open fires, finding time along the way to
invent the coffee percolator and the enclosed oven, and most importantly
pioneering our modern understanding of heat. White Knight, Red Heat
tells the story of this notable figure in book form for the first time
in over twenty years. Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford, was an
American-born British physicist, government administrator, and a founder
of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, London. His investigations of
heat overturned the theory that heat is a liquid form of matter and
established the beginnings of the modern theory that heat is a form of
motion. Loyal to the British crown, he served as a spy after the
outbreak of the American Revolution, but in 1776 he was forced to flee
to London, leaving his wife and daughter behind. Knighted by King George
III in 1784, Thompson introduced numerous social reforms and brought
James Watt's steam engine into common use... He was created a Count of
the Holy Roman Empire in 1791. Interest in gunpowder and weaponry
stimulated his physical investigations, and in 1798 he began his studies
of heat and friction, making one of the earliest measurements of the
equivalence of heat and mechanical energy.
