the private soldier; as head of the police he freed the city from the plague of beggars. A large piece of waste ground belonging to the elector he converted, with the elector's sanction, into a public park having a circumference of six miles. This is now known as the English Garden. When he left in 1795 the citizens of Munich erected a monument in it as a token of their gratitude.
In the spring of 1796 he went to Ireland as the guest of Lord Pelham, and while in Dublin he introduced improvements into the hospitals and workhouses. He left behind him a collection of models of his inventions. He was elected a member of the Irish Royal Academy and Society of Arts, and he received formal thanks from the grand jury and lord mayor of Dublin, and from the lord-lieutenant. In London he effected great improvements in the Foundling Hospital (Ann. Reg. 1798, p. 397). The cooking of food, and the warming of houses economically, occupied his thoughts, as well as smoky chimneys, five hundred of which he claimed to have cured. He made the first experiment at Lord Palmerston's house in Hanover Square, and the houses of other noblemen were afterwards freed from smoke.
Like his countryman Franklin, the aim of Rumford as an inventor was to promote comfort at the fireside, the main object of his life being, in Tyndall's words, ‘the practical management of fire and the economy of fuel’ (New Fragments, p. 168). Yet he made as valuable contributions to pure science as Franklin's in the domain of electricity. When a cannon was bored at Munich he noticed the amount of heat developed, and he succeeded in boiling water by the process. He answered the question ‘What is heat?’ by the statement that it cannot be other than ‘motion.’ Succeeding investigators confirmed his conclusion, and to him pertains the honour of having first determined that ‘heat is a mode of motion’ and of annihilating, as Tyndall says, ‘the material theory of heat.’ M. Berthollet, one of Rumford's eminent contemporaries, contested his theory of heat, and maintained the hypothesis of caloric in his ‘Essai de Statique Chimique,’ published in 1803, to which Rumford made a convincing reply (Rumford, Works, iii. 214, 221). Tyndall likewise gave Rumford the credit of travelling with Sir John Leslie [q. v.] over common ground on the subject of radiant heat and of anticipating Thomas Graham (1805–1869) [q. v.] in experimenting on the diffusion of liquids (New Fragments, pp. 163, 166), and also ‘for the first accurate determinations of the caloric power of fuel’ (Heat a Mode of Motion, p. 145). An interesting summary of Rumford's numerous practical suggestions touching cookery, clothing, and fuel-economy, as well as of his scientific discoveries, appears in the Royal Institution ‘Proceedings’ (vi. 227), 24 Feb. 1871.
In 1796 he presented 1,000l. to the Royal Society on condition that the interest should be devoted to the purchase of a gold and silver medal for presentation every second year to the discoverer during the preceding two years of any useful improvement or application in light and heat. The first award was made in 1802, the result of a ballot being a unanimous vote that both the gold and silver medal should be conferred on Rumford. He made a like donation, under similar conditions, in 1796 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Up to 1829 no candidates deserving one of these medals had appeared in America, and the trustees of the fund obtained an act from the Massachusetts legislature authorising the payment of a lecturer on the subjects in which Rumford was interested, the fund itself having increased in seventy years from five to twenty-five thousand dollars. In 1798 he gave two thousand dollars to Concord in New Hampshire, formerly Rumford, the interest to be used in clothing twelve poor children yearly, and the gift was accepted with the proviso that the girls should be educated as well as clothed.
He returned to Munich in 1796 with his daughter, who had joined him in England. Two years later he was in London as minister for Bavaria, but the king declined to receive one of his own subjects in that capacity. John Adams, president of the United States, gave Rumford the choice of the offices of lieutenant and inspector of artillery or engineer and superintendent of the military academy (Life and Works of Adams, viii. 660). He declined, but presented the model of a new field-piece as a personal acknowledgment of the compliment.
The most important of his works was founding the Royal Institution of Great Britain in Albemarle Street, London. In the ‘Proposals’ (London, 1799, 8vo) which he drafted its objects were stated to be twofold, the first being the diffusion of the knowledge of new improvements, the second ‘teaching the application of science to the useful purposes of life.’ Subscriptions were collected, and a charter obtained in 1799. Rumford became secretary and took up his residence in Albemarle Street, superintending the ‘Journal’ until he left for Bavaria in May 1802. He designed the lecture-room, and his sketches belong to the Royal Institute of British Architects. Thomas
