A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [51]
Things might have been worse had it not been for a splendidly improbable character named Count von Rumford, who, despite the grandeur of his title, began life in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753 as plain Benjamin Thompson. Thompson was dashing and ambitious, “handsome in feature and figure,” occasionally courageous and exceedingly bright, but untroubled by anything so inconveniencing as a scruple. At nineteen he married a rich widow fourteen years his senior, but at the outbreak of revolution in the colonies he unwisely sided with the loyalists, for a time spying on their behalf. In the fateful year of 1776, facing arrest “for lukewarmness in the cause of liberty,” he abandoned his wife and child and fled just ahead of a mob of anti-Royalists armed with buckets of hot tar, bags of feathers, and an earnest desire to adorn him with both.
He decamped first to England and then to Germany, where he served as a military advisor to the government of Bavaria, so impressing the authorities that in 1791 he was named Count von Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire. While in Munich, he also designed and laid out the famous park known as the English Garden.
In between these undertakings, he somehow found time to conduct a good deal of solid science. He became the world's foremost authority on thermodynamics and the first to elucidate the principles of the convection of fluids and the circulation of ocean currents. He also invented several useful objects, including a drip coffeemaker, thermal underwear, and a type of range still known as the Rumford fireplace. In 1805, during a sojourn in France, he wooed and married Madame Lavoisier, widow of Antoine-Laurent. The marriage was not a success and they soon parted. Rumford stayed on in France, where he died, universally esteemed by all but his former wives, in 1814.
But our purpose in mentioning him here is that in 1799, during a comparatively brief interlude in London, he founded the Royal Institution, yet another of the many learned societies that popped into being all over Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For a time it was almost the only institution of standing to actively promote the young science of chemistry, and that was thanks almost entirely to a brilliant young man named Humphry Davy, who was appointed the institution's professor of chemistry shortly after its inception and rapidly gained fame as an outstanding lecturer and productive experimentalist.
Soon after taking up his position, Davy began to bang out new elements one after another—potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, and aluminum or aluminium, depending on which branch of English you favor.*13 He discovered so many elements not so much because he was serially astute as because he developed an ingenious technique of applying electricity to a molten substance—electrolysis, as it is known. Altogether he discovered a dozen elements, a fifth of the known total of his day. Davy might have done far more, but unfortunately as a young man he developed an abiding attachment to the buoyant pleasures of nitrous oxide. He grew so attached to the gas that he drew on it (literally) three or four times a day. Eventually, in 1829, it is thought to have killed him.
Fortunately more sober types were at work elsewhere. In 1808, a dour Quaker named John Dalton became the first person to intimate the nature of an atom (progress that will be