Benjamin Thompson, Count of Rumford, 1753-1814.

American-born Enlightenment scientist, civil servant and social reformer, a forebearer of Malthus on

Originally from Woburn, Massachusetts, Benjamin Thompson, descended from an old New England family.  His father died shortly after his birth, and he was apprenticed at a young age to a wholesale merchant in Salem, and later to a dry goods dealer in Boston.  While a teenage apprentice, Benjamin Thompson is reported to have been among the riotous crowd at the Boston Massacre in 1770.  He was released from his apprenticeship shortly after.  Interested from an early age in mechanics, he undertook a program of self-study in science, occasionally attending lectures at nearby Harvard college.  For a living, he tried his hand at teaching, and eventually wound up as a schoolteacher in Concord, New Hampshire (the town of Concord was originally called "Rumford", from where he would adopt the name of his later imperial title).  In 1772, the penniless young Thompson married a local wealthy widow Sarah Walker thirteen years his senior, and catapulted in social standing and comfort.  Through his wife's contacts, the ambitious nineteen-year-old Thompson was commissioned as an officer by the British colonial governor of New Hampshire, which earned the resentment (and suspicion) of other American officers.

Benjamin Thompson became a loyalist during the American Revolutionary War which broke out in 1775.  He was evacuated from Boston in 1776 with the rest of the British garrison and made his way to England at the age of 23, leaving his wife behind.  Due to his intimate knowledge of New England, Benjamin Thompson was hired by the Sir George Germain, Secretary of State for Colonies.  He proved himself an able administrator, and rose quickly in colonial office ranks, reaching undersecretary of state.  During his time in London, Thompson also delved into military science, undertaking experimental inquiries into the efficiency of gunpowder, ballistic velocity and cannon bores.  He was elected a member of the Royal Society in 1779.

At the dismissal of Germain and the dissolution of the Colonial Office in 1782, Thompson returned to the army as a cavalry officer with the rank of colonel, and was dispatched to America.  He helped reorganize the remains of the loyalist regiments in South Carolina, and then moved up to Long Island, New York to take charge of the loyalist dragoons.  But the loyalist cause was by then irretrievable, and Thompson did little more than stay put in Flushing, annoying the locals, for a year, before being evacuated again back to Britain. 

Now 31, and still hungry for adventure, Thompson left England to serve as a soldier of fortune on the continent in September 1783.  He proceeded towards Vienna, hoping to volunteer for an imminent Austro-Turkish war.  The war, however, was not happening, so he found his way into service of the Elector Charles Theodore of Bavaria in 1784, who was promptly taken by his personality and ideas.  Benjamin Thompson would remain in Bavaria for the next eleven years in a variety of military and civil posts.  The Elector of Bavaria appointed Thompson his aide-de-camp, and then commander-in-chief of the Bavarian army and eventually minister of interior and still later prime minister of Bavaria.  Thompson would be invested as the imperial "Count of Rumford" (HRE title, "Reichsgraf von Rumford") in 1792, choosing the old name of his hometown in New Hampshire for his title.

A scientifically-minded Enlightenment type and meticulous administrator, in the space of a decade, Benjamin Thompson (Count of Rumford) left an indelible imprint upon Bavaria in general, and Munich in particular.  Backed by the full confidence of the Elector, Benjamin Thompson-Rumford overhauled the Bavarian military, then decrepit and demoralized mess.  He established military academies, children's schools and military manufactories. To improve recruitment and morale, he raised soldier's pay, improved rations, established smaller garrisons nearer to soldiers' homes, with regimental gardens to focus idle soldiers' attention during off-hours.  Rumford also deployed the army's resources towards civic improvements, designed new model houses for the people  and laid out the suburbs of Munich in line with Enlightenment ideals, rationally arranged, letting in light and air, and with gardens for recreation and cultivation  (Rumford was arguably responsible for the introduction of potato cultivation in Bavaria as a staple).  Among his famous feats was the draining of the swampy lands in northeastern Munich to lay out a large public park, the "Englischer garten" (referring to him), one of the most splendid pleasure gardens in Europe. 

Thompson-Rumford's more famous area were his social reforms, in particular handling pauperism, or as it is sometime put, "clearing beggary" from Bavaria.  Bavarian poor laws still operated on Medieval lines, reliant on the benevolence of the Catholic Church and the charity of alms-giving to the needy.  Thompson believed this had merely created a solid underclass of "sturdy beggars", particularly in Munich, who operated in a guild-like fashion, that seemed insurmountable and impervious to improvement.  Thompson-Rumford determined to overhaul the Bavarian poor system on a new rational basis and "end" intractable poverty.  

On January 1, 1790, in his capacity as interior minister, Benjamin Thompson ordered the arrest of all the beggars of Munich. Within a week, some 2,600 beggars (or paupers suspected of begging) were rounded up (Munich then had a total population  of about 60,0000) .  The beggars were put to work in the "House of Industry", a new massive workhouse erected by Thompson-Rumford to manufacture military uniforms.  Jobs inside the House were arranged so that all types of people, including elderly and children, would have tasks suitable to their abilities. Work was paid (even if minimally), to restore an element of self-respect and pride in labor. This, Rumford believed, would break the cycle of poverty, institute new habits, and transition dependent paupers into self-sufficient wage laborers.  In this sense, Rumford was perhaps the first of a generation of Enlightenment thinkers who saw the existence of the poor not as an inevitability, a constant of the human history, part of the Divine order of society, but rather as a consequence of individual choices and habits.  Poverty was not "with us always", but a social problem that could be rationally solved.

Thompson-Rumford, a micro-manager bent on rational efficiency, worked out the operation of the entire Bavarian poor system down to the last pfenning.  The provision of food to the inmates of his workhouses was a challenge of particular significance, and his solution - the soup kitchen - was perhaps his most famous contribution. 

Since his youth,  Thompson had a deep interest in science, particularly the physics of heat.  From his early days in London, where he examined and experimented with the effects of heat of cannons, Thompson developed new theories about heat conductivity which would anticipate future thermodynamics.  While a military officer and civil servant in Bavaria, Thompson-Rumford was a member of various academies of sciences and found time to experiment and publish many scientific papers on the physics of heat.  But he also applied his knowledge practically to invent and develop new and more efficient ovens and ranges for warming and cooking.  He would later introduce improvements chimneys and furnaces.  The coffee percolator was another invention attributed to him.

In social and economic history, Benjamin Thompson (Count of Rumofrd) is normally credited as the inventor of of the "soup kitchen".  Via his calculations, he had worked out that soup was the more efficient than bread to feed the inmates of his workhouses, and instituted industrial-scale soup kitchens using his new boilers. 

Thompson-Rumford returned to Britain in 1795, and would thereafter divide his time between Munich and London.  Britain was then in the throes of the famous "famine year" of 1795, which led to a lot of renewed concern and rethinking about the English poor (Eden and Malthus would publish their studies shortly after).  Rumford leapt immediately into the fray of the British debate, and published his Essays, outlining his reforms of poor institutions in Bavaria, and promoting their application to Britain and other countries.  Rumford implemented the first soup kitchen in England at the Foundling Hospital in London on March 1796, using new ranges and boilers of his design.  However, Rumford still thought of soup kitchens in terms of feeding the inmates of a large institution.  But one of his more enthusiastic acolytes, the London police inspector Patrick Colquhoun, realized soup kitchens could also be used extra-murally, to feed the poor of entire neighborhoods (and indirectly control their behavior). Colquhoun spread Rumford's "soup kitchen" gospel to private charities which were raising money during the hunger years.  Colquhoun posited soup kitchens, rather than bread distribution, was the most efficient solution to feed the urban poor during the famine years, when wheat prices were high.  Soup kitchens for the urban poor, charging a penny a quart, were first set up in Spitalfields in 1797, and then subsequently spread to other towns in the kingdom. By the mechanism of selling tickets, the soup charities could personally screen those who applied, deny the "undeserving" and monitor the personal behavior of the remainder.  This, it was believed, would break the poor habits of the poor and eventually end poverty.   

Thompson-Rumford's other great institutional invention was the establishment of the Royal Institution in London, arguably the first "mechanics institute" in Britain, in 1799 (it was preceded only by the Andersonian Institute in Glasgow).  Rumford designed it as a charity institution to deliver educational lecture series to the general public, particularly about new scientific principles in mechanics (physics) and chemistry.  Rumford's idea was to educate the more ambitious and clever members of the working class, giving them the scientific knowledge to make their own inventions and improve the machines they worked on.  The Royal Institution continues to this day.

Having abandoned his first wife in America (who subsequently died), Benjamin Thompson re-married the widow of the chemist Antoine Lavoisier in 1802;   During his life, Thompson-Rumford gave bequests to the Royal Institution and Royal Society in London (establishing the Rumford medal there), as well as to institutions in his former homeland, such as the American Academy of Sciences in Boston.  At his death, his will endowed the Rumford chair in physics at Harvard, which was inaugurated in 1816.

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