Colonel Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, FRS (26 March 1753 – 21 August 1814), was an American-born British military officer, scientist, inventor and nobleman.

After the war ended in 1783, Thompson moved to London, where he was recognised for his administrative talents and received a knighthood from George III in 1784.

He was educated mainly at the village school, although he sometimes walked almost ten miles to Cambridge with the older Loammi Baldwin to attend lectures by Professor John Winthrop of Harvard College.

Thompson excelled at his trade, and coming in contact with refined and well educated people for the first time, adopted many of their characteristics including an interest in science.

Her father was a minister, and her late husband left her property at Rumford, Province of New Hampshire, which is today in the modern city of Concord.

Thompson became a political and military advisor to General Thomas Gage (whom he was already passing information on the Americans to), and later assisted Lord George Germain in the organization and provisioning of Loyalist units.

In 1781, Thompson financed his own military unit - The King's American Dragoons - which primarily served on Long Island in 1782 and early 1783, where they earned local notoriety for demolishing a church and burial ground in order to erect Fort Golgotha in Huntington.

[3] While working with the British armies in America he conducted experiments to measure the force of gunpowder, the results of which were widely acclaimed when published in 1781 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

[6] On Prince Charles' behalf he created the Englischer Garten in Munich in 1789; it remains today and is known as one of the largest urban public parks in the world.

He founded the Royal Institution ... His methods of conservation of heat and economy of fuel, his designs of stoves, fireplaces and cooking utensils were widely used during his lifetime.

He taught his contemporaries to recognise the fire built on an open hearth, the only means of domestic heating and cooking with which they were acquainted, for the ineffective and wasteful contrivance it really was.

... Rumford's constant preoccupation ... was the application of scientific principles to the improvement of the lot of the poor and the working classes, and it was in the subject of heat and its utilization that he found the greatest outlet for his endeavours.

He devised a method for measuring the specific heat of a solid substance but was disappointed when Johan Wilcke published his parallel discovery first.

Again, he seems to have been influenced by his theological beliefs[15] and it is likely that he wished to grant water a privileged and providential status in the regulation of human life.

He explained Pictet's experiment, which demonstrates the reflection of cold, by supposing that all bodies emit invisible rays, undulations in the ethereal fluid.

[full citation needed] Thompson was an active and prolific inventor, developing improvements for chimneys, fireplaces and industrial furnaces, as well as inventing the double boiler, a kitchen range, and a coffee percolator roughly between 1810 and 1814.

He and his workers modified fireplaces by inserting bricks into the hearth to make the side walls angled, and added a choke to the chimney to increase the speed of air going up the flue.

The key innovation involved separating the burning fuel from the limestone, so that the lime produced by the heat of the furnace was not contaminated by ash from the fire.

His assistant, Michael Faraday, established the Institution as a premier research laboratory, and also justly famous for its series of public lectures popularizing science.