Rumford was a Loyalist Ben Franklin; he spied for England during the American Revolution, left before the war was over, and surprisingly soon was a colonel in Bavaria. There, he wrote, he would 'endeavor to unite the interest of the soldier with the interest of civil sociey', which he did by treating the common soldiers more generously, with pay and leave and education. Here he started doing research into food and warmth (to efficiently keep the army fed & clothed) as well as the manufacture of guns. Changing the uniforms to make them seasonable required setting up manufacturies; since Bavaria had a beggar problem at the time, he staffed the factories by rounduing up all the beggars in Munich - but providing them with better food, clothing, education and healthcare than jobs there usually did. This was apparently a solid success in less than a decade, both in manufacturing clothes and in reintegrating beggars into respectable working society, 'on the principle of making the inmates happy before trying to make them virtuous'.
I would like more supporting evidence about that, and comparisons to orphanages and workhouses and settlement houses earlier and latr, because he seems to have been rather ahead of his time.
It wasn't popular with the powerful in Bavaria. Back in England, he published his research into effective nutrition and heating. He also had a complex and never restful private life, not very private and overblessed with extramarital children. He had money partly because he invented useful things: better lamps, stoves, fireplaces - including the damper - pressure cookers, institutional kitchens. Not only did he want food to be cooked well and at a low expense in fuel, but he thought out how to make the vast kitchens comfortable and efficient for the cook. That was way ahead of its time, though not before need. Also: portable field stoves for armies; drip-pots for coffee; and an awful cheap recipe for breadline soup. Not even the coffeepot is the foundation of his fame; that's because he proved the kinetic, vs. the caloric, theory of heat, by observations from boring cannon.
With these successes, and philanthropical intent, he set the foundation of the Royal Institution of Great Britain (applied science) but he still wasn't a master of politics, and it was soon left to others. Rumford dwindled into an unhappy marriage to Lavoisier's widow and died in France.
I want to know what he actually thought of people, because it is much less clear from his biography than most. It seems odd that he was socially so attached to the nobility while pursuing the comfort of soldiers and servants. Did he get, or get away with, the latter because he was an American and therefore not an aristocrat? Did he sleep with everyone, but only the noblewomen published their letters about it? Was he kindly to the poor to make the lower orders stronger cogs, or because that was the other form of social interaction he was good at, or what?
Baking-powder isn't mentioned at all, although his name and silhouette are on Rumford baking powder. It's just the sort of thing he might have invented, in order to have biscuits with coffee for five hundred, and it seems a proper honor that the baking powder gets the name because its inventor once held the Rumford Chair for achievements in science and cooking.
ISBN: 0-7509-2674-0
So wrote clew in
History (18th c.).