Not all residents of 1770s New England were swept up in the spirit of revolution. Benjamin Thompson, later known as Count Rumford, was less-than-enthusiastic about the cries for freedom that rang out among his peers. His peers, as it turned out, were less-than-enthusiastic about Thompson, who was rumored to be a British spy. In 1774, a committee of Thompson’s Concord, New Hampshire neighbors grew fed up with his British loyalism, and charged him with “being unfriendly to the cause of liberty.” When Thompson remained steadfast in his support of the Tory cause, a mob attacked his home. Thompson fled, ultimately deserting his wife and small daughter for the safety of the British lines. But under the protection of the crown, Thompson’s lot improved considerably.

Thompson became a founding member of the King’s American Dragoons, a loyalist military unit where he served as a colonel and an advisor to General Gage and Lord George Germain. Thompson proved not only loyal, but a talented engineer. He drew designs for warships and began experimenting with the force of gunpowder — a wartime task that would lead to a lifetime obsession with the properties of light and heat.

Shortly after leaving the United States permanently in 1783, Thompson was knighted by King George III. He was then appointed the Bavarian Army Minister and spent the next eleven years in Munich, reforming the welfare system, reorganizing the army, and conducting experiments on everything from soup to nuts — including a high-calorie, low-cost potato porridge that would become known as “Rumford’s soup.”

For his service in Bavaria, Thompson was awarded the title Count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1792. He chose the name “Count Rumford” for the New Hampshire village he’d been driven from only two decades prior. Perhaps he was nostalgic for the town where he’d arrived as a schoolteacher, married a well-to-do heiress, and emerged as an officer of the British forces.

At least one aspect of Thompson’s New England roots had left an impression on him: As a gifted youth, Thompson would accompany his neighbor Loammi Baldwin from their hometown of Woburn, Massachusetts to Harvard University, where they would attend Professor John Winthrop’s lectures on science.

Thompson continued to practice science throughout his life. His interest in light and heat centered on practical, everyday endeavors including home heating and cooking — Thompson is considered the father of sous-vide food preparation. His other chief accomplishments included an energy-efficient, state-of-the-art design for fireplaces; a kiln to produce quicklime; the introduction of the standard candle as a unit of luminous intensity, and research on the mechanical nature of heat that would later help establish the laws of conservation of energy.

Even after his death in 1814, Thompson’s contributions to science lived on. In 1796, Thompson bestowed gifts to both the Royal Society of Great Britain and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Both institutions award medals in Thompson/Rumford’s name for outstanding scientific research on heat or light. The rest of Thompson’s estate was left to Harvard University, home of the Rumford Professorship in physics. Even Thompson’s Woburn birthplace was named a National Historic Landmark in 1975, preserving the legacy of the revolution’s most revered “scoundrel.”

Sources: monticello.org, middlesexcanal.org, Count Rumford and the Royal Institution