Its originator and founder, I say, and say advisedly; for, of course, here, as always, there is one man who is the true heart and soul of the movement, one name that stands, in truth, for the whole project, and to which all the other names are mere appendages. You would never suspect which name it is, in the present case, from a study of the charter, for it appears well down the file of graded titles, after "cousins" and "counsellors" have had their day, and is noted simply as "our trusty and well-beloved Benjamin, Count of Rumford, of the Holy Roman Empire." Little as there is to signalize it in the charter, this is the name of the sole projector of the enterprise in its incipiency, of the projector of every detail, of the writer of the charter itself even. The establishment thus launched with royal title might with full propriety have been called, as indeed it sometimes is called, the Rumford Institution.
The man who thus became the founder of this remarkable institution was in many ways a most extraordinary person. He was an American by birth, and if not the most remarkable of Americans, he surely was destined to a more picturesque career than ever fell to the lot of any of his countrymen of like eminence. Born on a Massachusetts farm, he was a typical "down-east Yankee," with genius added to the usual shrewd, inquiring mind and native resourcefulness. He was self-educated and self-made in the fullest sense in which those terms can be applied. At fourteen he was an unschooled grocer-lad--Benjamin Thompson by name--in a little New England village; at forty he was a world-famous savant, as facile with French, Italian, Spanish, and German as with his native tongue; he had become vice-president and medallist of the Royal Society, member of the Berlin National Academy of Science, of the French Institute, of the American Academy of Science, and I know not what other learned bodies; he had been knighted in Great Britain after serving there as under-secretary of state and as an officer; and he had risen in Bavaria to be more than half a king in power, with the titles, among others, of privy councillor of state, and head of the war department, lieutenant-general of the Bavarian armies, holder of the Polish order of St. Stanislas and the Bavarian order of the White Eagle, ambassador to England and to France, and, finally, count of the Holy Roman Empire. Once, in a time of crisis, Rumford was actually left at the head of a council of regency, in full charge of Bavarian affairs, the elector having fled. The Yankee grocer-boy had become more than half a king.