He concludes thus:
‘Anything which any insulated body or system of bodies can continue to furnish without limitation cannot possibly be a material substance, and it appears to me to be extremely difficult, if not quite impossible, to form any distinct idea of anything capable of being excited and communicated in these experiments except it be MOTION.
‘I am far from pretending to know how that particular kind of motion which has been supposed to constitute heat is excited, continued, and propagated. Nobody surely in his sober senses has ever pretended to understand the mechanism of gravitation, and yet what sublime discovery was our immortal Newton enabled to make merely by the investigation of the laws of its action!’
The account of these experiments was read to the Royal Society, January 25, 1798.
Some interesting facts regarding this paper are to be found in the correspondence of Sir C. Blagden with Sir J. Banks.
Dear Sir Joseph,—Count Rumford’s paper on Friction, together with your letter, were safely delivered to me by Lord Palmerston. The paper is by no means incorrect in itself, nor has the copyist made any remarkable blunders, and it is valuable from the large scale on which the experiments were tried, and the quantity of heat produced in consequence. As the result of the experiments was such as the Count himself foresaw, and as every other philosopher would have expected, they do not furnish any new argument in favour of the opinion he has adopted that heat is motion, though perhaps they add force to the old ones. There is, however, an experiment of some consequence if it can be depended upon; namely, that which seemed to show that the shavings cut by the borer out of the cannon had the same capacity for heat as the metal on which the borer had not acted; but I do not feel much confidence in experiments of this nature. You will recollect that one opinion pretty much adopted on this subject is that the heat produced in boring a cannon depends on the compression of the metal of the cannon by the borer, in consequence of which it gives out heat; on the principle that the same body has a less capacity for heat when it is in a denser than when it is in a rarer state. I wish the Count had ascertained whether the metal shavings he tried had really a greater specific gravity than that of the chips of metal he had sawed off.
Whilst in England Rumford at this time strove to advance scientific knowledge not only by the publication of his own discoveries, but also by his benefactions for the promotion of discovery by others, and by the further practical application of some of the results which he had obtained.
On July 12, 1796, he wrote to the Honourable John Adams, President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at Boston, to offer 5,000 dollars in the 3 per cent. stocks, ‘to the end that the interest may be spent every second year on a silver and gold medal as a premium to the author of the most important discovery or useful improvement on heat or on light; the preference always being given to such discoveries as shall, in the opinion of the Academy, tend most to promote the good of mankind.’
In 1829 the fund accumulated to 20,000 dollars, and in 1870 to 37,000 dollars. The Academy applied to the Legislature to use the money for the purchase of books and apparatus, and to pay for experiments, lectures, and treatises, and this was decided in 1831. During the first fifty years only one award of the medals was made. This was to Dr. Hare, of Philadelphia, 1839. They have been since given to Mr. Ericsson, Professor Treadwell, Mr. Alvan Clark, and Mr. Corliss.
On the same day in 1796 Count Rumford wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal Society, offering 1,000l. stock on the same conditions to the Royal Society of London.