He then gives the state of the laboratory, the workshops for iron and copper, the joiners’ workshops, the kitchen, the library, the hall, and passage to the conversation room.
He then says:
The repository is in the same state you left it; indeed, it has been, and is at present, a workshop for the plumbers and glaziers.
The printing office. We are busy printing Dr. Young’s syllabus and beginning Mr. Davy’s. Dr. Young’s is expected to make 10 or 12 sheets. Of Mr. Davy’s there is none printed off. It is meant to be 6 sheets. We print 1,000 on common paper and 100 on large paper of Dr. Young’s, and 500 on common paper and 50 large of Mr. Davy’s. We have printed one sheet for a number of the Journals which contains part of Mr. Davy’s paper on Galvanism, but it appears very uncertain when we shall publish it. [This was No. 4.]
The apparatus for warming the lecture room is fitted up. They have tried it, but have not yet been able to raise the temperature more than 5 degrees. It is considerably hotter under the seats, and they have bored a great number of holes through the front of them to admit the hot air into the room.
Mr. Davy’s rooms are fitted up; he does not mean to give separate courses of lectures on tanning, and on staining and printing cotton, but purposes to incorporate them in his general course. The attic floor is far from being finished; they have not yet begun to plaster it, but it is all lathed. There are three additional annual subscribers, one of them through your letter (the circular). The Committee of Chemistry have resolved to recommend to the managers to provide apparatus to the amount of 314l. 11s. for the laboratory, and to stop the passage through and attach the servants’ hall to the laboratory.[19]
He ends his letter thus:
I anxiously wish for your return, as I can perceive that the Institution begins to feel the want of you. I have the honour to be, with the greatest respect, Sir, your most humble Servant,
W. S.
The energy of supervision and the power of organisation of Count Rumford enabled him in 1801 to work out most of his plan; but to keep it in action far more money was wanted than he had obtained, and to perfect it he must have continued much longer to act the part of a dictator. Before 1801 was ended a new and powerful interest began to draw him away from his Institution and from England.
In three years he had made more or less perfect working models of an industrial school for mechanics; of a society for diffusing useful knowledge by publications and lectures; of a mechanical exhibition of things useful to the poor and to the rich; of an association for the promotion of scientific investigation by means of different committees of workers; and of a convenient modern club, with a school of cookery attached to it. He had included all these objects in one design, and had placed them under one roof.
He was not yet fifty years old, and after the events through which his energy had carried him he saw no difficulty, and thought it would be easy to make his most complicated Institution prove to the world how scientific knowledge might be useful to the lower as well as to the higher classes. He expected to gain the support of the whole nation. He wished that his Institution should be approved by all the world.
The difficulties and dangers that arose as he worked out his plan became only stimulants to his energy, and if engagements at Munich and attractions at Paris had not interfered, he would not have allowed his original Institution to fail from any want of support or from any opposition to his designs.
Already he had made enemies and met with difficulties, and early in 1802 political necessity and private interest led him abroad, and made him agree to changes which affected the foundations of his Institution, and caused it to approach in some respects nearer to its present form. Thus the year 1802 saw the first great change in the management of the Royal Institution.