Brilliant Benjamin Thompson won world fame as Count Rumford the scientist but never dispelled his countrymen’s suspicions
On Munich’s bustling Maximilianstrasse, before the huge Bavarian National Museum, is a bronze statue of a tall, elegant, strikingly handsome man in the uniform of a general of the late Eighteenth Century. His chiseled features are framed by a peruke, a military cloak hangs in folds to his knees, across his chest slants the broad riband of an order of knighthood, he swings a tasseled cane as he strides forward arrogantly, and his left hand grasps the plans of the city’s famous Englischer Garten which he conceived and laid out. Read more »