12 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



did not discourage him, for throughout his life he retained an 

 interest in explosives to which, both in England and Bavaria, he 

 devoted much attention. His letters to his most intimate friend, 

 Loammi Baldwin, afterwards colonel in the Revolutionary Army 

 and engineer of the Middlesex Canal, indicate the extent and 

 diversity of his scientific curiosity. 



WOBURN, Aug. 14, 1769. 

 "MR. LOAMMI BALDWIN, 



"Sir: Please to give me Direction of the Rays of Light from a 

 Luminous Body to an Opake and the Reflection from the Opake 

 Body to another equally Dense and Opake; viz. the Direction of 

 the Rays of the Luminous Body to that of the Opake and the di- 

 rection of rays by reflection to the other Opake Body. 



"Yours, etc., 



"BENJAMIN THOMPSON. 



"N. B. From the Sun to the Earth Reflected to the Moon at 

 an angle of 40 degrees." 



In 1769 Thompson was apprenticed as clerk to Hopestill Capen, 

 a dry goods dealer in Boston, but his employer having entered 

 into the boycott of British goods, he had little to do and in a few 

 months returned to his house in Woburn where "he was received 

 by his acquaintances with unwelcome pity, as an unfortunate 

 young man, who could not fix his mind on any regular employ- 

 ment, and would never be able to support himself, or afford any 

 consolation to his friends." 



His stay in Boston, although short, was utilized in acquiring 

 some of the accomplishments which afterwards proved of so much 

 use to him in the courts of Europe. He took lessons in French 

 every evening, except Sunday, practiced drawing and engraving, 

 played on the violin, rehearsed plays and exercised with the back 

 sword. At the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770, he is said to have 

 been in the midst of the crowd, sword in hand, eager for an attack 

 upon the British troops which a few years later he was to lead 

 against his own countrymen. 



Freed from imprisonment in the shop, Thompson, now seven- 

 teen, spent the next two years in the study of medicine and natural 



