44 LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



rules against any rewards or prizes for inventions made in the 

 Institution, and against any exercise of favoritism by the authori- 

 ties. 



In some respects the Royal Institution departed from Rumford's 

 intentions as soon as he relinquished his somewhat despotic con- 

 trol. He obviously had in mind a sort of technological school and 

 laboratory for inventing useful appliances, and testing them for 

 the benefit of the public according to the idea thus expressed in his 

 Prospectus: 



"It is an undoubtable truth that the successive improvements 

 in the condition of man, from a state of ignorance and barbarism 

 to that of the highest cultivation and refinement, are usually ef- 

 fected by the aid of machinery in procuring the necessaries, the 

 comforts and the elegancies of life; and that the preeminence of 

 any people in civilization is, and ought ever to be, estimated by 

 the state of industry and mechanical improvement among them." 



When Rumford left England the instruction in mechanics was 

 quietly dropped, because it was thought that teaching science to 

 the lower classes had a dangerous political tendency. The stone 

 staircase leading to the mechanics' gallery was torn down, the 

 culinary contrivances and the models were put away, and the 

 workmen discharged. For a time the Royal Institution seemed 

 likely to degenerate into a mere fashionable lecture course for 

 "a number of silly women and dilettante philosophers." 



The Royal Institution owes its survival and success to the fact 

 that it has always contained one or two determined investigators, 

 and that they were given a free hand. Rumford rightly prided 

 himself on his choice of Humphry Davy, then twenty-three years 

 old, as assistant lecturer in chemistry, at a salary of $500 a year, 

 room, coals and candles and a folding bed from the model room 

 being provided for his accommodation. Five years later in the 

 laboratory of the Royal Institution, Davy decomposed the fixed 

 alkalies by the electric current, and obtained from them the new 

 metals, sodium and potassium. Faraday, then twenty-one, at- 

 tended four lectures of Sir Humphry Davy, wrote out his notes, 

 illustrated them by sketches of the apparatus, and sent them in to 



