4H LEADING AMERICAN MEN OF SCIENCE 



best work whatever it may be," and no body of workers could have 

 been more free to work out their own salvation. The atmosphere 

 was exactly suited to Rowland. He could not brook restraint. 

 He had to do things in his own way. He was not fitted for the 

 ordinary routine duties of a professor. He was an investigator, 

 and to the work of investigation he turned at once. 



He soon devised a method for the redetermination of the 

 Mechanical Equivalent of Heat. This fundamental constant 

 had been determined by others. Rumford laid the foundation 

 for the work in observations made in boring cannon in the ordnance 

 foundry at Munich, Bavaria. His attention was arrested by the 

 well-known fact that the metal became hot in consequence of the 

 friction caused by the boring. He then attempted to determine 

 the amount of heat produced by a certain amount of work, or in 

 other words to determine the relation between the amount of 

 work done and the amount of heat evolved. Joule of Manchester, 

 much later, took up this problem and with the aid of more refined 

 apparatus and methods obtained a much more satisfactory result. 

 Rowland used a modification of the method of Rumford. He 

 obtained a figure for the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat that 

 differed somewhat from those obtained by his predecessors and 

 for twenty-five years this has stood the test of criticism. While he 

 was engaged in the work he received a visit from a well-known 

 chemist. After Rowland had explained what he was doing the 

 visitor asked this question: " Suppose you should find that you 

 get the same result as Joule, will you consider that you have 

 wasted your time?" To which Rowland replied, "No. If my 

 result should be the same as Joule's, that will prove that Joule 

 was right." 



I wish I had a picture of the surroundings in which this impor- 

 tant work was carried on. The original back kitchen was not ade- 

 quate. It happened that the university had come into possession 

 of a small old building on a near street. This had been used as a 

 grocery store. In the rear was a most disreputable looking room, 

 dirty, small, dilapidated. Here the delicate apparatus was set up 

 and here the experiments were carried on day by day, and it is 



