Records of Jacob Bigelow, Rumford Professor and Lecturer on the Application of Science to the Useful Arts

Jacob Bigelow (1787-1879), a botanist and physician in Boston, Massachusetts, served as lecturer at the Harvard Medical School from 1815 to 1818; Rumford Professor and Lecturer on the Application of Science to the Useful Arts from 1816 to 1827; Professor of Materia Medica from 1815 to 1855; and as a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers from 1846 to 1854. After graduating from Harvard College in 1806, Bigelow received his Doctor of Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1810. In 1811, Bigelow established a medical practice in Boston and began a series of botanical lectures at Harvard College with William Dandridge Peck (1763-1822), Massachusetts Professor of Natural History.

As the Rumford Professor at Harvard, Bigelow's objective was to apply scientific principles to improve daily life and the human condition. Although Bigelow only served as Rumford professor for eleven years, he helped solidify the teaching of the applied sciences at Harvard. As a classroom instructor, Bigelow taught his students using scientific demonstrations and experiments. Bigelow created a large collection of working models to demonstrate scientific principles in his lectures. He built architectural working models of domes, roofs, arches, walls, and columns; models of chimney stoves and fireplaces; various steam engines, windmills, and watermills; and three working models of the Waltham, Massachusetts cotton factory. Subjects discussed in his classroom involved the strength of various materials, the methods of illumination, heating, ventilation, metallurgy, writing and printing, engraving and lithography, locomotion, machinery, horology, and the preservation of organic substances. Bigelow's lectures were delivered to large audiences each semester. Seeking a more accurate word to describe the application of practical knowledge and instruction, Bigelow coined the term "technology" to describe the use of scientific ideas in the useful arts, and in 1829, Bigelow published his lectures under the title Elements of Technology, taken chiefly from a Course of Lectures delivered at Cambridge, on the Application of the Sciences to the Useful Arts.

In 1816, Benjamin Thompson (1753-1814), also known as Count Rumford, a British physicist, inventor, and social reformer, bequeathed an annuity of $1000, a reversion of a $400 annuity he bequeathed his daughter, and his residuary estate, to Harvard College for the establishment of a professorship to "teach regular courses of academical and public lectures" in the field of the practical sciences. The establishment of the Rumford Professorship illustrated the new emphasis on the application of science at Harvard and in many other colleges in America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first five incumbents of the new chair were subsequently known as the "Rumford Professor and Lecturer on the Application of the Sciences to the Useful Arts." After 1910, "Lectureship" was removed from the title and the holders of the chair were known as the "Rumford Professor of Physics."