I never really questioned who Smithson was until I read this
article from them, about how the Smithsonian Institution came to be, James
Smithson (1765-1829) was a well-to-do English scientist who had never
visited the United States, in his 1826 will,
he left his estate to his nephew, but he ended his will with an odd clause that
said if that nephew died without heirs, legitimate or illegitimate, the estate
would go “to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the
name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase &
diffusion of knowledge among men.” when Smithson’s nephew died without
heirs in 1835, the peculiar clause went into effect, on July 28, 1835,
Smithson’s solicitors notified the United States government of the bequest,
an 1835 article in the National Intelligencer told
the public that a “gentleman of Paris” (he was born in secret in Paris, where
his mother had gone to hide her pregnancy), had left a bequest to the
United States, for the purpose of endowing a National University,
the amount he left was not small, it totalled half a million
dollars, or 1/66 of the United States' entire federal budget at the time, but
here was the rub, just twenty years before, the British
had burned the Capitol, and anti-British sentiment was still quite high and led to a fierce debate in congress,
but cooler heads prevailed and the bequest was finally accepted by Andrew Jackson.
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