March 15, 2010, Kaunakakai, Hawaii - Einstein wrong!
Relativity overturned!
Luminiferous ether discovered!
                            -Molokai Dispatch News
For more details go to here.
American-British physicist and scoundrel who, while drilling out cannons in the Munich munitions works, noticed that the canon became hot as long as the friction of boring continued. Furthermore, Rumford observed, the amount of heat released would be sufficient to completely melt the canon if it could be returned to the metal. Since more heat was being released than could have been originally contained in the metal, these observations were an outright contradiction to the caloric theory.  Rumford was therefore led to conclude that it was the mechanical process of boring which was producing the heat.  Rumford even calculated a value of the mechanical equivalent of heat which, however, was not nearly as accurate as the one reported later by Joule.

Nonetheless, despite the solidity of his results, physicists of his day ignored his work as unconvincing, clinging instead to the caloric theory of heat as a fluid. It is rather surprising, given the great interest in the unity of Nature, that the first quantitative verification of the convertibility of two apparently different physical entities was completely ignored by the entire community. Some degree of hesitancy to abandon the conventional caloric theory would be understandable, but disregarding such cogent and basic results as those produced by Rumford's investigations is difficult to understand. It was only a matter of time, however, until Rumford's experiments were repeated and improved by others, eventually leading to the acceptance of the equivalence of heat and work.

Although historians usually cite only his work on heat,  he made numerous practical innovations, including central heating, the smokeless chimney, the kitchen oven, thermal underwear, the pressure cooker, and numerous others. In later life, he married (and then became estranged from) Lavoisier's widow Marie-Anne. Rumford was overbearingly arrogant and had no friends, as well as having a life filled with repeated cycles of rapid rises to prominence followed by equally rapid falls to penury. His abrasive personality and style are perhaps why his many innovations were not widely chronicled by historians.