A duke's illegitimate son left his fortune to the United States, which used it to found the Smithsonian

James Smithson was born in Paris about 1765 as Jacques-Louis Macie, the illegitimate son of Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie and Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland. Born outside marriage, he had no claim to his father's title or estates. He studied at Pembroke College, Oxford, was elected to the Royal Society in 1787 and published 27 papers; the zinc mineral smithsonite is named after him. He took the surname Smithson after his mother died. He wrote that "the best blood of England flows in my veins." His 1826 will left his fortune to his nephew Henry James Hungerford. If the nephew died without children, it went "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." Smithson died in Genoa on 27 June 1829. The nephew died unmarried and childless in 1835. Richard Rush went to London to claim the money in the Court of Chancery. In August 1838 he returned with 104,960 gold sovereigns, reminted as $508,318.46. Congress argued over the use of the money until President Polk signed the act founding the Smithsonian on 10 August 1846. A final $54,165.38 came in 1864 from the nephew's mother, Marie de la Batut. Alexander Graham Bell brought Smithson's body from Genoa in January 1904, and it lies in the Smithsonian Castle. In 2026 the Smithsonian runs 21 museums.