Thomas was a child prodigy, he could read by the age of two and a couple of years later had read the Bible through twice. His parents probably realised that their brilliant child would have better opportunities elsewhere and Thomas stayed with his teacher aunt at Minehead and later went to a Quaker school in Dorset. He learnt many languages and became interested in science. From the age of 12 his voracious thirst for knowledge continued at the home of a rich Quaker at Ware, Herts. After recovery from illness he resolved to become a doctor and found a willing sponsor in a great-uncle, Dr Richard Brocklesby.
In London he studied the eye and was elected to the Royal Society at the age of 21. His medical education continued at Edinburgh, Gottingen and Cambridge but he had to wait several years for his qualifications to be recognised. During that time he concentrated on physics and made significant discoveries. He showed that the eye lens changes shape to focus at various distances, suggested that 3 kinds of receptor are responsible for colour vision and his two slit experiment established the wave theory of light. The latter was controversial at the time because most physicists followed Newton’s theory that light consists of particles. From 1801 to 1803 he was the Professor of Physics at the Royal Institution and his lectures covered all aspects of many topics along with their applications and history. I found the printed lectures fascinating when I read them recently and was reminded that he is the Young of Young’s modulus. In acoustics he worked out Young’s temperament for proper tuning of organs and this features in some new organs to this day.
After publishing his lectures Young concentrated on his medical career. He had a small summer practice at Worthing, gave lectures in London which surveyed the whole subject and in 1811 was elected to a post at St George’s Hospital. He was too aware of the deficiencies of medicine in those days to be a popular physician but continued his hospital visits for two decades. Nevertheless, Young’s rule for calculating the dose of medicine for children was used long after his time.
In 1814 he was distracted by the Rosetta Stone with its inscriptions in three scripts and tried to decipher its hieroglyphics. He made some important breakthroughs but the hieroglyphic translation was completed by Champollion, a brilliant Frenchman. Young, however, worked out the demotic script on another part of the Stone.
Young was called on for articles by the Encyclopaedia Britannica and among his 63 contributions there were notable pieces on Egypt, languages, bridges, tides and many biographies included one on Porson, a great classical scholar. He was the first scholar to identify Indo-European languages as a distinct group.
He was secretary to the committee that made recommendations on weights and measures and, among other things, standardised the Imperial Gallon which lingers on to this day. For the last decade of his life he was superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, an onerous task with its intricate calculations and the need to iron out errors that had crept in before he took over.
Altogether, he was a very remarkable man and what I have written above just gives a taste of his abilities and achievements. He died in 1829 at the age of 55 and his wife, Eliza, a great supporter, made sure that there was a memorial plaque in Westminster Abbey and after much badgering from her a biography was produced in 1855. The excellent 1954 biography by Alexander Wood and Frank Oldham is now superseded by The Last Man who Knew Everything by Andrew Robinson (2006). Here is the conclusion of this splendid book:
‘Thomas Young really did approximate to “the last man who knew everything” – however much he himself would have denied this - and we can safely say, with the endless expansion ... of knowledge, that no one will be able to stake this awesome claim ever again.’ (p. 239)
