THE LAST MAN WHO KNEW EVERYTHING

Serviceable life of the autodidact’s autodidact, bringing recognition to a chap all but forgotten for the last couple of hundred years.

Thomas Young (1773–1829) was not someone you’d want to go up against on Jeopardy! Indeed, writes British science journalist Robinson, the London Science Museum opines that “Young probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history. He made discoveries in nearly every field he studied.” Among his contributions were advances in the wave theory of light, for which Young squared off against the orthodox Newtonian physicists of his day (thanks to Einstein, both Newton and Young can be viewed as sort of right), and his discovery of how the eye focuses on objects at different distances. Add to that his mastering dozens of languages, inventing the category “Indo-European” along the way, developing of a rule of thumb for adjusting adult dosages of medications for children’s use, and inventing a method of tuning a harpsichord, and deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, and it becomes clear that Young was an uncommon force who little deserves the obscurity into which he has fallen. Save, of course, that yesterday’s revolutionaries become today’s establishment become tomorrow’s deposed fuddy-duddies, which is just what happened; in his own time, Young, accused of committing “gratuitous fictions” in his work on the physics of light, lost ground to nose-to-the-grindstone types who had more patience for the hard, dull work of endless experimentation. Robinson varies, not always successfully, between dumbing down the science and plunging full-tilt into arcana, and many linguists will still want to give pride of place to Champollion on the matter of the Rosetta Stone. Still, he gives a good account of Young, who emerges in the end as something of a proto-nerd, brilliant but not much fun in company, incapable of telling a joke but able to explain the world.

Solid but plodding, like its exemplary subject.