Thomas Young | Biography

A child prodigy, Young learned to read by age two and twice finished the Bible by age six. He learned more than a dozen languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Arabic.. He was a musician proficient in several instruments, an accomplished actor, and a versatile athlete. When still a young man he inherited a substantial amount of money, allowing him the freedom to devote his time to research and experimentation. Today, he is highly regarded in a number of fields ranging from physics to Egyptology. Young was born in Somerset, England. He was encouraged by his great uncle, a prominent London physician, to study medicine, and in 1792 he enrolled at the University of Edinburgh. He soon traveled to Germany and earned his medical degree from the University of Gottingen in 1796. Young opened his own practice in London in 1799, largely subsidized by an inheritance left by his great uncle. At this same time he attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was given the nickname "Phenomenon" Young. He received his M.B. in 1803 and his second M.D. in 1808. While still a student, Young had attracted the attention of the British scientific community. His first paper in 1794 earned him a fellowship to the British Royal Society. The paper described the behavior of the human eye's lens as it changes shape to focus on objects at different distances; a behavior that is called accommodation. Young followed up this paper with research into astigmatism. Since Young himself suffered from astigmatism, he used his own eyes as the subject of experimentation. He announced in 1801 that astigmatism was the result of an improperly curved cornea. While Young's scientific reputation was growing, his professional life was faltering badly. He was considered a poor physician because he possessed a poor bedside manner. Instead, then, of working directly with patients, he served as both a consultant and a researcher for St. Bartholomew's Hospital, positions he retained his entire life. Young also served briefly as the Professor of Natural Philosophy for the newly formed Royal Institution. Though he was welcomed in 1801, his lectures were considered too technical and weighted with mathematics--particularly when considering the popular audiences for whom the lectures were intended. Thus, he was encouraged to leave the Royal Institution in 1803. Given the freedom to experiment as he pleased, Young proceeded to address a wide variety of scientific issues. After his study of the human eye, he became interested in the nature of light itself. This was a dilemma of monumental importance to the European scientific community, which was almost evenly split between two dominant theories: corpuscular (that light traveled as a stream of particles) and undulatory (that light moved in waves). To Young, the wave theory of light seemed far more logical, and he set out to prove its validity in 1803. It is undeniable that water moves in waves; therefore, thought Young, if light could be shown to behave in the same fashion as water, it, too, must travel in waves. In a pool of water, two waves will interact, causing interference; where they overlap, the waves will either amplify each other or cancel each other out. Young recreated this action by allowing light to pass though two tiny slits, producing two separate beams. As the beams interacted, bright lines appeared where the beams were amplified and dark patches appeared where they were canceled out. Young's work was not well received in England because it contrasted with the opinions of Sir Isaac Newton, the chief proponent of the corpuscular theory of light. Generally, English scientists were loathe to deny Newton's theories, and even more upset when he was challenged by another English scientist, which seemed unpatriotic to some. Thus, it was left to the French physicists Augustin-Jean Fresnel and Dominique-Françios Arago to repeat and support Young's experiments before the undulatory theory of light was accepted. Even in the face of criticism Young continued to experiment with light. He was the first to demonstrate that the human eye saw only three colors--red, green, and blue--and that all other colors were combinations of those three. This proposal was further illustrated by Hermann von Helmholtz and is now known as the Young-Helmholtz three-color theory. Young also dabbled in more diverse disciplines, often with landmark results. He experimented with liquids, striving to understand the nature of surface tensions. His research on elasticity yielded an equation for relating the amount of stress in an elastic substance to the strain; this equation, which includes Young's modulus of elasticity, is still an important tool for engineers. He was the first to use the word " energy" in its modern form (the ability to do work), and he championed the effort to defeat the caloric theory of heat. In his later years, Young turned his efforts in a very different direction: Egyptology. In 1799 archaeologists discovered the Rosetta Stone, a stone tablet covered with ancient hieroglyphics. Young was the first person to successfully decipher a significant portion of the Rosetta Stone, and he rapidly became the foremost authority on ancient Egypt. He summarized his knowledge in 1818 in a highly respected article for the Encyclopedia Britannica.