Thomas Young
 (1773-1829) 

Thomas Young was a man who contributed top scholar work to many different fields of learning. The first of ten children born to Thomas Young senior and Sarah Davis he was born on June 16th 1773 in an old Bank house which is still standing to this day, in a little village called Milverton, in England. Young was a remarkable child at the tender age of two he had already learned to read, and by the age of six he is said to have read the bible twice. By the age of nineteen this extremely smart young man has learned on his own to read Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Ethiopian, and had time to master calculus, chemistry, and physics on the side. On June 14th 1804, Thomas Young married Eliza Maxwell, who was the second daughter of J.D Maxwell of Cavendish Square and of Trippendence, near Farnborough, Kent. The marriage seems to have been in every way a singularly happy one, and his wife, who was extremely young at the time, survived him through time when he was indulged in research. His relations with his wife’s family were also most happy and warm.

At the age of nineteen he began his medial education at Hunterian School of Anatomy in the autumn of 1792 in London. Young took rooms in Little Queen Street, Westminster, and in the autumn of 1793 entered St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Young had a well-known band of teachers, in medicine he had Sir Alexander Crichton one of the leading physicians, and John Latham, later President of the Royal College of Physicians. In midwifery his teachers were William Osborne, who claimed to have taught more than 1200 practitioners, John Clarke, who, after having the largest midwifery practice in London, became a consultant on the diseases of women and children. In botany his lecturer was Sir James Smith, founder and first president of the Linnean Society. His medical studies, however did not absorb all of his energies he still devoted some to his literary and linguistics studies. Young took his M.B degree at Cambridge in March 1803 and his M.D degree in July 1808, the dates in both cases being the earliest at which the regulations would permit him to proceed to the degrees. His fellow students at Cambridge nicknamed him Phenomenon Young because he was such a gifted intellectual.

During Young’s two years in his medical studies in London he became very interested in the physiology of the human eye. He set out to discover how the eye was able to view objects at very close distances. Two views had been held on this firstly that the length of the eyeball could be altered so as to adjust the distance of the retina, which receives the image, like is done in a camera. Secondly the power of the lens was altered, the faces become more strongly curved, and the lens therefore more powerful when it is necessary to focus an object at short range. Young’s attention was directed towards the eye of an ox. He noticed how flexible and muscular the so-called crystalline lens was. The result of the efforts to focus on near objects is that the lens increases the curving of its faces and so increases it’s converge power, when the eye is relaxed it is focused on distant objects. Young was the first to explain how the human eye can focus on objects at different distances. He also explained by experimenting with his own eyes, the nature of astigmatism, which is a defect of a lens of the eyes that prevent light rays from meeting in a single focal point.

Young as well did research on the nature of color blindness this led him to state the three-component theory of color vision in 1801. This was further developed during the 1850’s by a German physicist, Hermann Von Helmholtz, this theory is also know as the Young-Helmholtz theory or the trichromatic theory. The theory proposes that the eye have three types of fibers that are sensitive to different wavelengths of light. When light strikes the fibers, they generate electrical signals that travel directly to the brain. According to the three component theory, the color sensations that arise in the brain correspond to the electrical signals in a simple and direct way. Scientific experiments have confirmed the existence of the three types of fibers, which are now called cones. Each type of cone is particularly sensitive to one of three general ranges of wavelengths of light those corresponding to red, green, and blue. All the other colors are simply combinations of these three basic colors. This theory is the basis of modern color photography and color television.

Subsequently Young’s work on vision led him to explore the nature of light. He was interested in the workings of the human ears and eyes and dedicated much time to a study of sound and light. He knew that if two sound waves of equal intensity reach the ear 1800out of phase, they cancel each other out and no sound is heard. It occurred to him that a similar interference effect should result with two beams of light if, like sound, light consisted of waves. This led Young to an experiment now commonly referred to as Young’s double-slit experiment. Experiments with double-slit interference, Newton’s rings, and thin films convinced him that light was a wave motion of some kind. Young never developed the mathematics to explain his wave model of light properly, and so the French physicist Fresnel, who did, is often given more credit then Young for the wave theory.

In his latter years Young devoted most of his time to his first love, languages. He dedicated years of intense study to deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics found on the Rosetta stone discovered in the Nile Delta in 1799. In 1814 Young’s interest was a roused by the stone and he took a copy of the inscription with him on his annual visit to Worthing, together with the published results of de Sacy and Akerblad, and settled down to work at the enchorial script. He enclosed his translation of the first five lines of the inscription. However some of the demotic characters were derived from the hieroglyphic and that the demotic was there fore probably in part symbolic as had been thought entirely alphabetical, was a very important step in the interpretation of the script. It is much too important to be board cast without confirmatory evidence, and so Young collected all the available materials and subjected his study to careful scrutiny. His ideas of this are the basis for our understanding of communication.

Thomas Young was a brilliant intellectual, but had little understanding of human sensitivities. He was honest, and sometimes too honest in appraising the scholarly work of his contemporaries, and made enemies as a result. Much of his scientific work was published anonymously because he did not want his patients to think that his heart was not in his medical practice.

Early in January 1829 Young’s health began to fail, the first symptoms being repeated attacks to asthma and general weakness. He made it on through April and died on May 10. The post mortem examination carried out by his doctors revealed an ossification of the aorta extending to the heart. The appearance being of a completely worn out man. This disease which must have been caused by his constant labor, usually assails a person of a much later age then 56. He was buried at Farnborough in Kent on May 16th, in the family vault of the Maxwell’s.

To conclude, Thomas Young is a well-known name to all scientists, and will always be remembered for his for his study on the human ear, the human eye, how it focuses and on astigmatism. Also for his research on color blindness which led him, to the three-component theory of color vision. He will be remembered for his double-slit experiment and his work on the fabulous Rosetta Stone. Although Thomas Young will be remember for all of these well accomplished contributions to science I believe he will most be remembered for his extraordinary mind and as an especially hard working man who never seized to give up on his research.

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