A fox with a bit of hedgehog

Replace the commas in the subtitle of this book, ‘Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone Among Other Feats of Genius’, with exclamation marks, and it reads like the title of a Gillray cartoon or the patter of a circus huckster. The problem we have with polymaths, as Andrew Robinson points out in his introduction, is that they do seem too good to be true. When it comes to Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction between thinkers — hedgehogs, who know one big thing, and foxes, who know many things — we are generally more comfortable with the hedgehogs. Or rather, preferring to pin thinkers down into easily memorable categories, we will foxes into hedgehogs. The foxes, with their wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and manifold talents excite our suspicion. Perhaps they are plausible quacks; perhaps they force us to acknowledge our own blinkered specialisms.

Thomas Young, with his achievements in optics, physics, medicine, philology, life insurance and mechanics (among other things), was a remarkable figure in the early 19th century; he now has the biography he deserves. He was elected to the Royal Society at the tender age of 21. In his late twenties his theory of optics in the eye led to researches which demonstrated that light acted as waves, not, as Newton had said, a stream of corpuscles. In his forties he contributed 63 articles to the supplement of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on subjects as diverse and complicated as bridges, ancient Egypt and tides; at the same time he was making the first moves in the unlocking of the riddle of the Rosetta Stone. And these are just a few of the things that Young managed to cram into his life.