May/June 2016
25
HISTORICAL
because it was when he became secretary of
the Royal Society and lectured on physical
optics. He again became controversial for
differing with Newton on various aspects of
optics and mathematics.
In the summer of 1805 or 1806, he moved
his medical practice to Worthing, a sea
coast resort near Brighton. It appears he
spent much of the winter in London and
then resumed his medical practice on the
coast as the weather warmed.
He finally got his MD from Cambridge in
1808, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal
College of Medicine in 1809. He began
lecturing at London’s Middlesex Hospital
that same year. However, it wasn’t until
1811 that he received an appointment to St.
George’s Hospital.
In 1813, Thomas Young published
Introduction to Medical Literature
,
Including
a System of Practical Nosology.
10
Then, in
1815, he published
A Practical and Historical
Treatise on Consumptive Disease
. Despite the
wide acceptance of these two volumes, his
medical reputation and practice did not
increase. His interest in such a wide range
of subjects offended his fellow physicians.
He was considered a great philosopher, but
a poor physician.
Throughout the years, Young had been
developing an interest in linguistics and
deciphering documents especially ancient
Roman and Greek documents.
11
In
1814, he began developing an interest in
Egyptian languages and hieroglyphics. He
made his first report on his work to the
Royal Society that same year. He then got
a copy of the Rosetta Stone and took it
with him to Worthing. He discovered that
the cursive equivalent of the hieroglyphics
was a mixture of representatives of the
hieroglyphics and letters of an alphabet. He
also proposed a phonetic element to the
hieroglyphics. As Secretary of the Royal
Society, he also communicated his progress
to a Frenchman, Champollion, who was
also working on the Rosetta Stone.
Both men continued working on the
Rosetta Stone. Young made several
substantial breakthroughs and published
his entire work in the Egypt section of
the fourth edition of the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica
. Finally, in 1821, Champollion
published his deciphering of the Rosetta
Stone without giving Young any credit for
his pioneering breakthroughs. Young never
disputed that Champollion was the first
to fully decipher the Rosetta Stone, but he
could never forgive him for not giving him
the credit he was due.
From 1816 to 1825, Thomas Young wrote
63 articles for the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
.
12
He wrote on almost any subject you
can think of, including earthquakes,
13
weights and measures,
14
tides, longitude
carpentry,
15
mines, and insurance;
his section on linguistics covered 400
languages in depth.
His writing and scientific work was so
ahead of its time that he was in constant
scientific controversy. In 1821, in order
to escape his anger over Champollion’s
Rosetta Stone slight, the Youngs traveled to
Italy, Switzerland and Paris. However, their
trip was cut short when Thomas’s mother-
in-law died.
Young had a longtime interest in British
mortality rates. For years, he had fought the
idea that English insurance rates were based
on a single county’s mortality rate. As one
of his many interests, he had calculated a
mortality rate using the mortality rates of
counties throughout Great Britain, and he
had written extensively on insurance and
annuities. It was no surprise when he was
appointed Inspector of Calculations and
Physician for Eagle Star Assurance at £500
per year in 1824.
In 1828, while on a trip to Geneva, he
began experiencing severe fatigue. Over
the next year, his symptoms increased
with fatigue, shortness of breath, and
hemoptysis. He died on May 10, 1829.
10. The volume was republished in 1823.
11. He was already famous for having deciphered
papyrus scrolls from Herculaneum.
12. To begin with, the articles were written
anonymously. Then Young found he would get
four guineas more per article if he let them use his
name. That was a 25 percent increase.
13. He was the first to identify the energy waves of
earthquakes as the destructive force.
14. Young also served on the Government Commission
on Weights and Measures and headed the
committee that made the official comparison of the
Imperial Units and the metric system.
15. He also served on the Board of Longitude.
Thomas Young's sketch of two-slit diffraction, which he presented to the Royal Society in 1803.
An image from Thomas Young’s “Lectures,” publ. 1807,
the text of lectures to London’s Royal Institution in 1802.
Shows Young’s experience of the “two slit” phenomenon,
which supports wave theory of light.
Image via Public
Domain,
.
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