The Last Man Who Knew Everything   by Andrew Robinson

Thomas Young, of Youngʼs slits and Youngʼs modulus fame, born in 1773 and in eminence from 1800 to 1829, turns out to have invented and discovered many, many things in his lifetime, as well as occupy very senior positions. By far the most important: he was the one who worked out that light was a transverse wave phenomenon with polarization, whose colour was determined by the wavelength, and that the human eye picked up the colours around three spectral centres (red, green and blue) and then the brain processed the information to give us the view of the world around us that we perceive.

He also helped found the Royal Institution alongside Humphrey Davey, was the Royal Societyʼs foreign secretary for most of his working life, and latterly led the mapping activities at Greenwich. But despite all this, he put most of his professional energy into medical training and trying to establish a medical practice in Worthing, which never really succeeded.

Evidently a secretly vain person who spent most of his life publishing anonymously and not taking any more credit (often less) than he deserved, but close to death he wrote his own autobiographical obituary in which he lauded his own achievements and clearly wanted his mark on history to be recorded. He also acknowledged that he was a polymath who spread himself far too thinly, opening up avenues of research and then leaving them for others to continue.

This book is a swift outline of his life, with the shallowest of explanation or detail of his actual cerebral efforts. It is intended for the layperson who has never heard of him. It is pretty much a re-writing of the autobiography, including a re-visiting of a couple of other biographies that have been written since his death.

It is interesting to read about life at the turn of the nineteenth century, although it is very clear that this is a very privileged man who inherited a good fortune and eventually lived at the heart of Londonʼs high society. But in his time he travelled the length and breadth of Scotland on horseback, ran a general practitioner surgery in Worthing (nothing like todayʼs GPs!), and rubbed shoulders with all the great scientists, home and abroad in Europe, of the day. So not only is his life extraordinary, but only scantly told.

Thoroughly interesting book, but thin on the ground, especially in the science department.