Yet another side to Thomas Young

10 Mar 2011

A quick glance at the official minutes of the Board of Longitude demonstrates the limited understanding we have of Thomas Young's daily activities toward the end of his lifespan despite the huge amounts of research done on his life and intellectual work in that period.

Successful in so many endeavours some of Young's achievements are inevitably going to be pushed to the side. Two of Young's achievements in particular dominate work on him, from the memoir written just after his death by his good friend, Hudson Gurney, to the 2007 biography by Andrew Robinson, The Last Man Who Knew Everything.

The first of Young's achievements that has been concentrated on in biographical work was his contribution to the translation of the Rosetta Stone. Young's work in Egyptology and hieroglyphics was done in his leisure time surrounding his Secretarial and Superintendent duties for the Admiralty and the Board of Longitude.

Shortly after his death Young's role in the translation became a matter of national pride with a re-invention of Young and his achievements taking place in obituaries and biographies; a prominence was given to his linguistic work to claim the translation of the Rosetta Stone as a British triumph. The Rosetta Stone had been the focus of nationalistic rivalries ever since its transfer from French to British possession in the Napoleonic Wars. At the time of Young's death he was embroiled in a very public disagreement over reforms of the Nautical Almanac and was hugely unpopular in certain quarters; yet he was quickly established as a great intellectual, a man that Britain could be proud of, for translating the secrets of the ancient Egyptians. 

The Rosetta Stone is still remember in this way, situated in the British Museum as one of the key pieces of its collection. Today much of the credit for translation goes to the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion. Yet it is still claimed that Young's discovery that cartouches around certain repeating sets of hieroglyphics are indicative of proper nouns, which could then be compared with the Greek and demotic texts, was the linchpin of any translation. In the 1970s French visitors to the British Museum complained that the portrait of Young was larger than the one of Champollion on the information panel for the Rosetta Stone; the portraits were actually the same size.

Secondly Young's work on optics is a prominent feature in biographies and how we remember Young in this context is again shaped by the biographer's ambition. George Peacock portrayed Young in his 1855 biography as the 'father of the wave theory of light' in an attempt to get it introduced into the Cambridge Tripos, which was dominated by Newtonian physics including his corpuscular theory of light. Yet with another re-imagining of Young, some slight exaggeration and embellishment, he and his wave theory could be represented as a continuation and expansion of Newton, rather than as opposition. Wave theory from a man who believed in Newtonian physics and ideals would help to get it included in the Tripos. Young was a conservative, gentlemen of science and famed for opposing change for changes sake in scientific thinking and administration; he had publicly clashed with Charles Babbage who had previously demanded change in the Mathematics Tripos during his time at Cambridge.

These manipulations of Young's story result in his work as a civil servant being neglected. The last two decades of his life were spent working as Secretary to the Committee for Weights and Measures, Secretary to the Board of Longitude and the Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac. He helped the Admiralty and the Royal Society to accomplish achievements that were just as important to national pride as his work done on the translation of the Rosetta Stone and our understanding of light. The two most significant examples are the establishment of the Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope and the search for the North West Passage.

One of Young's duties as Secretary of the Board of Longitude was to verify any claim for the £20,000 prize offered by the Board for the discovery of a North-West Passage. On the 27th November 1820, Lieutenants William Edward Parry, Henry Parkyns Hoppner and Matthew Liddon along with Captain Edward Sabine claimed that in the previous year they obtained a longitude of 110º West of Greenwich sailing within the Artic Circle. Young's correspondence with Hudson Gurney tells us that this endeavour had economic as well as national significance, affected the domestic supply of whale oil used in lamps and wool combing: "And here is the polar expedition arrived, whom I am to examine on their oaths to get them the £5000, which it seems will be spent in lowering the price of oil, by the information they have given the whalers."



Young was a man of many great achievements; John Herschel called him a "truly original genius" and his time spent helping to co-ordinate the establishment of the Observatory is not well documented but this endeavour was regarded as much more important that his work on hieroglyphics by his contemporaries. When Sir Joseph Banks seconding Davies Gilbert's proposal of a Cape Observatory, he declared that 'nothing could more essentially promote the glory of this country, than to be foremost in such an undertaking.'

Young's expanse of work is a challenge to any historian, so we must allow for the neglect of some aspects of his endeavours. Yet hopefully from the Board of Longitude archives a new historical understanding of Thomas Young as Secretary and Civil Servant will emerge, to complement his already well documented work in linguistics and optics. We hope to find yet another side to Thomas Young.

Picture credits: Print of Thomas Young, after Thomas Lawrence, c. 1810, Science and Society Picture Library; Rosetta Stone, Wikimedia Commons; The Crews of the H.M.S Hecla and Griper Cutting into Winter Harbour, Sept. 26th, 1819, Wikimedia Commons.