Polymath or jack of all trades? Too many talents can be a mixed blessing, as Thomas Young, one of the most intelligent Englishmen who ever lived, found out. His work was overlooked or misunderstood in a vast number of fields from physics and engineering to Egyptology, in all of which he has since been shown to have made a huge contribution. He was the first person to prove that light is a wave. He discovered how the eye focuses and he coined the phrase “Indo-European”. His lectures to the Royal Institution were reprinted as recently as 2002. Yet he is scarcely a household name.

Young’s abilities showed themselves early. Born in 1773 into a strict Quaker family, he learnt to read at the age of two. By five he had got through Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels and decided he didn’t care for English fiction. Although he trained as a doctor, the rest of his life was chiefly devoted to science, or “natural philosophy”, as it was then known. He was born at an auspicious time; a child of the enlightenment growing up in the age of the Romanticism, he lived in a world where the boundaries between disciplines had yet to harden, and where Humphry Davy, his fellow lecturer at the Royal Institution, could publish in the same magazine as Keats. Whole new areas of knowledge were opening up, and with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the discovery of the Rosetta stone came the possibility of deciphering the language of the pharaohs. Young was keen to have a go and his efforts made him the first person to read demotic script since the fall of the Roman Empire.

Even by the standards of that remarkable time, however, “Phenomenon Young” as he was known, not entirely kindly, at Cambridge, extended himself in more directions than was thought proper. Andrew Robinson’s admiration for his subject is profound but judicious. He is careful in the claims he makes and points out that however seductive the myth of the lone genius, the reality of scholarship is more complex and collaborative. He is frank, too, about the points where Young’s multiple interests proved distracting and he failed to follow through his insights. He often published anonymously and his explanations of his theories were frequently laconic to the point of obscurity. Despite which, he could hardly be said to be his own worst enemy as long as Henry Brougham and Jean-François Champollion were alive. Brougham, the brilliant Whig politician, lawyer and amateur physicist, attacked Young’s theories about light waves in a series of articles in the Edinburgh Review that were so damning that Young’s publisher withdrew his contract. In Brougham, Young faced the envy of the amateur who had his own, quite mistaken ideas, while in Champollion, who went on to become the founder of modern Egyptology, Young met the ire of the specialist. Champollion made use of Young’s researches while consistently trying to write him out of the early history of the decoding of hieroglyphics.

Robinson’s is primarily an intellectual biography, with chapters devoted to the various facets of his subject’s career. The descriptions of Young’s — horribly hazardous — experiments on his own eyes are not for the squeamish, and the explanations of colour and light theories will challenge those who never got to A-level physics. Even Robinson admits defeat when it comes to Young’s innovatory theory about tides, announcing that this is “a difficult subject, even for specialists, and we shall not venture into it”, which is, on the whole, a relief.

From this perspective, Young’s personality emerges obliquely, but disarmingly. Although he abandoned the Quaker tradition, he remained somewhat severe. He was “not easily seduced into enthusiasm” as his first biographer put it with perhaps considerable understatement, and he took his pleasures seriously. As a student in Edinburgh, he was found by a friend with a ruler and compasses working out an improved version of the minuet. Yet the assertion by one of the Cambridge dons, who had found the young polymath irksome, that he “never could make a joke or understand one”, is manifestly untrue. Young’s letters to his sister-in-law and his lifelong friend Hudson Gurney are imbued with a wry if sometimes tetchy humour. His relationship with his much younger wife was remarkably happy and his autobiography contains some poignant insights, not least, reflecting on his life’s work, the thought that intellectually he had been “born old and died young”. This was to be literally the case, too, for he died unexpectedly at the age of 56 and was soon largely forgotten. His reputation has since been secured among scientists, but Robinson’s engaging biography will bring him to the wider public he deserves.

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16.19 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

Times Recommends

• The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway
• Burning is too good for them
• Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate by Kenan Malik