Thomas Young (scientist)

Lore & Background

By age 14, he had learned Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Syriac, Samaritan Hebrew, Arabic, Biblical Aramaic, Persian, Turkish, and Ge'ez. He established himself as a physician in London in 1799. Later, he served on committees regarding gas lighting and the seconds pendulum, and became secretary to the Board of Longitude. He married Eliza Maxwell in 1804; they had no children. He was buried in Farnborough, Kent.

Reader's Guide

Thomas Young's most significant legacy is his establishment of Christiaan Huygens' wave theory of light, which countered Isaac Newton's corpuscular theory. Through experiments including the ripple tank and the double-slit experiment, he demonstrated light interference and calculated wavelengths of colors with high accuracy. His work influenced later scientists such as William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. Young also played a crucial role in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs via the Rosetta Stone. Despite his achievements, he was known for difficulty in communicating his knowledge. His epitaph in Westminster Abbey highlights his contributions to the undulatory theory of light and Egyptology. Young's work in multiple fields—from solid mechanics to language—exemplifies his polymathic nature, though his wave theory was later supported by Augustin-Jean Fresnel.

Did You Know?

• By age 14, Young had learned eleven languages including Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Ge'ez.
• He published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician.
• Young's double-slit experiment allowed him to calculate the wavelengths of different colors of light, coming very close to modern values.

A Relentless Chain of Displacement

The body of believers was driven successively from Ohio into Missouri and then into Illinois, where they invested heavily in building and renaming the city of Nauvoo. It was against this backdrop of escalating persecution that Brigham Young, Smith's successor, urged the Saints to look beyond the western frontier entirely.

Engineering an Impossible Crossing

A Philadelphia non-Mormon named Thomas L. Kane, who maintained close ties to President Polk's administration, secured permission for the group to overwinter on Indian land, a site later called Kanesville. Young himself combed every available account of the Great Basin, interviewed mountain men and trappers passing through, and conferred with Jesuit missionary Father Pierre-Jean De Smet. By late February the plan crystallized: assemble portable boats, maps, scientific instruments, farm tools, and seed stock; research irrigation methods; and chart a new corridor along the north bank of the Platte River to sidestep the crowded Oregon Trail and avoid disputes over water and grazing.

Settling Land That Belonged to Someone Else

A crucial and often overlooked dimension of the westward push was its legal and political ambiguity. The Mormon settlers crossed into Mexican sovereign territory without any governmental authorization, and they did so despite the established rights of the Shoshone, Ute, and Goshute peoples who already inhabited the region. The United States and Mexico were soon embroiled in a war over the unresolved border question left after Texas's annexation. Young, characteristically cautious, had deliberately chosen a valley he believed no rival colonizing group coveted, a calculation that kept the Saints clear of direct competition even as the geopolitical ground beneath their feet shifted from Mexican to American control.

A Migration That Outlasted the Railroad

Yet the story did not end when the rails were laid. The transcontinental network served only a handful of main corridors, and many families simply could not afford the fare. As a result, small wagon-train migrations into the Far West continued in a scattered, sporadic fashion well into the twentieth century. For his role in orchestrating this decades-long movement, Brigham Young has been called the 'American Moses,' and the entire undertaking is widely regarded as a defining stress-test of the church's restructured administrative and leadership apparatus.