Thomas Young (1773-1829) was born in Milverton, Somerset, in 1773, the eldest of ten children in a Quaker family. Soon after his birth, he was brought up by his mother’s father, Robert Davis, in Minehead, about 15 miles from Milverton.

By the time he left school at the age of thirteen, Young was knowledgeable in many languages, including ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, as well as French and Italian, and had a good grounding in Newtonian physics and optics.  He went on to study Euclid’s Elements and read other scientific works, as well as books on history and languages.  At Cambridge, though enrolled on a medical course, Young continued studying physics.

In 1801, Young was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in London and he immediately set about preparing a series of lectures which he presented between January and May 1802. When it was repeated in 1803, the course had grown to 60 lectures and covered everything from mechanics, drawing, architecture and carpentry to music, mathematics, the properties of liquids and gases, optics, heat, electricity, gravitation, and light.  Young has been described as the ‘last man who knew everything’.

Young set about preparing his lectures for publication, a task which took almost four years. The expanded and revised versions of the lectures finally appeared in 1807 in two volumes as A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts.  One critic described the published lectures as containing:

the original hints of more things since claimed as discoveries, than can perhaps be found in a single production of any known author.

 The Institution’s copies are among the most important Enlightenment works in the Early Science Collection and reflect its founding aim ‘to promote the general diffusion of Science, Literature and the Arts’.  The volumes were presented in September 1813 by William Kendall (1768-1832), a local lawyer, poet and founding member of the Institution.