German-English industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher
1822 CE
to 1911 CE
Sir Francis Galton FRS (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, is an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician.
He is knighted in 1909.
Galton was a very bright child growing up, learning to read at the age of two and a half.
A little before he was four years old, he had already written his first letter; learned how to do multiplication and tell time when an average child would have learned to do all that after the age of seven.
Galton has a prolific intellect, and produces over 340 papers and books.
He also creates the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean.
He is the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduces the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needs for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies.
He is a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself and the phrase "nature versus nurture".
His book Hereditary Genius (1869) is the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.
As an investigator of the human mind, he founds psychometrics (the science of measuring mental faculties) and differential psychology and the lexical hypothesis of personality.
He devises a method for classifying fingerprints that proves useful in forensic science.
He also conducts research on the power of prayer, concluding it has none by its null effects on the longevity of those prayed for.
As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devises the first weather map, proposes a theory of anticyclones, and is the first to establish a complete record of short-term climatic phenomena on a European scale.
He also invents the Galton Whistle for testing differential hearing ability.
