Thomas Young was born in Milverton, Somerset in 1773 and died in London 1829. His father was a banker and Young was brought up as a Quaker. He was a precocious child, learning to read by the age of two. He attended two boarding schools between 1780 and 1786 where his ability to learn languages became marked. For the next few years he studied privately; his reading included the works of Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Black. In 1793 he entered St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, to study medicine. He continued this study at Edinburgh (from 1794; it is from this period that he began to distance himself from Quakerism) and Göttingen (from 1795; MD 1796). From 1797 to 1803 he was attached to Emmanuel College Cambridge (MR 1803, MD 1808), where he turned his attention to scientific matters. In 1797 an uncle left him 10,000 pounds and a London house into which he moved in 1800 and in 1804 married Eliza Maxwell. Although he practised medicine and was Professor of Natural Philosophy at the newly founded Royal Institution from 1801 to 1803 he was not particularly successful at either occupation, though the latter did lead to his publishing 'A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts' in two volumes in 1807. In 1811 he became physician to St George's Hospital. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1794, he served as its Foreign Secretary from 1804 until his death. From 1818 he was Secretary of the Board of Longitude and Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac, a position he retained following the abolition of the Board in 1828. After the abolition he was named one of the Admiralty's scientific advisers.
Though Young did significant work on capillarity and the theory of elasticity, it is for his optical work that he is chiefly remembered. His earliest work was in physiological optics in which he sought from 1791 to explain how the eye functioned. He argued that the lens of an eye changed shape to focus light as necessary. In 1801 he suggested that the retina responded to three 'principle colours' only which combined to form all the other colours. In the later hands of James Clerk Maxwell and Hermann Helmholtz, this view came to be the standard theory of colour sensation.
It was a short step from physiological optics to considering the nature of light. Young's interest in this was reinforced by some work he had done in the mid-1790s on the transmission of sound which he came to believe was analogous to light. In addition Young's natural philosophy demanded a structured aether. In 1800 he brought these ideas together in a paper where he argued for the transmission of light waves through an aether (misleadingly selectively quoting from Newton as partial justifications for his views). Over the next two years Young developed his ideas on the nature of light discovering in the process, in May 1801, the principle of interference of light. He first enunciated this principle in terms of the luminiferous aether, but in the following year he reworked the principle to make it an experimental fact independent of theory. Indeed he showed that the principle alone could be employed to explain a number of optical phenomena. Parallel with this, Young also changed his views on the nature of the aether, so that by 1807 he only required it to exist. Young's inability to sustain over time a consistent view of the nature of light and of the aether, together with some vituperative attacks on his work by Henry Brougham, contributed to little attention being paid to his theoretical work, though the principle of interference was viewed widely as an important discovery. The wave theory of light was not established until the work of Augustin Fresnel in the 1810s. However, the historical work of William Whewell in the 1830s gave an importance to Young's views which they did not warrant; it is only in recent times that Young's work has been properly contextualised.
After his work on optics, Young returned to the study of languages and in particular from 1813 started to attempt to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. By the following year he had translated the demotic script of the Rosetta stone. However, he published little at the time due, it would seem, to his official duties. In 1823 he published a comparison of his and J.F. Champollion's work and his Enchorial Egyptian Dictionary was published postumously in 1830. Both were attempts to claim priority over Champollion and, in so far as Young is generally mentioned when the deciphering of hieroglyphics is discussed, he was not wholly unsuccessful.
Bron: http://www.ri.ac.uk/History/Young/