Francis Galton gave us correlation, fingerprint files and weather maps, plus eugenics
One Victorian produced the first weather map, a fingerprint classification police could use, the statistical idea of correlation and a whistle for testing hearing. He even studied the best way to brew tea. Francis Galton also coined the word eugenics in 1883, and that legacy has rightly drawn heavy criticism.
Galton was born in 1822 at The Larches in Birmingham, on the site of Joseph Priestley's former home. His family were Quaker gunmakers and bankers, and through their shared grandfather Erasmus Darwin he was a half-cousin of Charles Darwin. Both families were full of inventors and Royal Society fellows; Erasmus Darwin and Galton's grandfather Samuel helped found the Lunar Society, whose members included James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood.
He was a prodigy, reading at two and enjoying Shakespeare by six, but he left King Edward's School in Birmingham at 16, bored by its narrow classics. Pushed towards medicine, he studied at Birmingham General Hospital and King's College London, then mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1840. A breakdown ended his hopes of honours and he took an ordinary pass degree, like Darwin. His father's death in 1844 left him grieving but financially independent, and he abandoned medicine for travel, sport and invention.
His scientific range was extraordinary. Across more than 340 papers and books, he developed correlation, popularised regression toward the mean and was first to apply statistics to human differences and inherited intelligence. He pioneered questionnaires and surveys, founded psychometrics and differential psychology, and wrote Hereditary Genius in 1869, the first social-scientific study of greatness. In meteorology he proposed a theory of anticyclones and compiled the first complete Europe-wide record of short-term weather. He even tested whether prayer lengthened lives and found no effect.
He popularised the phrase nature versus nurture, framing the debate over heredity and environment, and his ideas later underpinned behavioural genetics. But he was also a leading proponent of social Darwinism, eugenics and biological racism, and his reputation carries that weight. He was knighted in 1909 and died on 17 January 1911.
Source: Francis Galton
