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Updated: June 18, 2025
To the celebrated Frenchmen Fresnel and Arago he was first indebted for the restitution of his rights; for they, especially Fresnel, independently remade and vastly extended his discoveries.
A few months later Fresnel was dead, and Young survived him only two years. Both died prematurely, but their great work was done, and the world will remember always and link together these two names in connection with a theory which in its implications and importance ranks little below the theory of universal gravitation.
The bare enumeration of the names of the men who were the great lights of science in the latter part of the eighteenth and the first decade of the nineteenth century, of Herschel, of Laplace, of Young, of Fresnel, of Oersted, of Cavendish, of Lavoisier, of Davy, of Lamarck, of Cuvier, of Jussieu, of Decandolle, of Werner and of Hutton, suffices to indicate the strength of physical science in the age immediately preceding that of which I have to treat.
On the other hand, its own undulations are so rapid that so far as they are concerned the conditions become very different, and its fluidity has, one might say, no longer the time to come in. Hence its rigidity alone appears. Another consequence, very important in principle, of the fact that vibrations of light are transverse, has been well put in evidence by Fresnel.
And still another is the well-known instance of the change in polarization predicted by Fresnel from the mere interpretation of an algebraic symbol. This prophetic insight is very sublime, and opens up new spaces in man. Of the discoveries of Kepler, we can here have to do with their universal and humanitary bearings alone.
"Fresnel," he said, quietly, "if, as you say, the gallows claim me, the thing that has brought me to this extremity arises out of the shooting of Mabey. Had not Mabey been murdered there would have been no need for me to have raised my voice as I have done. Mabey was your friend, I think. Will you for his sake lend me the little help I need to save my neck?"
Fresnel freely acknowledged Young's priority so soon as his attention was called to it; and Young applauded the work of the Frenchman, and aided with his counsel in the application of the undulatory theory to the problems of polarization of light, which still demanded explanation, and which Fresnel's fertility of experimental resource and profundity of mathematical insight sufficed in the end to conquer.
After having been eclipsed for two hundred years by the success of the immortal synthesis of Newton, it gained an entirely new splendour with Fresnel and his followers.
But the idea was one which he entertained merely as an indefinite possibility upon which he felt no real impulse to act. Meanwhile he chuckled at the thought of Fresnel as he had last seen him, with his muffled face and glaring eyeballs. "For one who was anything but a man of action," he writes, "I felt that I had acquitted myself none so badly."
As a fitting culmination of the chapter of felicities between the three friends, it fell to the lot of Young, as Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society, to notify Fresnel of the honors shown him by England's representative body of scientists; while Arago, as Perpetual Secretary of the French Institute, conveyed to Young in the same year the notification that he had been similarly honored by the savants of France.
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