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Francis Galton
1822–1911
A restless Victorian thinker, he ranged from African exploration to weather maps, fingerprints, and the statistics that helped shape modern social science. His work was highly influential and often troubling, especially in the way it fed into the early eugenics movement.
4 Audiobooks
Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development
by Francis Galton
Finger Prints
by Francis Galton
Noteworthy Families (Modern Science)
by Francis Galton, Edgar Schuster
About the author
Born in 1822 in England, Francis Galton was a wide-ranging writer and investigator whose interests stretched across geography, anthropology, psychology, heredity, and measurement. He became known for popularizing the study of individual differences and for developing ideas that influenced correlation, regression, and other statistical methods.
Galton also wrote vividly about travel and exploration, including his experiences in southern Africa, and he had a gift for turning observation into systems and experiments. He helped advance the use of fingerprints for identification and contributed to early work in meteorology.
At the same time, his legacy is deeply controversial. Galton was a central early advocate of eugenics, a movement built on harmful ideas about heredity and human worth that caused lasting damage. Remembered today as both an inventive Victorian polymath and a figure whose ideas demand critical scrutiny, he died in 1911.