18 Facts About Ray Galton

1. Ray Galton was a half-cousin to Charles Darwin, whose father, Robert, was Erasmus Darwin's son by his first wife.

2. Ray Galton collected many of these important observations together in his book Natural Inheritance.

3. Ray Galton was intensely interested in the analysis of quantitative data.

4. Ray Galton was honored with numerous prestigious awards and was knighted in 1909.

5. Ray Galton began his scientific career, at the age of 16, as a medical student at the Birmingham Free Hospital.

6. Ray Galton believed that sensory skill is a measure of intellect.

7. Ray Galton established a system of classifying fingerprints that is still used today.

8. Ray Galton devised the correlation coefficient and brought other statistical methods into this work, which was carried on by his pupil Karl Pearson as the science of biometrics.

9. Ray Galton used his considerable fortune to promote his scientific interests.

10. Ray Galton supplemented Quetelet's tables by a short table of the abscissas of the unit normal curve corresponding to percentiles of area.

11. Ray Galton was awarded the Royal Medal in 1876 and the Copley Medal in 1910.

12. Ray Galton adapted his whistle to test the hearing of various animals.

13. Ray Galton determined that the normal upper limit of human hearing was around 18 kHz.

14. Ray Galton made no further overseas expeditions, the trip to Africa having permanently affected his health.

15. Ray Galton wrote scripts for sitcoms produced in Germany and Scandinavia.

16. Ray Galton contracted tuberculosis aged 18 in 1948 and was admitted to Milford Sanatorium near Godalming in Surrey, where he met fellow patient Alan Simpson.

17. Ray Galton married Tonia Phillips in 1956, and they had three children; she died in 1995.

18. Ray Galton was born in Paddington, West London, and after leaving school he worked for the Transport and General Workers Union.