1. Francis Galton invented a digital printing electric telegraph, explored the blank spots of Africa, wrote a best-selling book on the Art of Travel, and the instructions which accompanied Burton and Speke in search of the Nile. 2. That's when he wasn't inventing scientific fingerprinting and modern weather maps, discovering the anti-cyclone, founding the scientific study of differential psychology, human heredity and behavior genetics (Hereditary Genius) ...

1. There is a common misconception, endlessly repeated today, that the communist fellow-travelers of the 1930s were naive well-intentioned people. That they were duped by the Soviets and fooled by Potemkin tours. If only they had been more careful! A leeetle more skeptical! 2. Examples given include George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, who certainly went on Potemkin tours of the USSR and made any number of dishonest remarks about the system they breezed through. This gets the history badly wrong. Intentionally so, because the reality stings far more.

@herandrews Rian Malan is essential for entertaining reading. For serious reading, WK Hancock's biography of Smuts, probably the last great leader to emerge from the country. Generally, the drive-by impressions by modern visitors with a political point of view will not help one understand the place. Instead, read the original explorers, as collected by Raven-Hart, Or Early French Callers at the Cape. Karel Schoeman's work is outstanding, as are his novels. A titan, no longer with us.

1. On July 14th 1791, the mob destroyed Joseph Priestley's house and laboratory, Fair Hill, a mile outside Birmingham. They had been put up to it by the local magistrates, who (correctly) associated Priestley with the French Revolution. 2. Books, rare manuscripts, very costly lab equipment, chemicals, furniture, all destroyed. The house was gutted by fire, obtained from the lab. Priestley, a pacifist, watched it start from a distance and made no attempt to resist. He fled to London and ultimately to America.

Francis Galton at 200, in 25 tweets

1. On this day, Feb 16, in 1822, Francis Galton was born near Birmingham. He would become one of the most original scientists of all time, brimming with ideas and new ways of looking at the world, able to see what most others could not. 2. Galton's ancestors were Quakers who had mingled ideas with the Darwins in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and genes in marriage. He shared an illustrious grandfather, the polymath and poet Erasmus Darwin FRS, with his half-cousin Charles Darwin the naturalist.