The Story of Thomas Fuller is Disturbing as it is Enlightening. What if he had Been Given a Chance?

The story of Thomas Fuller is disturbing as it is enlightening. What if he had been given a chance?

Nicknamed the “Virginia Calculator”, Fuller was sold by a greedy African chief and arrived in Alexandria, Virginia in 1724, at the age of 14, to work the plantations. And to raise eyebrows.

Historians have long debated where he was born, with some saying he was picked somewhere in Kasewe in Present day Nyasore school while yet others insisted he was from Central Africa, before a final determination was made that he was born somewhere in present day Liberia or Benin in West Africa.

The property of Mrs. Elizabeth Cox, Fuller carried with him from Africa a rare brain that became the talk of the Western world.

With no formal education at all, Fuller was an early walking calculator and algorithm, before the advent of the commercial calculator in 1886.

They were so disturbed with his mental prowess in America that two skeptics William Hartshorne and Samuel Coates visited the Cox farm where he worked to challenge his brain and prove him wrong.

At the Cox farm, Fuller stood confidently before the two doubting Thomases and told them to ask him any difficult mathematical problem they could think of. A multitude stood nearby, with pens and paper, to verify.

The first question was thrown to the Virginia Calculator. “How many seconds are there in a year and a half? Fuller blinked his eyes twice, closed them and in less than two minutes said 47,304,000. He was right.

The second man said, “let me ask him a question he will not answer.”

“How many seconds has a man who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old lived on earth?

This one was so easy for him. He answered in a minute and a half. He said 2, 210,500,800 confidently.

“Wrong! I got him.” Coates shouted!

Before his saliva could dry up, Fuller interjected, “Top, Massa, you forget de leap year.”

When the leap year was added, Fuller was proved right and Coates coiled his tail, bowed to Fuller and asked no further questions.

When he died in 1790, The Newspaper, Columbian Centinial wrote a description of the brain that had left the world;

“The man was a prodigy. Though he could never read or write, he had perfectly acquired the art of enumeration. He could multiply seven into itself, that product by seven, and the products so produced by seven for seven times.

“He could give the number of months, days, weeks, hours, minutes and seconds in any period of time any person chose to mention, allowing in his calculation for all the leap years that happened in the time.”

BWANA!

“He would give the number of poles, yards, feet, inches and barley-corns in any distance, say the diameter of the earth’s orbit and in every calculation, he would produce the true answer in less time than 99 men out of 100 would produce with their pen.

Then the gazette concluded;

“Had his opportunity been equal to those of thousands of his fellow men, Even Isaac Newton himself would have been ashamed…”.

The brain of Thomas Fuller was used to press for the abolition of the Slave trade, with abolitionists saying, “these people are not mentally inferior to whites as people think.”

Those who had the privilege to savor his extraordinary intellect said, “it’s a pity this man was not given a chance to be educated.”

When Thomas Fuller himself was asked if he felt any regret for having been uneducated, the answer he gave will close for us this article today. 

“It is best l got no learning, for many learned men be great fools.”

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Ken Bill Mteule