In 17th-century Oxford, a young man named John Richard Stephens was born, of a family that was not poor but had no fortune either. This lack of material wealth left no margin for the exercise of his unusual gifts of wit, learning and invention. His father was a small-town doctor and his mother a schoolmistress. He was sent to school at Winchester College and then, after a brief period at the University of Glasgow, to Balliol College, Oxford
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But it was not until he was nineteen years old that he became a doctor himself. It is said that his mother once observed him as he sat with his feet on the table writing out some difficult calculation upon a slate as though it were as easy as adding up sums of money. He had been taught from childhood how to work hard by those who knew him best—his parents, his sister and his tutor Leonard Osborn.