SACRED LEGACY ARCHIVES™

Thomas Wright Hill

1763-04-24 – 1851-06-13

This portrait is by British portrait artist Mary Martha Pearson (1798 –1871) .Credit: Mary Martha Pearson

Life & Legacy

Thomas Wright Hill (24 April 1763 in Kidderminster – 13 June 1851 in Tottenham) was an English mathematician and schoolmaster. He is credited as inventing the single transferable vote in 1819. His son Rowland, famous as the originator of the modern postal system, introduced STV in 1840 into the world's first public election, for the Adelaide City Council, in which the principle of proportional representation was applied.
In 1791, Thomas Wright Hill courageously tried to save the apparatus of Dr Joseph Priestley from a mob in the Birmingham 'Church and King' riots —the offer was declined.
He was interested in astronomy, being a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and in computers, as is shown by a letter of his to Charles Babbage, dated 23 March 1836, among the Babbage manuscripts at the British Library, returning some logarithm tables that he had borrowed and adding "How happy I shall be when I can see such a work verified and enlarged by your divine machine".