Then Again: A Vermont prodigy wows the world

[I]f anyone was ever born with a special gift, it was Zerah Colburn.

Little about the boy, however, signaled genius in his earliest years. He’d had a smidgeon of education – six weeks at a neighborhood school in his hometown of Cabot; about what you would expect a young boy to have growing up in the wilds of Vermont in the early 1800s.

So you can imagine his father’s surprise when the 6-year-old – playing with wood chips as his father did carpentry on the family’s failing farm, as the story goes – began mumbling math equations. “Five times seven are 35 … six times eight are 48 …”

Abiah Colburn must have dropped his adze in amazement and stared at his son. He quizzed Zerah, who seemed to know the multiplication table by heart. Trying to stump him, Colburn asked Zerah to multiply 13 times 97. The boy instantly responded: 1,261.

Word of the wonder boy spread quickly. Townspeople dropped by to test Zerah, who always seemed to have the answer. Colburn began to see his son as destined for fame and, more importantly, fortune. Many historians, many of whom don’t even bother to refer to him by name, regard Abiah Colburn as a schemer. Unfortunately for Zerah, they seem to be correct. If he had been born to a wiser father, Zerah might have achieved greatness. Instead, he became little more than a curiosity.

Colburn and his son made the short trip to Danville, where court was in session. There, Colburn had the judges and lawyers question his son. Then the two traveled to Montpelier for more grilling by state legislators. No one could stump the boy with algebra problems. Perhaps annoyed, they began throwing odd questions at him. Someone asked the imponderable question: “How many black beans would make five white ones?” Zerah reportedly replied: “Five, if you skin them.”

So pleased was Colburn with his talented boy that he left his wife and six other children and began an odyssey in search of riches. The two stopped at Dartmouth College on their way to Boston. Dartmouth’s president offered to educate the boy for free. But Colburn, thinking he could do better, turned down the offer.

Zerah’s mathematical display at Dartmouth impressed more than just the college president. One witness of the performance was so stunned, Zerah later wrote, that he “renounced his infidel foundation and ever since has been established in the doctrines of Christianity.”

In Boston, a group of prominent men offered to raise $5,000, half of which would go to Abiah Colburn, if he would let them fund an education for Zerah with the other half. The offer was too small for Colburn’s taste, so they kept moving south. When he couldn’t strike a profitable enough deal, Colburn booked the pair for passage to England, even though the War of 1812 had just erupted between that country and the United States.

Zerah wowed the British, too. Colburn was again able to gather distinguished gentlemen to discuss funding his son’s education. This time, he also asked them to buy copies of a biography of the boy that was yet to be written.

At that meeting, a questioner asked Zerah to raise eight to the 16th power. Working without paper, he came up with the correct answer: 281,474,976,710,656. Someone else asked him the factors of 247,483, to which he replied 941 and 263, and pointed out that those are the only factors that when multiplied together will produce that number. Then he was asked the factors of 36,083, which was a trick question. It has no factors because it is a prime number, he replied.

His performance was reported in London newspapers. Some of the accounts referred to him as a Russian, apparently because the new war made it impolitic to praise anything American.

Despite Zerah’s impressive showing, he was offered little money. Benefactors lavished Zerah with toys, which were probably more to the 9-year-old liking anyhow. Eventually, Abiah Colburn decided to try his chances in France. Maybe there he could find the boy the benefactor he deserved.

Among the people who met this odd couple from Cabot was John Quincy Adams, then a U.S. envoy. Adams took time to meet them in Paris.

“The boy … has, it would seem, a faculty for the composition and decomposition of numbers of inspiration,” Adams wrote in his diary, then noted that the boy had never been properly educated in mathematics. “… Even now he cannot do a common sum in the rule of three, but he can by a mental process of his own extract the roots of any power or number and name the factors by which any given number is produced.”

Abiah Colburn, Adams wrote, “is a plain New England farmer and to all appearances a very ordinary man. His language is that of our most uneducated people and his principal anxiety seemed to be to get a picture of Zerah to send home to America as a present to Congress.”

(It is unclear whether Colburn ever arranged that portrait of Zerah. One from 1810 exists, however. It shows an elfin boy, with a large head, widely spaced eyes and, if you look closely, a genetic anomaly he shared with his father and some of his siblings, an extra finger – though that was clearly not the secret to his mathematical powers.)

Adams wrote that he had paid for an as-yet-unpublished (and indeed never-to-be-published) book on Zerah’s mathematical methods. He concluded his diary entry by remarking, “Zerah is certainly an astonishing and promising boy; but if his promise is ever to realize anything, the sooner his father commits him to the tuition of the Polytechnic School (in Paris) the better.”

Colburn finally agreed to have his son attend the Lyceum Napoleon, where he studied until his father decided they would be better off returning to London. For years, the father dragged the son around England and Ireland. Now Colburn saw his son’s future, and his own fortune, in theater, math having failed to produce the wealth he sought.

Colburn’s dream of riches died with him in 1824. Then the Earl of Bristol, a wealthy man who had been turned off by the constant scheming, offered Zerah money and an education. Zerah replied that he only wanted to go home, and accepted little more than enough to pay his father’s debts and buy passage to America.

Returning in 1824 as a 20-year-old, Zerah was shocked to see how much his mother and siblings had aged in the 12 years he’d been gone. Upon his return, he seldom used his gift for math again, except perhaps his ability to multiply: After marrying, he fathered six children.

Zerah Colburn found his calling as a Methodist minister and taught briefly at Norwich University until he died in his mid-30s, the victim of tuberculosis. In the end, he benefited from his father’s obsession in one way. He never taught math at Norwich – he had either grown tired of the subject or never comprehended the finer points; instead he taught the languages he had picked up during his endless travels.