I’ve read a story once of a man called Thomas Fuller. Thomas wasn’t his given name when he was born, nor was his last name Fuller — born around 1710, the was snatched up and sold as a slave in 1724, aged fourteen. From there on out, until the end of his days, he was a piece of human property.

No one ever bothered to teach Fuller how to read or write. He remained illiterate his entire life. He nonetheless had tremendous brainpower — he could count like no other, out of the top of his head. Like Dustin Hoffman’s character in the film Rain Man, the enslaved man could solve incredibly complex sums and equations in his head and do so rapidly. The tribe to which Fuller had belonged, known as the Bassari, famously used to have "specialists who were trained in the memorization of sums”. It is likely that as a child, before being enslaved, he was trained as one.

Whatever the origins of his intelligence, Thomas Fuller was a brilliant man. Unlike Hoffman’s “idiot savant” character, the African math prodigy was by no means mentally challenged, having a sharp mind, excellent social skills and the ability to more or less run his master’s plantation for him. When Fuller was already in his seventies, he met a businessman who had come with some associates from Pennsylvania after having heard of his mental prowess..

The visitors asked him several questions to gauge his intellect. First they asked Fuller:

“How many seconds were in a year and a half?”

“47,304,000,” answered Fuller, without skipping a beat.

Next, they asked him his age in seconds:

“How many seconds had a man lived who is 70 years, 17 days and 12 hours old?”

“2,210,500,800 seconds,” answered Fuller.

One of the men disagreed, saying his own calculations didn’t allign with the slaves’ calculation.

Fuller responded: “Massa, you forget de leap year.”

They recalculated, taking into consideration the leap year, and found that now their numbers alligned perfectly with Thomas Fuller’s assertions.

The men had met Thomas Fuller when he was already seventy years old, well past his prime. Still, he impressed the plantation’s learned visitors — despite being a slave who had received no formal education since the age of fourteen, his mental abilities in mathematics were still superior to those of the much younger white gentlemen who came to see him.

“How much brighter this man would have been, had he been given proper education,” one of the men remarked, thinking out loud.

“No, Massa, it is best I had no learning, for many learned men be great fools,” replied Fuller with a wink. Stories like his make one think. How many brilliant minds have been born in places where the conditions were simply not there for them to shine? History has had, and will continue to have, many Thomas Fullers. Their names forever lost to the sands of time, their great abilities never fully developed or put to good use.