Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet was a French psychologist, born in Nice in 1857 and died in 1911, who together with the psychiatrist Théodore Simon created the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test. Trained first in law and then in physiology, he began as a researcher at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris under the mentorship of Jean-Martin Charcot, and from 1894 until his death he directed the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology at the Sorbonne. In 1904 he sat on a French commission asking how schoolchildren with learning difficulties should be identified and taught, and he argued for objective evidence rather than a medical examination alone. A preliminary scale appeared in 1905, the full version in 1908 and a revision in 1911. He also co-founded the journal L'Année Psychologique.