This is how I study, the history of Binet
Binet like the best psychologists wanted to be a doctor but had a complete emotional breakdown into the gutters of what at that time- the rockin’ 1900’s era was the field of Psychology. Screw being a doctor, when you can headshrink the peeps!
At first he fucked up with magnets and the belief that it would “cure hysterical women” annnnnnd yeah, that failed miserably. FOR SERIOUS! I also have absolutely no idea what he thought the magnets would do, but maybe he was going for the sex toys make women forget about hysteria stuff and has a very loose sense of what sexual play entailed…. ANYWAYS!
He gave up on women, far too complicating to explain with mere psychiatric medicine and went on a different kick. This time he decided to focus on Intelligence and used children since they made in his time very easily accessed and useful specimans. Nothing better to do he made his children his labrats- hooray!
His early fuckups made him more wary of just flinging ideas and inventions off the top of his noggin’ and so he figured you know what I should try? SCIENCE!
Then he was all Science -woah. This shit is the organized!
He tried Cattell’s stuff briefly but then went fuck that shite it’s stupid (which is what a student of Cattell’s eventually thought too when he debunked his teacher’s research, having good hand eye coordination doesn’t guarantee you’re intelligent who’d have guessed?).
So using his kids because kids=free labrats and apparently his wife never protested the tests, I guess because he was using them for intelligence tests and over the years intelligence tests and kids are like a surefire meat market of each parent being sucked in, everyone is all oooooh testing and then everyone will know how shiny my lil whatshis/herface is!
So he watched his kids and logicked out how the testing should work, he had been shocked to realize children could be perceptive and sometimes better than adults in some areas of intelligence than adults… yup, screams faith in his kids? Anyhow, he was all well okay so children aren’t complete wastes of time and effort, now how to test it and went making his test.
Of course his formatting sucked balls.
So he went to Paris.
In paris, he met Simon who helped him get his shit together and make the test functional.
By 1908 they were set with a revised Binet-Simon Scale of Intelligence, the 1908 revision also added mental level and in 1911 it was revised again so that each level had exactly 5 tests and the scale extended into the adult range. This made it like the king of awesome in terms of intelligence tests. Unfortunately, Binet couldn’t enjoy his popularity because he’d died the same year before the revision went out and got picked up by the U.S. Ah well, sucks to be him.