Alfred Binet

Built the first IQ test specifically to find kids who needed extra help — and warned, in writing, against the fixed-intelligence reading that took it over.

In 1904 the French Ministry of Public Instruction asked Alfred Binet to identify schoolchildren who would struggle in standard classrooms and would benefit from remedial education. With Théodore Simon he built the Binet-Simon scale (1905): 30 short tasks of increasing difficulty (point to your nose, repeat a sentence, define a word, compare two objects). The score was a snapshot used to flag who needed support, not an inborn quantity. Binet wrote in 1909: "Some recent thinkers seem to have given their moral support to these deplorable verdicts by affirming that an individual's intelligence is a fixed quantity… We must protest and react against this brutal pessimism; we must try to demonstrate that it is founded on nothing." Six years later Lewis Terman at Stanford translated the scale into the Stanford-Binet (1916) and used it to rank Americans, advocate sterilization, and classify gifted children for life. Same instrument; opposite use. Binet built it to find who needed help. Terman used it to decide who didn't deserve it. The popular image of "an IQ test" is Terman's reading. Binet's warning was already in print, and was already ignored.