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Definition: John Tyndall

Part of Speech Definition
Noun 1. British physicist (born in Ireland) remembered for his experiments on the transparency of gases and the absorption of radiant heat by gases and the transmission of sound through the atmosphere; he was the first person to explain why the daylight sky is blue (1820-1893).[Wordnet].

Source: WordNet 3.0 Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

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Extended Definition: John Tyndall

John Tyndall

This article is about the scientist. For the 20th century British politician of the same name, see John Tyndall (politician).
John Tyndall
John Tyndall.
John Tyndall.
Born 2 August 1820
Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland
Died 4 December 1893 (aged 73)
Hindhead, Surrey, England
Nationality British
Fields Physics
Institutions Royal Institution of Great Britain
Alma mater University of Marburg
Known for Atmosphere, physics education,
Tyndall effect, diamagnetism,
infrared radiation, Tyndallization

John Tyndall FRS (2 August 1820 – 4 December 1893) was a prominent 19th century physicist. His initial scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he studied air and produced a number of discoveries about processes in the atmosphere. Tyndall published seventeen books, which brought state-of-the-art 19th century physics to a wider audience. From 1853 to 1887 he was Professor of Natural Philosophy (Physics) at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, where he became the successor to positions held by Michael Faraday.

Early years and education

Tyndall was born in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland. His father was a local police constable and small landowner, descended from Gloucestershire emigrants who settled in southeast Ireland around 1670. Tyndall attended the local schools in County Carlow until his late teens, and was probably an assistant teacher near the end of his time there. Skills learned at school notably included technical drawing and mathematics with some applications of those skills to land surveying. He was hired by the government's Ordnance Survey in Ireland as a draftsman in his late teens in 1839, and moved to the Ordnance Survey in England in 1842. In the decade of the 1840s a railroad-building boom was in progress, and Tyndall's land surveying experience was valuable and in demand by the railroad companies. Between 1844 and 1847 he was lucratively employed in railroad construction planning.[1]

In 1847 he opted to become a mathematics teacher at Queenwood College in Hampshire, an experimental school founded by the industrialist and social philosopher Robert Owen. He had met Owen more than once and perhaps opted to work at Queenwood under Owen's influence.[2] Recalling this period later Tyndall wrote: "the desire to grow intellectually did not forsake me; and, when railway work slackened, I accepted in 1847 a post as master in Queenwood College."[3] However, he soon became dissatisfied with Queenwood. Another recently-arrived young teacher at Queenwood was Edward Frankland, who had previously worked as a laboratory assistant for the British Geological Survey. Frankland and Tyndall became good friends. Together they decided to go to Germany to further their education in science. (The German universities were regarded as best in the world in chemistry and physics at the time. British universities were still focused on classics and mathematics and not science). The pair moved to Germany in 1848 and studied at the University of Marburg, where Robert Bunsen was an influential teacher.[4] Probably more influential for Tyndall at Marburg was Professor Hermann Knoblauch, with whom Tyndall maintained communications by letter for many years afterwards. Tyndall's Marburg dissertation was a mathematical analysis of screw surfaces in 1850. He stayed at Marburg for a further year doing research on magnetism with Knoblauch, including some months' visit at the laboratory of Knoblauch's main teacher, Gustav Magnus in Berlin. Tyndall returned to England in 1851 with a first-rate education in experimental science. It is clear today that Bunsen and Magnus were among the very best experimental science instructors of the era.

Early scientific work

Tyndall's early original work in physical science was his experiments on magnetism and diamagnetic polarity, on which he worked from 1850 to 1856. His two most influential reports were the first two, co-authored with Knoblauch. One of them was entitled "Second memoir on the magneto-optic properties of crystals, and the relation of magnetism and diamagnetism to molecular arrangement", dated May 1850. The two described an inspired experiment, with an inspired interpretation. These and other magnetic investigations very soon made Tyndall known among the leading scientists of the day.[5] In June 1852 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In his search for a suitable research appointment, he was able to ask the longtime editor of the leading German physics journal (Poggendorff) and other prominent men to write testimonials on his behalf. In June 1853 Tyndall attained the prestigious appointment of Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, due in no small part to the esteem his work had garnered from Michael Faraday, then the leader of magnetic investigations at the Royal Institution.[6]

Tyndall remained at the Royal Institution for the rest of his career.

Main scientific work

Beginning in the late 1850s, although perhaps initially wishing to study how electromagnetism is able to act at a distance through air, Tyndall mostly studied air, and the earth's atmosphere, and he produced a series of clarifications and discoveries about processes in the atmosphere over the following two decades:[7][8]

An illustration appearing in Tyndall's book Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat, 1872
  • Tyndall explained atmospheric heat in terms of the capacities of various gases to absorb (and transmit) radiant heat, a.k.a. infrared radiation. His measuring device, which used thermopile technology, was a significant early step in the history of absorption spectroscopy.[9] He measured the infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, hydrocarbons, etc. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Heat absorption by the bulk of the other gases is negligible. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised, but he was first to prove, that the earth's atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect. The sun's energy arrives on the ground as visible light mostly, and returns back up from the ground as infrared energy mostly, and he showed that water vapor and some other atmospheric constituents substantially absorb infrared energy, hindering it from radiating back up to outer space.[10]
  • He contributed to establishing, as he put it in his 1873 tutorial book, "the identity of light and radiant heat", where "identity" means alike in every way.[11] He consolidated and enhanced James David Forbes and Hermann Knoblauch's experiments demonstrating that the principal properties of visible light can be reproduced for radiant heat, namely reflection, refraction, diffraction, polarization, depolarization, double refraction, and rotation in a magnetic field (Faraday effect). He also converted radiant heat into visible light and coined the word "calorescence" for that conversion. He referred to radiant heat as "obscure radiation", "dark waves", "non-luminous rays" or "ultra-red undulations", as the word "infrared" didn't start coming into use until the 1880s. Among his key laboratory tools were substances that are transparent to infrared and non-transparent to visible light; or vice versa. (Tyndall's main published research reports about radiant heat were republished as a 450-page collection in 1872. The collection contains more than 200 mentions of the name Professor Magnus. Tyndall and Magnus studied each other's radiant heat research during the 1860s.)
  • In the investigations on radiant heat it had been necessary to use air from which all traces of floating dust had been removed.[12] A sensitive way to detect floating dust is to bathe the air with intense light. The scattering of light by dust and large molecules in the air is known today as the Tyndall effect, also known today as Rayleigh scattering due to a later analysis by Rayleigh. In studying the interactions between light and the constituents of air, Tyndall developed the nephelometer and other precision instruments. Particulates suspended in air are visible to the naked eye in a darkened room with sunlight coming through a crack in the curtains. Mostly visibly that's light reflecting off large particles which is not the same as light scattering off small particles. But with dark background illumination and customized light beams, and without microscopes, very low concentrations of particles far below the threshold of visibility become visible and quantifiable because of light scattering. When combined with microscopes, the result is the ultramicroscope, which was developed later by others. Tyndall is one of the "founding fathers" of precision instruments in this field.
  • In the lab he came up with a simple way to obtain "optically pure" air. (Namely, he coated the inside walls of a box with glycerin, which is a sticky syrup. He discovered that after a few days' wait, the air inside the sealed box became "pure" to his optical instruments, because the various floating-matter particulates had ended up getting stuck to the sticky walls.) There were no signs of floating micro-organisms in the optically pure air. He compared what happened when he let heat-sterilized meats sit in such pure air, and in ordinary air. The meats in the pure air remained "sweet" (as he said) to smell and taste after many months of sitting, while the ones in ordinary air started to become putrid after a few days. These studies extended Louis Pasteur's earlier demonstrations that the presence of micro-organisms ("germs") is a precondition for biomass decomposition. However, the next year some repeats of the exercise resulted in a surprising failure to reproduce it. From this he was led to find viable bacterial spores in heat-sterilized foods. The foods had been contaminated with dry bacterial spores from hay in the lab, he found out. All bacteria are killed by boiling but they have spores that can survive boiling, he correctly contended. At the time, this finding affirmed the "germ theory" against a number of critics whose experimental results had been defective from the same cause. And he devised a method of killing the spores that came to be known as "Tyndallization". During the 1870s Pasteur and Tyndall were in frequent communication.[13][14]
  • During the 1860s and 1870s he published research reports and a book about sound propagation in air, and was a chief participant in a large-scale British project that developed a better foghorn. In laboratory demonstrations motivated by foghorn issues, he established that sound is partially reflected (i.e. partially bounced back like an echo) at the location where an air mass of one temperature meets another air mass of a different temperature; and more generally when a body of air contains two or more separate air masses of different densities or temperatures, the sound travels poorly because of reflections occurring at the interfaces between the air masses, and very poorly when many such interfaces are present. He then argued, though inconclusively, that this is the usual main reason why the same distant sound (e.g. foghorn) can be heard stronger or fainter on different days or at different times of day.[15]
  • He was the first to observe and report the phenomenon of Thermophoresis (1870). (Tyndall simply reported it, without explaining it. Later, as with Tyndall scattering, it was further understood by John Strutt, a.k.a. Lord Rayleigh, who succeeded to Tyndall's position at the Royal Institution upon Tyndall's retirement).[16]
  • He was the first to show that ozone is an oxygen cluster.[17]
  • He is credited with the first ever atmospheric pollution measurements using infrared and scattering measurement instruments to monitor a city's air quality (in London).
  • Invented a better fireman's respirator, a hood that filtered smoke and noxious gas from air.

As an indicator of his lifetime research output, an index of 19th century scientific research journals has Tyndall as author of 145 papers.[18]

Tyndall was an experimenter and laboratory apparatus builder, not an abstract model builder. But he did attempt to extend his studies on the heat-absorptive power of gases into a research program about molecules. That is one of the underlying agendas of his 1872 book Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat. It is also evident in the spirit of his widely read 1863 book Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion. Besides heat, he also saw phenomena of magnetism and sound propagation as reducible to molecular interactions. Invisible molecular interactions were the ultimate substrate of all physical activity. With this mindset, and his experiments, he was able to outline an account whereby differing molecules have differing absorptions of infrared (or other) radiation because their molecular structures give them differing oscillating resonances. He'd gotten into the oscillating resonances idea because he'd seen that the same molecules have differing absorptions at differing wavelengths.[19] In his experiments he'd also seen that the absorption behavior of molecules is quite different from that of the atoms composing the molecules -- for example nitric oxide (NO) absorbed more than a thousand times more infrared radiation than either nitrogen or oxygen. He also took pains to show that the vapor form of various molecules (such as H2O) has the same absorptive power as the liquid form. Tyndall's promotion of the molecular mindset, and his efforts to experimentally expose what molecules are, is discussed in detail in "John Tyndall, The Rhetorician Of Molecularity".[20]

In his lectures at the Royal Institution Tyndall put a great value on -- and was talented at producing -- lively, visible demonstrations of physics concepts. In one lecture, published later in one of his books, Tyndall demonstrated the propagation of light though a flexible tube of flowing water via total internal reflection. It was referred to as the "light-pipe". It is historically significant today because it demonstrates the scientific foundation for modern fiber optic technology. During second half of the 20th century Tyndall was usually credited with being the first to make this demonstration. However, Jean-Daniel Colladon published a report of it in Comptes Rendus in 1842, and there's some suggestive evidence that Tyndall's knowledge of it came ultimately from Colladon and no evidence that Tyndall claimed to have originated it himself.[21]

Alpine mountaineering and glaciology

John Tyndall explored the glacial tributaries feeding Mer de Glace in 1857, at times accompanied by Thomas Henry Huxley.

Tyndall was a pioneering mountain climber and distinguished member of the London-based Alpine Club. He visited the Alps almost every summer from 1856 onward, was a member of the very first mountaineering team to reach the top of the Weisshorn (1861), and led one of the early teams to reach the top of the Matterhorn (1868). He summited Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa several times.[22]

In the Alps, Tyndall studied glaciers, and especially glacier motion. His views on glacial flow brought him into dispute with others, particularly James David Forbes and James Thomson. It was known that glaciers moved, but the mechanism for this action was uncertain. Some thought they slid like solids, others that they flowed like viscous liquids, others that they crawled by alternate thermal expansion and contraction, or by fracture and regelation. Tyndall believe that regelation, discovered by Michael Faraday, played a key role. Tyndall commented: "The idea of semi-fluid motion belongs entirely to Louis Rendu; the proof of the quicker central flow belongs in part to Rendu, but almost wholly to Louis Agassiz and Forbes; the proof of the retardation of the bed belongs to Forbes alone; while the discovery of the locus of the point of maximum motion belongs, I suppose, to me."[23]

Tyndall Glacier in Chile is named after John Tyndall, as is Mount Tyndall in California.[24] and Mount Tyndall in Tasmania.[25]

Educator

Besides a scientist, John Tyndall was a science teacher and evangelist for the cause of science. He spent a significant amount of his time disseminating science to the general public -- contributing over the years to science columns in popular middle class periodicals such as the Athenaeum and the Saturday Review in the UK, and Popular Science Monthly in the US; and giving hundreds of public lectures to non-specialist audiences at the Royal Institution. When he went on a public lecture tour in the US in 1872, large crowds paid fees to hear him lecture about the nature of light.[26] A book devoted to contemporary celebrities published in 1878 in London had this to say: "Following the precedent set by Faraday, Professor Tyndall has succeeded not only in original investigation and in teaching science soundly and accurately, but in making it attractive.... When he lectures at the Royal Institution the theatre is crowded."[27] Tyndall said of the occupation of teacher "I do not know a higher, nobler, and more blessed calling."[28] His greatest audience was gained ultimately thorough his books, most of which were not written for experts or specialists. He published 17 science books.[29] From the mid-1860s on, he was one of the world's most famous living physicists, due firstly to his skill and industry as a tutorialist. Most of his books were also translated into German[30] and French[31] with his main tutorials staying in print in those languages for decades.

As an indicator of his teaching attitude, here's his concluding remarks to the reader at the end of a 200 page tutorial book (1872):[32] "Here, my friend, our labours close. It has been a true pleasure to me to have you at my side so long. In the sweat of our brows we have often reached the heights where our work lay, but you have been steadfast and industrious throughout, using in all possible cases your own muscles instead of relying upon mine. Here and there I have stretched an arm and helped you to a ledge, but the work of climbing has been almost exclusively your own. It is thus that I should like to teach you all things; showing you the way to profitable exertion, but leaving the exertion to you.... Our task seems plain enough, but you and I know how often we have had to wrangle resolutely with the facts to bring out their meaning. The work, however, is now done, and you are master of a fragment of that sure and certain knowledge which is founded on the faithful study of nature.... Here then we part. And should we not meet again, the memory of these days will still unite us. Give me your hand. Good bye."

As another illustration, here's the opening paragraph of his 350-page tutorial entitled Sound (1867): "In the following pages I have tried to render the science of acoustics interesting to all intelligent persons, including those who do not possess any special scientific culture. The subject is treated experimentally throughout, and I have endeavoured so to place each experiment before the reader, that he should realise it as an actual operation." In the preface to the 3rd edition of this tutorial (1875), he reports that earlier editions were translated into Chinese at the expense of the Chinese government; and translated into German under the supervision of Hermann von Helmholtz (a big name in the science of acoustics).[33] His first published tutorial, which was about glaciers (1860), similarly states: "The work is written with a desire to interest intelligent persons who may not possess any special scientific culture."

His most widely praised tutorial, and perhaps also his biggest seller, was his second, the 550-page "Heat: a Mode of Motion" (1863; updated editions until 1880). It was in print for at least 50 years[34], and is in print today.

His three longest tutorials, namely Heat (1863), Sound (1867), and Light (1873), represented state-of-the-art experimental physics at the time they were published. Much of their contents were recent major innovations in the understanding of their respective subjects, which Tyndall was the first writer to present to a wider audience. One caveat is called for about the meaning of "state of the art". The books were devoted to laboratory science. They avoided mathematical analysis. In particular, they contain absolutely no infinitesmal calculus. Mathematical modeling using infinitesmal calculus, especially differential equations, was a component of the state-of-the-art understanding of heat, light and sound at the time.

Demarcation of science from religion

Caricature of Tyndall from Vanity Fair, 1872

The majority of the progressive and innovative British physicists of Tyndall's generation were conservative and orthodox on matters of religion. That includes for example James Joule, Balfour Stewart, James Clerk Maxwell, George Gabriel Stokes and William Thomson -- all names investigating heat or light contemporaneously with Tyndall. Tyndall, however, was a member of a club that vocally supported Darwin's theory of evolution and sought to establish a barrier, or separation, between religion and science. The anatomist Thomas Henry Huxley was the most prominent member of this club. Tyndall first met Huxley in 1851 and the two had a lifelong friendship. Chemist Edward Frankland and mathematician Thomas Archer Hirst, both of whom Tyndall had known since before going to university in Germany, were members too. Others included the political philosopher Herbert Spencer. See X-Club.

Though not nearly so prominent as Huxley in controversy over theological problems, Tyndall played his part in communicating to the educated public the virtues of having a clear separation between science (rationality & knowledge) and religion (faith & spirituality). As the elected president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 he gave a long keynote speech at the Association's annual meeting held that year in Belfast. The speech gave a favorable account of the history of evolutionary theories, mentioning Darwin's name favorably 19 times, and concluded by asserting that religious sentiment should not be permitted to "intrude on the region of knowledge, over which it holds no command". This was a hot topic. The daily newspapers carried the report of it on their front pages -- in the British Isles, North America and even the European Continent -- and the defenders of religious orthodoxy felt impelled to rebutt it, and their rebuttals were carried by the newspapers too.[35] In several essays included in his book Fragments of Science for Unscientific People: A Series of Detached Essays, Lectures, and Reviews Tyndall attempted to dissuade people from the belief in miracles and the effectiveness of prayers. At the same time, though, he was not broadly anti-religious, and his writings leave no straightforward evidence that he was not a Christian or at least a Deist.[36]

In Rome the Pope in 1864 decreed that it was an error that "reason is the ultimate standard by which man can and ought to arrive at knowledge" and an error that "divine revelation is imperfect" in the Bible -- and anyone maintaining those errors was to be "anathematized" -- and that was followed up in 1870 with the decree that "all faithful Christians are forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith".[37] Those principles and Tyndall's principles were profound enemies. Luckily for Tyndall he didn't need to get into a contest with them, in Britain, nor in most other parts of the world. Even in Italy, Huxley and Darwin were awarded honorary medals and most of the Italian governing class was hostile to the papacy.[38] But in Ireland during Tyndall's lifetime the majority of the population grew increasingly doctrinaire and vigorous in its Roman Catholicism and also grew stronger politically. It would've been a waste of everybody's time for Tyndall to debate the Irish Catholics, but Tyndall was active in the debate in England about whether to give the Irish Catholics more freedom to go their own way. Like the great majority of Irish-born scientists of the 19th century he opposed Home Rule for Ireland. He had ardent views about it, which were published in newspapers and pamphlets.[39] It is said (though it's probably apocryphal) that he is the first person to have used the popular slogan "Home Rule means Rome Rule".[40] He tried unsuccessfully to get the Royal Society to denounce the Home Rule proposal as contrary to the interests of science.[41]

Private life

John Tyndall

Tyndall did not marry until age 55. His bride, Louisa Hamilton, who he had first met in the Alps, was the 30-year-old daughter of Lord Claud Hamilton, Member of Parliament (representing the Ulster constituency of Tyrone for the Conservative Party).[42] The following year, 1877, they built a summer chalet at Belalp in the Swiss Alps. Before getting married Tyndall had been living for many years in an upstairs apartment at the Royal Institution and continued to live there after marriage until 1885 when a move was made to a house near Haslemere 45 miles southwest of London. The marriage was a happy one and without children. He retired from the Royal Institution at age 66 having complaints of ill health.

Tyndall became financially well-off from sales of his popular books and fees from his lectures (but no evidence he owned commercial patents). His successful lecture tour of the United States in 1872 brought him a substantial amount of dollars, all of which he promptly donated to a trustee for fostering science in America.[43] Late in life his money donations went most visibly to the Irish Unionist political cause.[44]

In his last years Tyndall often took chloral hydrate to treat his insomnia. He died from an accidental[45] overdose of this drug at age 73, and was buried at Haslemere.[46] Afterwards, Tyndall's wife took possession of his papers and assigned herself as supervisor of an official biography of him. She dragged her feet on the project, however, and it was still unfinished when she died in 1940 aged 95.[47] The book eventually appeared in 1945, written by A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, who Louisa Tyndall had authorized shortly before her death.

John Tyndall's books

  • The Glaciers of the Alps (470 pages) (1860)
  • Heat as a Mode of Motion (550 pages) (1863; revised later editions)
  • On Radiation: One Lecture (40 pages) (1865)[48]
  • Sound: A Course of Eight Lectures (350 pages) (1867; revised later editions)
  • Faraday as a Discoverer (180 pages) (1868)
  • Three Scientific Addresses by Prof. John Tyndall (75 pages) (1870)[49]
  • Notes of a Course of Nine Lectures on Light (80 pages) (1870)
  • Notes of a Course of Seven Lectures on Electrical Phenomena and Theories (50 pages) (1870)
  • Diamagnetism and Magne-crystallic Action; including the Question of Diamagnetic Polarity (380 pages) (1870) (a compilation of early research reports)
  • Hours of Exercise in the Alps (450 pages) (1871)
  • Fragments of Science: A Series of Detached Essays, Lectures, and Reviews (over 500 pages) (1871; expanded later editions)
  • The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers (200 pages) (1872)
  • Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat (450 pages) (1872) (a compilation of research reports)
  • Six Lectures on Light (290 pages) (1873)
  • Lessons in Electricity at the Royal Institution (100 pages) (1876)
  • Essays on the Floating-matter of the Air in relation to Putrefaction and Infection (360 pages) (1881)
  • New Fragments (500 pages) (1892)

All of the above books can be freely ed at Archive.org.
The majority of the books have been re-issued in recent years by a variety of publishers and can be bought new.

Biographies of John Tyndall

  • Eve, A.S. & Creasey, C.H. (1945). Life and Work of John Tyndall. London: Macmillan.  430 pages. This is the "official" biography.
  • William T. Jeans published a 100-page biography of Professor Tyndall in 1887 (the year Tyndall retired from the Royal Institution). It is available for at Archive.org. Clicking the following link s it in the DjVu fileformat (10 megabytes): Tyndall Bio (DjVu) (if you don't have a good DjVu file viewer you can one here).
  • Louisa Charlotte Tyndall (his wife) wrote the 8-page biography of John Tyndall that appeared in the Dictionary of National Biography during the early part of the 20th century. An edition of one of his books published in 1903 is prefaced by a reproduction of this 8-page biography. It is available here (fileformat DjVu).
  • Brock, W. H.. "Tyndall, John (1820–1893), Physicist and Mountaineer". http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27948.  in the current Dictionary of National Biography
  • Burchfield, J.A. (1981). John Tyndall, Essays on a Natural Philosopher. Dublin: Royal Dublin Society. 
  • Arthur Whitmore Smith, a professor of physics, wrote at 10-page biography of John Tyndall in 1920 in an American scientific monthly. Available here(starts at page 91)(format DjVu).
  • John Walter Gregory wrote a nine-page biography of John Tyndall as an obituary in 1894 in the monthly journal "Natural Science". The relevant volume of the journal is able here.
  • An early, seven-page profile of John Tyndall appeared in 1864 in Portraits of Men of Eminence in Literature, Science and Art (volume II). Available here (fileformat DjVu).
  • McMillan N.D., "John Tyndall (1820 - 1893)", a 10-page biography in the book Physicists of Ireland (2002; edited by McCartney and Whitaker), preview available at Google Book Search.

See also

  • Ice sheet dynamics
  • Spontaneous generation

Footnotes

  1. Tyndall was the chief surveyor for the proposed railway line from Halifax to Keighley in 1846 according to Thomas Archer Hirst, who worked under Tyndall at the same engineering firm at the time ([1]). Tyndall described himself as the "principal assistant" at the firm ([2]).
  2. For an account of Tyndall's friendship with Robert Owen see the chapter about John Tyndall in the book "Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 12: Great Scientists" by Elbert Hubbard, published in 1916. The chapter is available online at [3] or the complete book at [4]. For a different account, involving one George Edmondson, see Norman D. McMillan's biography of Tyndall at [5].
  3. Tyndall has detailed recollections about his life in the 1840s in "Address Delivered at the Birkbeck Institution on October 22, 1884", which is published as a chapter in his New Fragments essays (1892).
  4. In deciding to attend the University of Marburg, the reputation of Robert Bunsen was one of the main attractions for Frankland and Tyndall. Tyndall studied under Bunsen for two years. 35 years later the student praised the teacher for explaining chemistry and physics in "the language of experiment" and followed that with "I still look back on Bunsen as the nearest approach to my ideal of a university teacher." [6]
  5. Tyndall's diamagnetic research reports were later republished as a 370-page collection, which is available at Archive.org (fileformat DJVU). In the preface to the collection Tyndall writes about the work's historical context. William T. Jeans' biography of Tyndall (pages 22 to 34) also goes into the historical context of Tyndall's diamagnetic investigations.
  6. In advocating Tyndall's appointment, in a letter to the managers of the Royal Institution on 23 May 1853, Faraday also praised Tyndall's abilities as a lecturer: "I have heard him on two or three occasions, when his manner of expounding nature by discourse and experiment was in my judgement excellent". Source: [7].
  7. Tyndall's various discoveries about air are reviewed in "The Legacy of John Tyndall in Aerosol Science" by James W. Gentry and Lin Jui-Chen in Journal of Aerosol Science vol 27 page S503, 1996, available online at [8]
  8. "Biography of John Tyndall at The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research". http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/general/history/john_tyndall_biography.shtml. 
  9. Details of Tyndall's device for measuring the infrared absorptive power of a gas are described in James Rodger Fleming (2005). Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. Oxford University Press. pp. 69-70. http://books.google.com/books?id=09RtcSCGv7gC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=%22was+able+to+exclaim+in+his+journal%22+%22Experimented+all+day%22&source=web&ots=SxjEO2m9Gm&sig=hmkLYIfTtDuMW1E1EG5dXG9JL2c&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result.  (Note that what Fleming calls "spectrophotometry" is usually termed "radiometry.") Greater details are in Tyndall's own book at Archive.org.
  10. Tyndall explained the "greenhouse effect" in a public lecture in January 1863 entitled "On Radiation Through The Earth's Atmosphere". This short, very readable lecture is reprinted in his 1872 book about radiant heat, available here (DJVU fileformat).
  11. The "identity of light and radiant heat" is a section heading in his 1873 tutorial Six Lectures on Light (fileformat DJVU).
  12. As reported in the 10-page biography of John Tyndall by Arthur Whitmore Smith, a professor of physics, writing in an American scientific monthly in 1920. Available here(starts at page 91)(format DjVu).
  13. See [9] for a catalog, presumably incomplete, of letters from Pasteur to Tyndall. Their communications were most frequent during the mid-1870s. The earliest letter is dated 10 Aug 1871. Pasteur's early research had been in fermentation vats and broths. As he aimed to extend his program to air, he got in touch with Tyndall as someone who was an expert at dealing technically with air. It's probably no coincidence that in June 1871 a short lecture by Tyndall entitled "Dust and Disease" was published in the British Medical Journal. The "Dust and Disease" lecture was Tyndall's first published comments in this area (in a medical journal at least). Ten years later Tyndall published a 350-page book Essays on the Floating-matter of the Air in relation to Putrefaction and Infection (format DjVu).
  14. See also Conant, James Bryant (1957). "Pasteur's and Tyndall's Study of Spontaneous Generation". Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science. 2. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 489 – 539. 
  15. Lord Rayleigh, who published a much-praised tome about sound in 1877, provides a brief review of Tyndall's original contributions to the science of sound in Proceedings of the Royal Institution (vol XIV)(fileformat DJVU), dated 16 March 1894. Tyndall's own presentation of his "researches on the acoustic transparency of the atmosphere" is in the 3rd edition (1875) of his book Sound(format DjVu), Chapter VII.
  16. Tyndall's analysis of ozone is in sections 17, 18 & 19 of Chapter II of Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat
  17. Quote: "In the Royal Society's catalogue of scientific papers 145 entries appear under Tyndall's name between 1850 and 1883, indicating approximately the number of his contributions to... scientific journals." That quote is from the short biography of Tyndall written by his wife (see Biographies of John Tyndall). However, some of Tyndall's papers were republished in other journals -- for instance his paper on diamagetism with Knoblauch in 1850 appeared in an English journal and got enough interest that it was straightup republished shortly afterwards in German and French journals. It is unclear how many duplicates and near duplicates are in the 145 number.
  18. As early as January 1861 Tyndall was writing: "All the gases and vapours hitherto mentioned [which are absorbers of radiant heat] are transparent to light; that is to say, the waves of the visible spectrum pass among them without sensible absorption. Hence it is plain that their absorptive power depends on the periodicity of the undulations which strike them.... By Kirchhoff it has been conclusively shown that every atom absorbs in a special degree those waves which are synchronous with its own periods of vibration." [10] (fileformat DJVU).
  19. "John Tyndall, The Rhetorician Of Molecularity", by Maria Yamalidou, published 1999, a two-part article at [11] and [12].
  20. Daniel Colladon's 1842 "light pipe" article is entitled "On the reflections of a ray of light inside a parabolic liquid stream". For more on the history of the "light pipe" in the 19th century see chapter 2 of the book "The Story of Fiber Optics" by Jeff Hecht available for viewing online at Google Book Search Preview. For a modern re-creation of Tyndall's light-pipe demonstration see Tyndall's Historical Experiment at i-fiberoptics.com. In Tyndall's own 1870 book Notes about Light he has a section entitled "Total Reflexion" where he explains: "When the light passes from air into water, the refracted ray is bent towards the perpendicular.... When the ray passes from water to air it is bent from the perpendicular.... If the angle which the ray in water encloses with the perpendicular to the surface be greater than 48 degrees, the ray will not quit the water at all: it will be totally reflected at the surface.... The angle which marks the limit where total reflexion begins is called the limiting angle of the medium. For water this angle is 48° 27', for flint glass it is 38° 41', while for diamond it is 23° 42'."
  21. According to Tyndall's account in The Glaciers of the Alps (1860), in 1858 he summited Monte Rosa solo carrying only a ham sandwich for sustenance. The first human summiting of Monte Rosa had taken place only in 1855. Tyndall had already summited Monte Rosa in a guided group on 1858-08-10 but he made an unplanned second summit solo on 1858-08-17 after breakfast: "the waiter then provided me with a ham sandwich, and, with my scrip thus frugally furnished, I thought the heights of Monte Rosa might be won...." (continued at pages 151-157 of Glaciers of the Alps).
  22. Brewer, William H. (1873). "Discovery of Mount Tyndall". The Popular Science Monthly 2: 739 – 741. http://books.google.com/books?id=s54VAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA739&dq=Mount+Tyndall&lr=&as_brr=1#PPA739,M2. 
  23. Haast, Julius (1864). "Notes on the Mountains and Glaciers of the Canterbury Province, New Zealand". The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 34: 87 – 96. http://books.google.com/books?id=JOoRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA89&dq=Mount+Tyndall&lr=&as_brr=1#PPA87,M2. 
  24. During the 14 days in December 1872 when Tyndall gave public evening lectures in Manhattan, The New York Times printed news items about Tyndall on 9 of the days, some of them lengthy efforts at recapitulating what Professor Tyndall had said in his lecture the night before about the nature of light. The New York Times noted that more than half the people attending the lectures were women (which was generally true of Tyndall's lectures in London as well) and noted that the lectures about the nature of light delivered in Washington DC were attended by eminent U.S. Senators, Cabinet Ministers, and even the U.S. President himself. The New York Times Archives, 4 Dec 1872 - 9 Feb 1873.
  25. Tyndall was a celebrity in the later 19th century and he was one of the people profiled in the 1878 book "Celebrities at Home" (2nd Series). The book is available online at Archive.org.
  26. Tyndall said he found that "two factors went to the formation of a teacher. In regard to knowledge he must, of course, be master of his work.... [and secondly] a power of character must underlie and enforce the work of the intellect. There were men who could so rouse and energise their pupils -- so call forth their strength and the pleasure of its exercise -- as to make the hardest work agreeable. Without this power it is questionable whether the teacher could ever really enjoy his vocation; with it, I do not know a higher, nobler, and more blessed calling." [13]
  27. Some of his science books were short, like 80 pages, and others were not. See List of John Tyndall's books
  28. A catalog of the German editions of Tyndall's books is at Worldcat.org.
  29. A catalog of the French editions of Tyndall's books is at Worldcat.org.
  30. Quote from Tyndall's tutorial The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers, first published in 1872.
  31. Clicking this external link s the complete 350-page tutorial book Sound, 3rd edition, in the DJVU fileformat (10 megabytes): Sound (Archive.org).
  32. The UK publisher was Longman. The US publisher was Appleton. Longman kept the book in print until sometime after 1908 and Appleton until sometime after 1915; see Worldcat.org. The German publisher, Braunschweig, introduced a renewed German edition in 1894; and the French publisher, Gauthier-Villars, in 1887.
  33. The text of Tyndall's 1874 Belfast Address is available at Victorianweb.org. This speech got more coverage in the Victorian-era newspapers than any other single public speech in the decades-long Victorian debate over the status of evolution theory. A review of the speech's reception by various London newspapers is at [14]. The great majority of London newspapers either endorsed Tyndall's position or took a neutral but respectful attitude towards it.
  34. The collection of Tyndall's essays where his views on religion are most clearly stated is available online at [15].
  35. Those quotations are from the Syllabus of Errors decree (1864) and the First Vatican Council decree (1870). The full text of the Syllabus of Errors is at Wikipedia's sister site Wikisource.Org.
  36. For Italy see Prisoner in the Vatican. Also see [16].
  37. For example, in an opinion piece in The Times newspaper on 27 Dec 1890, Tyndall saw priests and Catholicism as "the heart and soul" of the Irish Home Rule movement and wrote that placing Irish Protestants "under the feet of the priestly horde" would be "an unspeakable crime". [17](page 183)(format DjVu). Tyndall was the author of a pamphlet, "Mr. Gladstone's Sudden Reversal of Polarity", which documented how British Prime Minister Gladstone did a flip-flop on the Irish question. The intent was to undermine Gladstone's intellectual credibility on the question. Gladstone publicly defended himself against the attack. The debate between them got a lot of attention in the daily newspapers in the early 1890s.
  38. See, e.g., "John Tyndall". Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco). http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/t/Tyndall,J/life.htm.  In debate in the House of Commons in June 1874 a member of parliament stated: "It has been often said that "Home Rule is Rome Rule"" [18]. Since John Tyndall didn't became conspicuous on the Home Rule question until 1874 and after, it is unlikely that he was the first person to use the slogan.
  39. The scientists of the British Isles were nearly unanimous in opposing Irish Home Rule, but, to Tyndall's disappointment, a majority of them also thought that the matter didn't have enough direct bearing on the vital interests of science to warrant an organized formal denunciation by them. See: Jones, Greta (2001), "Scientists against Home Rule", in Boyce, D. George; O'Day, Alan, Defenders of the Union: A Survey of British and Irish Unionism Since 1801, London: Routledge, pp. 188 – 208 .
  40. Thepeerage.com
  41. See The New York Times, 8 July 1885. See also: Staff (1885-11-03). "Professor Tyndall's Fellowship". The New York Times (1885). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9D04EED81138E033A25750C0A9679D94649FD7CF 
  42. See The New York Times, 25 June 1892.
  43. In late years he was taking magnesia for dyspepsia and chloral hydrate for insomnia. His wife, who administered the drugs, accidentally gave him none of the former and a lethal overdose of the latter. See this report of Mrs. Tyndall's testimony: Staff (1893-12-25). "Mrs. Tyndall's Fatal Error". The New York Times (1893). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F00E4D9173EEF33A25756C2A9649D94629ED7CF 
  44. E. F. (1894). "Obituary Notice of John Tyndall". Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 45: xviii - xxxiv. http://books.google.com/books?id=_fMAAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PR34&dq=John+Tyndall+died&as_brr=1. 
  45. Louisa Tyndall wanted a collaborator, but was unsatisfied with all candidates. Later, according to Crowther, she would only accept one who would live in her own house, and none such was found. Crowther, J. G. (1968). Scientific Types. London: Barrie & Rockliff, The Crescent Press Ltd.. pp. 187 – 188. 
  46. The short book On Radiation (1865) was wholly incorporated into the long book Fragments of Science (1871).
  47. His book Scientific Addresses was published in America only. It consisted of three speeches delivered in Britain 1868-1870. Two of the three were published in Britain in the short book Essays on the Use and Limit of the Imagination in Science.

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Source: adapted by the editor from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia; from the article "John Tyndall". Image Credit.
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