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The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual
Rising from a humble background in rural southern Ireland, John Tyndall became one of the foremost physicists, communicators of science, and polemicists in mid-Victorian Britain. In science, he is known for his important work in meteorology, climate science, magnetism, acoustics, and bacteriology. His discoveries include the physical basis of the warming of the Earth's atmosphere (the basis of the greenhouse effect), and establishing why the sky is blue. But he wasalso a leading communicator of science, drawing great crowds to his lectures at the Royal Institution, while also playing an active role in the Royal Society.Tyndall moved in the highest social and intellectual circles. A friend of Tennyson and Carlyle, as well as Michael Faraday and Thomas Huxley, Tyndall was one of the most visible advocates of a scientific world view as tensions grew between developing scientific knowledge and theology. He was an active and often controversial commentator, through letters, essays, speeches, and debates, on the scientific, political, and social issues of the day, with strongly stated views on Ireland, religion,race, and the role of women. Widely read in America, his lecture tour there in 1872-73 was a great success.Roland Jackson paints a picture of an individual at the heart of Victorian science and society. He also describes Tyndall's importance as a pioneering mountaineer in what has become known as the Golden Age of Alpinism. Among other feats, Tyndall was the first to traverse the Matterhorn. He presents Tyndall as a complex personality, full of contrasts, with his intense sense of duty, his deep love of poetry, his generosity to friends and his combativeness, his persistent ill-health alongsidegreat physical stamina driving him to his mountaineering feats. Drawing on Tyndall's letters and journals for this first major biography of Tyndall since 1945, Jackson explores the legacy of a man who aroused strong opinions, strong loyalties, and strong enmities throughout his life.
- GenresBiography
575 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 13, 2018
39 people want to read
About the author
Roland Jackson
2 books2 followersI'm interested in the history, ethics, and policy issues relating to science and technology.
Trained as a bioscientist, I taught science in the school sector before joining the international chemical company ICI as their Education Adviser in 1989. In 1993 I joined the Science Museum, London, initially as Head of Education and eventually as Head of Museum from 2001-2002. From 2002-2013 I was Chief Executive of the British Science Association. Since then I have been Executive Chair of Sciencewise, and held various other positions in areas of science policy. I am currently a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and Research Associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies in University College London.
Trained as a bioscientist, I taught science in the school sector before joining the international chemical company ICI as their Education Adviser in 1989. In 1993 I joined the Science Museum, London, initially as Head of Education and eventually as Head of Museum from 2001-2002. From 2002-2013 I was Chief Executive of the British Science Association. Since then I have been Executive Chair of Sciencewise, and held various other positions in areas of science policy. I am currently a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Visiting Fellow at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and Research Associate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies in University College London.
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January 23, 2019
A version of a review I wrote for he Literary Review:
In 1859, John Tyndall wrote “the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.” He was just beginning a thorough scientific study of the way infrared radiation is absorbed by different gases, including water vapour and carbon dioxide, which would be developed by others into an understanding of the human impact on global warming. Tyndall always had a good way with words, summing up some of his research with:
The sun's invisible rays far transcend the visible ones in heating power, so that if the alleged performances of Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse had any foundation in fact, the dark solar rays would have been the philosopher's chief agents of combustion.
He was also the first person to explain correctly why the sky is blue, was an outspoken critic of the Victorian obsession with the supernatural, a popular lecturer, and author of books presenting science to a wide audience. He has long been one of my scientific heroes, and for even longer he has been in need of a good biography. The Ascent of John Tyndall is not quite as good as I had hoped it might be, but my expectations were perhaps unreasonably high, and Roland Jackson has done a thorough job, even if his prose lacks sparkle.
Tyndall’s ascent took him from modest beginnings in Ireland, where he was born in the early 1820s (the exact date is not known because the relevant records were destroyed during the Irish Civil War of 1922) to succeed Michal Farady (himself the successor to Humphry Davy) at the head of the Royal Institution in London. Davy, Faraday and Tyndall were the men who made the RI a success, and made science fashionable in nineteenth century England. The ascent was, however, far from straightforward. It took Tyndall from surveying work with the Ordnance Survey (linked with the railway boom of the mid-1800s) to schoolmastering at a college where although hired to teach surveying to prospective farmers, he was also told to teach chemistry, and kept one step ahead of his students with the aid of a textbook. His interest in science was fired, and in 1848 he went to Germany to work for a PhD – at that time, there was no requirement to take an undergraduate degree first. Back in England, Tyndall built up a reputation through his work on magnetism, gave some well-received lectures, and was appointed as a lecturer at the RI.
In the mid-1950s, through an interest in the way rocks are fractured, he found a life-long passion – mountaineering. What started as field trips to the Alps to investigate geology and glaciology became climbing for the sake of climbing. In many ways, Tyndall was a pioneer, circumventing rules that any attempt on Mont Blanc had to be accompanied by four guides by claiming that as he was on a scientific field trip he only needed one guide. But in other ways he was in the tradition of Victorian gentlemen mountaineers. On that climb, porters carried supplies up to the base hut before the ascent – supplies that included one bottle of cognac, three of Beaujolais, three of vin ordinaire, three large loaves, three halves of roasted leg of mutton, three cooked chickens, raisins and chocolate. Well, there were a couple of other people in the party!
Such entertaining detail is, unfortunately, thin on the ground in Jackson’s account, which sometimes falls back on lists of the dinners attended and people met, culled from diaries. Nevertheless, we glean that Tyndall was something of a ladies’ man, and when he eventually married (in 1875) a friend commented that this would “clip his wings”. An anecdote which struck a more personal chord with me concerned Tyndall’s relationship with publishers. His book Glaciers of the Alps was published by Murray, but he then switched to Longman for his subsequent works. When asked why, he explained that Murray had taken a cut of income from an American edition produced by another publisher, while Longman offered two-thirds of profits from the UK and did not claim control of overseas rights. Some modern publishing houses could learn from that example.
The USA became increasingly important to Tyndall as his fame, and his books, spread. In the early 1870s he undertook a lecture tour of America which can best be described as the scientific equivalent of Charles Dickens’ triumphal progress through the States. Six lectures in New York were printed up as pamphlets and 300,000 copies were sold across the USA at 3 cents each. Overall, after the deduction of expenses the tour produced a profit of $13,033.34, which was donated by Tyndall to be invested and found a fund to provide scholarships for American students to carry out research in Europe. Many Americans benefited from the scheme, which only ran out of money in the 1960s.
Tyndall was involved in many official works, including serving on the Lighthouse Committee (a post which he essentially inherited from Faraday) and was not afraid to speak out on matters of public interest. He carried out key work which helped to establish the idea that disease is spread by germs, challenging opponents of the idea through papers published in the medical journals and in letters to the Times. Above all, Tyndall was a rationalist, who believed in the scientific method and poh-poohed spritualism. He wrote “A miracle is strictly defined as an invasion of the law of the conservation of energy . . . Hence the scepticism of scientific men when called upon to join in national prayer for changes in the economy of nature.” This should be read against the background of a sermon by the Dean of York in which he preached that a cattle plague then afflicting the herds was God’s work, and that only God could avert it. As with Tyndall’s work on what we now call the greenhouse effect, his ideas have resonance today – ironically, particular resonance in the United States which espoused Tyndall himself so enthusiastically.
In a later article, Tyndall put humankind in a cosmic perspective, imagining:
Transferring our thoughts from this little sand-grain of an earth to the immeasurable heavens where countless worlds with freights of life probably revolve unseen.
Tyndall died in 1893. His wife was still only in her late forties, and lived for a further 47 years. Unfortunately, although she gathered together a wealth of material about her husband, she could never bring herself to write a biography, and inadvertently prevented anyone else doing so until a less than comprehensive account appeared in 1945. Jackson’s account is certainly comprehensive, and to be recommended to anyone interested in nineteenth century science and society, not just to the minority who have heard the name John Tyndall already (except, perhaps, in connection with a namesake with very different political convictions to “our” John Tyndall). It isn’t the kind of book you will read at a sitting, but with thematic chapters dealing with topics such as glacial studies or rationalism, it is easy to select what takes your fancy while skipping anything that doesn’t. And it is certainly the best biography of Tyndall.
In 1859, John Tyndall wrote “the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.” He was just beginning a thorough scientific study of the way infrared radiation is absorbed by different gases, including water vapour and carbon dioxide, which would be developed by others into an understanding of the human impact on global warming. Tyndall always had a good way with words, summing up some of his research with:
The sun's invisible rays far transcend the visible ones in heating power, so that if the alleged performances of Archimedes during the siege of Syracuse had any foundation in fact, the dark solar rays would have been the philosopher's chief agents of combustion.
He was also the first person to explain correctly why the sky is blue, was an outspoken critic of the Victorian obsession with the supernatural, a popular lecturer, and author of books presenting science to a wide audience. He has long been one of my scientific heroes, and for even longer he has been in need of a good biography. The Ascent of John Tyndall is not quite as good as I had hoped it might be, but my expectations were perhaps unreasonably high, and Roland Jackson has done a thorough job, even if his prose lacks sparkle.
Tyndall’s ascent took him from modest beginnings in Ireland, where he was born in the early 1820s (the exact date is not known because the relevant records were destroyed during the Irish Civil War of 1922) to succeed Michal Farady (himself the successor to Humphry Davy) at the head of the Royal Institution in London. Davy, Faraday and Tyndall were the men who made the RI a success, and made science fashionable in nineteenth century England. The ascent was, however, far from straightforward. It took Tyndall from surveying work with the Ordnance Survey (linked with the railway boom of the mid-1800s) to schoolmastering at a college where although hired to teach surveying to prospective farmers, he was also told to teach chemistry, and kept one step ahead of his students with the aid of a textbook. His interest in science was fired, and in 1848 he went to Germany to work for a PhD – at that time, there was no requirement to take an undergraduate degree first. Back in England, Tyndall built up a reputation through his work on magnetism, gave some well-received lectures, and was appointed as a lecturer at the RI.
In the mid-1950s, through an interest in the way rocks are fractured, he found a life-long passion – mountaineering. What started as field trips to the Alps to investigate geology and glaciology became climbing for the sake of climbing. In many ways, Tyndall was a pioneer, circumventing rules that any attempt on Mont Blanc had to be accompanied by four guides by claiming that as he was on a scientific field trip he only needed one guide. But in other ways he was in the tradition of Victorian gentlemen mountaineers. On that climb, porters carried supplies up to the base hut before the ascent – supplies that included one bottle of cognac, three of Beaujolais, three of vin ordinaire, three large loaves, three halves of roasted leg of mutton, three cooked chickens, raisins and chocolate. Well, there were a couple of other people in the party!
Such entertaining detail is, unfortunately, thin on the ground in Jackson’s account, which sometimes falls back on lists of the dinners attended and people met, culled from diaries. Nevertheless, we glean that Tyndall was something of a ladies’ man, and when he eventually married (in 1875) a friend commented that this would “clip his wings”. An anecdote which struck a more personal chord with me concerned Tyndall’s relationship with publishers. His book Glaciers of the Alps was published by Murray, but he then switched to Longman for his subsequent works. When asked why, he explained that Murray had taken a cut of income from an American edition produced by another publisher, while Longman offered two-thirds of profits from the UK and did not claim control of overseas rights. Some modern publishing houses could learn from that example.
The USA became increasingly important to Tyndall as his fame, and his books, spread. In the early 1870s he undertook a lecture tour of America which can best be described as the scientific equivalent of Charles Dickens’ triumphal progress through the States. Six lectures in New York were printed up as pamphlets and 300,000 copies were sold across the USA at 3 cents each. Overall, after the deduction of expenses the tour produced a profit of $13,033.34, which was donated by Tyndall to be invested and found a fund to provide scholarships for American students to carry out research in Europe. Many Americans benefited from the scheme, which only ran out of money in the 1960s.
Tyndall was involved in many official works, including serving on the Lighthouse Committee (a post which he essentially inherited from Faraday) and was not afraid to speak out on matters of public interest. He carried out key work which helped to establish the idea that disease is spread by germs, challenging opponents of the idea through papers published in the medical journals and in letters to the Times. Above all, Tyndall was a rationalist, who believed in the scientific method and poh-poohed spritualism. He wrote “A miracle is strictly defined as an invasion of the law of the conservation of energy . . . Hence the scepticism of scientific men when called upon to join in national prayer for changes in the economy of nature.” This should be read against the background of a sermon by the Dean of York in which he preached that a cattle plague then afflicting the herds was God’s work, and that only God could avert it. As with Tyndall’s work on what we now call the greenhouse effect, his ideas have resonance today – ironically, particular resonance in the United States which espoused Tyndall himself so enthusiastically.
In a later article, Tyndall put humankind in a cosmic perspective, imagining:
Transferring our thoughts from this little sand-grain of an earth to the immeasurable heavens where countless worlds with freights of life probably revolve unseen.
Tyndall died in 1893. His wife was still only in her late forties, and lived for a further 47 years. Unfortunately, although she gathered together a wealth of material about her husband, she could never bring herself to write a biography, and inadvertently prevented anyone else doing so until a less than comprehensive account appeared in 1945. Jackson’s account is certainly comprehensive, and to be recommended to anyone interested in nineteenth century science and society, not just to the minority who have heard the name John Tyndall already (except, perhaps, in connection with a namesake with very different political convictions to “our” John Tyndall). It isn’t the kind of book you will read at a sitting, but with thematic chapters dealing with topics such as glacial studies or rationalism, it is easy to select what takes your fancy while skipping anything that doesn’t. And it is certainly the best biography of Tyndall.
July 17, 2018
In “John Tyndall...” Roland Jackson — its author, a scientist himself and CEO of the British Association, of which John was once a Director — wanted to create the most definite of Tyndall’s biographies. The result is certainly one of the most detailed accounts of anyone’s life, reading almost like a daily diary, detailing every meeting, encounter, conference, lecture, trip, in addition to a lot of correspondence and writing. All this data he must have methodically extracted from a variety of sources, including the personal diaries of John and his friends and family. The effect is a very rich and detailed view not only of this man’s life, but also his health, his occupations and preoccupations and the evolution of his thoughts - indeed perhaps too rich a picture because it demands a lot of patience from the average reader to plow their way through all this detail. But what does emerge out of it is a picture of an individual who is not only intelligent but unusually perceptive, curious, and, yes, aggressive in pursuing his interests, be it in the form of scientific inquiry, or physical prowess, or social and economic climbing, or even, towards trend of his life, in the area of politics. Indeed it is amazing how much this man was able to cram within any one interval of his life, simultaneously giving lectures, writing articles and books, visiting friends and colleagues, attending meetings and leading the several organizations he chaired, plus all his adventurous climbs and explorations of just about every major glacier and peak in the Alps in Switzerland. Equally amazing to us today is the way this physicist was able to shift from one subject to the next in the field of natural sciences, beginning with magnetism, then ice , then heat. Then meteorology, then germs and public health, all at a time of great scientific invention. Reading this book reveals a great deal about the inner workings of that generation of scientists, and how they drew from each other, even as they each competed with each other. Indeed, if there is an overarching message in this biography, it is that John deserves far greater scientific recognition than he has received to date, and to explain how it is that his influence has been forgotten. Clearly Roland Jackson wants John restored to his proper place in history, along the likes of Darwin, Huxley, Faraday, Joule, and Pasteur. However, what drew me to this book was Tyndall’s views on “science versus religion,” and the description of the intellectual and social forces at work when, for the first time, it became evident that inquiries into what lay behind the world around us could find their answer not so much in religious authority, or even philosophical discourse, but rather testable hypotheses about the behavior of our natural environment. It is important to understand this, since to this day there are many euwill challenge this proposition because it threatens their wealth or position of power.
October 2, 2021
John Tyndall, although following in the footsteps of Faraday, is very much less well known. He was a prolific researcher and experimenter, and, according to the book, a fantastic presenter and teacher. He had a wide-ranging career, starting out from a lowly background in Ireland, working up from surveying, teaching, translating and finally working at the Royal Institution. He was surrounded by other famous names, and was a friend of most of them, and an enemy of a few. Mixing with Darwin, Tennyson, Bunsen, Joule, Hooker, and, of course Faraday. His work rate seemed pretty prolific, he worked on magnetism, thermal properties of gases (for which, in these days of climate change, he is probably best known), as well as safety in mines and lights and sirens for lighthouses. In between he found time to spend months looking at glaciers and mountaineering, as well as writing books and translating scientific papers.
The research for the book is excellent, and it is composed of extracts from letters and diaries, including Tyndall's own. However, there is possibly too much in the book and I found myself wondering if some of it could have been shortened as it seems to cover almost every lecture series, book, and dinner party attended. That Tyndall was well regarded by the leading lights of the day is not in doubt, and it was interesting that, despite this, he was still not seen as good enough as a marriage prospect for the well to do. But, he doesn't come across as a particularly nice man, he had many arguments in the national press (he particularly disliked Gladstone), and seemed to sometimes fall out with his friends, he was also sexist and racist, believing there was a difference in intellectual capabilities of the sexes and of different races. So, although the book was well researched and interesting because it presented a warts and all view of someone rarely written about, it did become quite tedious after a while.
The research for the book is excellent, and it is composed of extracts from letters and diaries, including Tyndall's own. However, there is possibly too much in the book and I found myself wondering if some of it could have been shortened as it seems to cover almost every lecture series, book, and dinner party attended. That Tyndall was well regarded by the leading lights of the day is not in doubt, and it was interesting that, despite this, he was still not seen as good enough as a marriage prospect for the well to do. But, he doesn't come across as a particularly nice man, he had many arguments in the national press (he particularly disliked Gladstone), and seemed to sometimes fall out with his friends, he was also sexist and racist, believing there was a difference in intellectual capabilities of the sexes and of different races. So, although the book was well researched and interesting because it presented a warts and all view of someone rarely written about, it did become quite tedious after a while.
July 19, 2021
John Tyndall was a pretty amazing guy, and as Jackson notes, it's probably because he was more of an experimenter than a theorist that he's not better known. Unfortunately, this book is not likely to do much for his reputation, at least in the general public. It's overstuffed with details about every scientific quarrel he had, which city had the prettiest girls (according to Tyndall), and similar minutia, all of which makes for a real slog when reading.
This book would have been a great PhD thesis for a biographer, but it's not compelling as literature. I did come away with a lot of respect for Tyndall (and admittedly, for the researching abilities of the author) but only about 50% of the text was enjoyable reading.
It's ironic because Tyndall himself was acclaimed as a lecturer, and sold-out venues in Britain, Ireland, and America and created experiments he could reproduce on stage to enlighten the audience.
I did appreciate the author's straightforward account of Tyndall's shortcomings alongside his genius, in particular his attitudes toward women, democracy, and home rule (Ireland). It's a fair book with a lot of good information, but just too much information that's less valuable.
This book would have been a great PhD thesis for a biographer, but it's not compelling as literature. I did come away with a lot of respect for Tyndall (and admittedly, for the researching abilities of the author) but only about 50% of the text was enjoyable reading.
It's ironic because Tyndall himself was acclaimed as a lecturer, and sold-out venues in Britain, Ireland, and America and created experiments he could reproduce on stage to enlighten the audience.
I did appreciate the author's straightforward account of Tyndall's shortcomings alongside his genius, in particular his attitudes toward women, democracy, and home rule (Ireland). It's a fair book with a lot of good information, but just too much information that's less valuable.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews