Abstract
I analyze, through the work of the Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820–1893), the close relationship formed in the mid-nineteenth century between advances in the physical sciences and the rise of mountaineering as a sport. Along with groundbreaking experimental research in the physical sciences, Tyndall worked throughout his career to define and popularize the study of physics. He also was a pioneering mountaineer during the golden age of mountaineering. As he practiced his science, from rock quarries to the study of the blue sky, Tyndall’s interests in the fundamental forces of Nature brought him to the summits of mountains. His sojourns to the mountains, in turn, affected the manner in which he approached his researches. His science and mountaineering were tellingly mixed, and worked in unison to shape public perceptions of what physicists did during a period of increasing specialization and popularization of the field.
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Notes
Bernard Lightman at York University is currently spearheading the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, which includes twelve universities in four countries. The Project aims to publish a comprehensive one-volume calendar of correspondence and an eight-volume complete correspondence of John Tyndall. See the website <http://www.yorku.ca/tyndall>.
There are peaks throughout the globe named after the intrepid physicist-mountaineer, including Mount Tyndall in the Sierra Nevada range in California, and Mount Tyndall in the Tyndall Range in Western Tasmania.
References
John Tyndall, The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers Ice and Glaciers [1872] (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1897), p. 47.
John Tyndall, Hours of Exercise in the Alps [1871] (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1872), pp. 212-215.
Ibid., p. 217.
See, for example, Claire Eliane Engel, A History of Mountaineering in the Alps (London: George Allen and Unwin and New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), and James Ramsey Ullman, The Age of Mountaineering (Philadelphia and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1954). For a recent popular account, see Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000).
See, for example, the majority of the papers in Henrika Kuklick and Robert E. Kohler, ed., “Science in the Field,” Osiris 11 (1996), and the papers on the Victorian era in N. Jardine, J.A. Secord, and E.C. Spary, ed., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Richard Bellon, “Joseph Hooker Takes a ‘Fixed Post’: Transmutation and the ‘Present Unsatisfactory State of Systematic Botany’, 1844–1860,” Journal of the History of Biology 39 (2006), 1-39; Michael S. Reidy, “From the Oceans to the Mountains: Spatial Science in an Age of Empire,” in Jeremy Vetter, ed., Knowing Global Environments: New Perspectives on the Field Sciences (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 21-48.
H.J. Mackinder, The First Ascent of Mount Kenya. Edited, with and Introduction and Notes, by Michael Barbour (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1991); Michael S. Reidy, “At the Height of Empire [Halford John Mackinder and the Foundation of Geography in England],” Newsletter of the History of Science Society 37, No. 2 (April 2008), 24, 18-19.
See, for example, Charlotte Bigg, David Aubin, and Philipp Felsch, ed., “The Laboratory of Nature: Science in the Mountains–Mountains in Science, from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” Science in Context 22, No. 3 (September, 2009).
Bruce Hevly, “The Heroic Science of Glacier Motion,” in Kuklick and Kohler, “Science in the Field” (ref. 5), pp. 66-86.
Quoted in James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 65.
Joe D. Burchfield, “Tyndall, John (1820-93),” in Bernard Lightman, ed., The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Scientists. Vol. 4 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 2053-2058; on p. 2057.
John Tyndall, Address delivered before the British Association assembled at Belfast. With Additions (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1874); idem, “The Belfast Address,” in Fragments of Science. Vol. II (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1897), pp. 135-201.
Tyndall, “The Belfast Address” (ref. 12), p. 197; also quoted in Ruth Barton, “John Tyndall, Pantheist: A Rereading of the Belfast Address,” Osiris 3 (1987), 111-134; on 121. Tyndall eliminated this quotation, which was offensive to some, and much else in his separately published Address (ref. 12).
Ruth Barton, “‘An Influential Set of Chaps’: The X-Club and Royal Society Politics 1864-85,” The British Journal for the History of Science 23, No. 1 (March 1990), 53-81; especially 60-67; J. Vernon Jensen, “Tyndall’s Role in the ‘X Club’,” in W.H. Brock, N.D. McMillan, and R.C. Mollan, ed., John Tyndall: Essays on a Natural Philosopher (Dublin: The Royal Dublin Society, 1981), pp. 157-168; especially pp. 161-163; Roy M. MacLeod, “The X-Club: A Social Network of Science in Late-Victorian England,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 24 (1970), 305-322; especially 310-313.
Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 378-383, 489-494.
“Professor Tyndall and the Scientific Movement,” Nature 36 (1887), 217-218; on 217; also quoted in Ruth Barton, “Tyndall, John (1820-93),” in W.J. Mander and Alan P.F. Sell, ed., The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers. Vol. 2 (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 2002), pp. 1137-1141; on p. 1137.
Arthur Whitmore Smith, “John Tyndall (1820-1893),” The Scientific Monthly 11, No. 4 (October, 1920), 331-340; on 331.
Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).
Lord Schuster, “Tyndall as a Mountaineer,” in A.S. Eve and C.H. Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1945), pp. 340-392.
Roy MacLeod, “Tyndall, John,” in Charles Coulston Gillispie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Vol. XIII (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), pp. 521-524; on p. 524.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise (ref. 2), p. v.
The biographical material on John Tyndall in this section comes largely from Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19).
W. H. Brock, “Tyndall, John (1820-1893),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Vol. 55, p. 789; online edition (October 2006), 8 pages; on p. 1.
Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), p 39.
Brock, “Tyndall,” online edition (ref. 23), p. 3.
John Tyndall, The Glaciers of the Alps. Being a Narrative of Excursions and Ascents, an Account of the Origin and Phenomena of Glaciers, and an Exposition of the Physical Principles to which They are Related (London: John Murray, 1860).
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise (ref. 2), p. 382; Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), p. 114.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise (ref. 2), p. 370.
Quoted in Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), p. 61.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise (ref. 2), p. 10.
Ibid., p. 54.
Brock, “Tyndall,” online edition (ref. 23), pp. 4-5.
Fleming, Historical Perspectives (ref. 10), pp. 65-67.
Burchfield, “Tyndall” (ref. 11), p. 2057.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise (ref. 2), p. 106.
Ibid., p. 117.
Ibid., p. 123.
Ibid., p. 252.
Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), p. 113.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise (ref. 2), p. 257.
Quoted in Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), p. 384.
Quoted in Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), p. 136.
Quoted in Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), p. 65.
Tyndall, Hours of Exercise (ref. 2), p. 306.
Ibid., pp. 306, 313.
John Tyndall, “On the Blue Colour of the Sky, the Polarization of Skylight, and on the Polarization of Light by Cloudy matter generally,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 17 (1868-1869), 223-233.
Brock, “Tyndall,” online edition (ref. 23), p. 5; Peter Pesic, Sky in a Bottle (Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2005), pp. 97-101.
John Tyndall, “Scientific Use of the Imagination,” in Fragments of Science. Vol. II (ref. 12), pp. 101-134; on p. 112.
Thomas L. Hankins, “A ‘Large and Graceful Sinuosity’: John Herschel’s Graphical Method,” Isis 97 (2006), 605-633; especially 622-625; Michael S. Reidy, Tides of History: Ocean Science and Her Majesty’s Navy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), especially chapters 4-7.
J.K. Crellin, “Airbourne Particles and the Germ Theory: 1860-1880,” Annals of Science 22, No. 1 (1966), 49-63; especially 57-59, and James Bryant Conant, ed., Pasteur’s and Tyndall’s Study of Spontaneous Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).
Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), p. 320.
John Tyndall, “Spontaneous Generation,” in Fragments of Science. Vol. II (ref. 12), pp. 290-334; on p. 305; Gavin H. Thomas, “Microbes in the air: John Tyndall and the spontaneous generation debate,” Microbiology Today (November 2005), 164-167.
Tyndall, “Spontaneous Generation” (ref. 52), p. 307.
Ibid., p. 308.
John Tyndall, “Life in the Alps: A Sketch by Professor Tyndall.” Add.MS.53715/81, British Library, London, England.
Quoted in Eve and Creasey, Life and Work (ref. 19), pp. 252-253.
Alice Jenkins, “Spatial Imagery in Nineteenth Century Representations of Science: Faraday and Tyndall,” in Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar, ed., Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), pp. 181-191.
John Tyndall, Faraday as a Discoverer (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1868), p. 146; also quoted in Jenkins, “Spatial Imagery” (ref. 57), p. 186.
Quoted in Charles S. Blinderman, “John Tyndall and the Victorian New Philosophy,” The Bucknell Review 9, No. 4 (March 1961), 280-290; on 289.
John Tyndall, “Radiation,” in Fragments of Science. Vol. I (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1897), pp. 28-73; on p. 44.
Ibid., p. 46.
John Tyndall, Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion: Being a Course of Twelve Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in the Season of 1862 (London: Longman, Roberts, & Green, and New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1863).
John Tyndall, Sound. A Course of Eight Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1867).
John Tyndall, Researches on Diamagnetism and Magne-Crystallic Action, Including the Question of Diamagnetic Polarity (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870).
John Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics,” in Fragments of Science. Vol. I (ref. 60), pp. 281-303; on p. 282.
John Tyndall, Mountaineering in 1861: A Vacation Tour (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1862), p. 33.
Brock, “Tyndall” (ref. 23), p. 6.
Acknowledgments
Financial support for my research was made possible through a Scholarship and Creativity Grant from the Vice President for Research, Technology Transfer, and Creativity at Montana State University. The American Alpine Club Library allowed me access to their extensive holdings, and I especially thank Gary Landeck for his help. I thank Kirk Branch and Bernard Lightman for their close reading of an earlier version of my paper, and I am especially indebted to Roger H. Stuewer for his careful and thoughtful editorial work.
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Michael S. Reidy is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History and Philosophy at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana.
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Reidy, M.S. John Tyndall’s Vertical Physics: From Rock Quarries to Icy Peaks. Phys. Perspect. 12, 122–145 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-009-0012-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00016-009-0012-y
Keywords
- John Tyndall
- Joseph Dalton Hooker
- Thomas Henry Huxley
- James David Forbes
- Michael Faraday
- Royal Institution of Great Britain
- British Association for the Advancement of Science
- Alps
- mountaineering
- physics
- radiant heat
- glaciers
- popularization