London Trip – Royal Institution

I am in London right now, on a research trip to the archives of the Royal Institution, for Tyndall material, and at Kew on Thursday for J.D. Hooker material. Today I held in my hand a letter from Darwin to Tyndall that was inserted into one of Tyndall’s journals, the subject being of a biological nature. I am specifically looking for references to Darwin/evolution in Tyndall’s journals, notes, etc. Today I found some. Hopefully more tomorrow and Wednesday. Snapped a bunch of pictures of various exhibits, portraits, and areas of the Royal Institution. Enjoy!

John Tyndall, Royal Institution of Great Britain

Wednesday night I plan to see Creation at a theatre near my lodgings (which is the home of Darwin groupie Karen, who has been an online friend and whom I met on my trip to Cambridge in July). Friday I spend my day at the Natural History Museum and Darwin Centre (George Beccaloni wants to show me some of the Wallace Collection), and Saturday down to Downe to see Darwin’s home and laboratory for four decades. Sunday I fly home.

If only my bag (and my clothes) could get delivered to me, because it wasn’t at Heathrow when I got there. I am tired of wearing what I wore on Saturday.

Tyndall Project Awarded an NSF Grant

The Tyndall Project has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, allowing the project to get started at several other universities, including ASU. Here is the abstract for the grant:

This is a project to coordinate and complete the transcription of letters and other scholarly works of the Victorian physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) as intiated by the John Tyndall Correspondence Project. Tyndall was one of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. He became a leading figure in the debates over evolution, defending Darwin against his harshest critics, and he published numerous essays and popular books on the role of science and the burgeoning scientist in broader culture. He was an eminent practicing physicist, publishing significant works in electro-magnetism, thermodynamics, sound, glaciers, global warming, and spontaneous generation. He was also an accomplished alpinist, largely responsible for the growth of mountaineering as a sport. In short, Tyndall stood at the intersection of some of the most important developments in science and society, and his correspondence touches on all of them. His published correspondence will interest humanists ranging from historians to literary scholars, as well as scientists, from glaciologists and climatologists to physicists and biologists. One of the primary goals of the project is to publish a one-volume calendar of Tyndall’s correspondence and to issue (a projected) ten volumes of his collected correspondence, both in print and eventually in an accessible, searchable, on-line format. The other primary goal is to galvanize a community of scholars at varied stages in their careers, from graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to junior and senior scholars, around themes raised through an intense study of John Tyndall. The project puts graduate students at the center of the project, thereby constructing a new cooperative model of graduate student training and research that can be used for other correspondence projects or similar large-scale endeavors. This is an innovative model of graduate education and training that will promote the development by graduate students of new research questions within a collaborative research project fostered at several of the top history of science and technology programs.

More information about the grant can be had here. My advisor at Montana State was the PI for this grant, and I assisted him in editing parts of the proposal and putting together the bibliography for it.

19th-Century Caricature Prints with Tyndall, UPDATED

I updated my post “19th-Century Caricature Prints with Tyndall” with additional information regarding one of the caricatures. Check it out here.

[Tyndall Blogged] All about hot air

From the NASA blog My Big Fat Planet (2009-08-13):

John Tyndall (1820-1893). Drawing by Roger Kammerer.

All about hot air: Paving the way

From Erik Conway, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

One of the burning questions (pun intended!) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was why the Earth is so warm. A number of scientists, including the famous French polymath, Joseph Fourier, had calculated that it should be far colder than it actually is — cold enough, in fact, to be a frozen ball. And some of them had speculated that something about the atmosphere must be responsible for the Earth’s most fortunate, mainly unfrozen condition. The first person to show experimentally what the atmosphere did was an Irish physicist, John Tyndall.

Tyndall was born in 1820 in Leighlin Bridge, Ireland. Having finished a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Marburg, Germany, he took a job at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a prestigious research organization, in 1853. (A man of many talents, he also happened to be a pioneering scientific mountaineer, climbing a variety of European mountains to study their glaciers.) Tyndall became interested in how both heat and magnetism were transmitted through various substances and, in 1859, turned his focus to gases. That May, he announced that he had found huge differences in the ability of various gases to transmit heat.

What he had discovered was that oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen had almost no impact on heat — they were transparent to it. But carbon dioxide, ozone and “aqueous vapor,” as Tyndall called water vapor, all had a big impact on the amount of heat they let through. Of these, water vapor trapped the most heat. Without this curious characteristic, he wrote, “the warmth of our fields and gardens would pour itself unrequited into space, and the sun would rise upon an island held fast in the iron grip of frost.” It was these gases and vapors that ‘blanketed’ the Earth and kept it warm.

He also suspected that changing amounts of these gases in the atmosphere were responsible for “all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal…” In other words, they might have caused the ice ages. Though Tyndall was not interested in the modern problem of global warming, his work is hugely relevant today. It took nearly another century before anyone was able to demonstrate that humans were increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, forcing the world to slowly warm.

Erik is a historian based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Tyndall Born 189 Years Ago Today

Happy Birthday, John!

Evolution Quote Mining in the 19th-Century

Do check out my post “Evolution Quote Mining in the 19th-Century” at my other blog The Dispersal of Darwin. I look at how a quote from John Tyndall was taken out of context in the 1880s, making it seem that he rejected the theory of evolution.

19th-Century Caricature Prints with Tyndall

Earlier this month I went to Cambridge, England for a conference (here is a series of posts on my Darwin blog about the trip). I took in as many of the Darwin exhibits around the university, including “Darwin’s Microscope” at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science. The exhibit was more than just the microscope, for on display were numerous Darwin/evolution objects from the museum’s collection as well as a vast amount of contemporary Darwin memorabilia (photos from the exhibit here).  Here I want to point out two pieces in the exhibit that deal with Tyndall.

First, a late nineteenth-century caricature print published by E. Appleyard, London:

"Our national church the aegis of liberty, equality, and fraternity"

A close-up of a portion of the left side:

Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall

Tyndall holds the banner of “Science” while Darwin recruits younger men of science (Huxley, Tyndall) to his cause, the “dawning of an intellectual era” states the print at bottom right (“This way to daylight, my sons,” Darwin says, with a reference to Genesis 27:2: “I am now an old man and don’t know the day of my death.” The top right of the print gives reference to Genesis 27:11: “Behold, my brother is a hairy man and I am a smooth man”). A key at the bottom of the print lists four representatives of science (Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Colenso).

———-

UPDATE: I have since learned that this caricature was released as two versions. Looking again at this photo of Darwin memorabilia in the same exhibit,

Whipple Museum of the History of Science, University of Cambridge

I noticed that the caricature was in the magazine article on the left, but slightly different:

"Our national church the aegis of liberty, equality, and fraternity"

I tracked down the article, which is “America’s Difficulty with Darwin” by historian Thomas Dixon in History Today (February 2009, pp. 22-8). Dixon told me that the later caricature is described (p. 131) and reproduced (pp. 132-3) in Paul White’s Thomas Huxley: Making the Man of Science (2003) and both are described (pp. 380-1) in Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (2002). Here is what White has to say about it:

As one broadsheet produced in the early 1880s [1882] indicates, the claims of learned men, including members of Parliament, to be the best representatives of England’s people could become the subject of derision. As the Church parties pull in different directions beneath the dome, Roman Catholics, Dissenters, Freethinkers, and Secularists stake out different terrain outside. In the upper left corner, John Tyndall and Herbert Spencer accompany Huxley toward the dawn of Darwinism and Protoplasm (?).

Dixon provides in a footnote that “a different version of this broadsheet, printed ten years earlier, is reproduced in Desmond 1998.” That dates the version I saw as 1872. Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, and in the earlier version of the caricature Darwin is portrayed as a monkey. Browne, in her article “Darwin in Caricature: A Study in the Popularisation and Dissemination of Evolution” (Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 145, No. 4, Dec. 2001, pp. 496-509; PDF), wrote:

With publication of the Descent of Man in 1871, followed by

Expression of the Emotions in 1872, Darwin himself entered the cartoons,

usually as the ape itself. His personal facial attributes, such as

his beard, the great dome of his skull, and the beetling eyebrows, were

already relatively familiar to the public from the Vanity Fair chromolithograph

and photographic images reproduced in the Illustrated

London News and elsewhere.20 Such recognition was unusual at a time

when mass publicity was only in its infancy, even more so for a scientist.

Nevertheless, Darwin’s facial features were heavily emphasised

in every caricature around the time of the Descent of Man and the

Expression of the Emotions.

With publication of the Descent of Man in 1871, followed by Expression of the Emotions in 1872, Darwin himself entered the cartoons, usually as the ape itself. His personal facial attributes, such as his beard, the great dome of his skull, and the beetling eyebrows, were already relatively familiar to the public from the Vanity Fair chromolithograph and photographic images reproduced in the Illustrated London News and elsewhere. Such recognition was unusual at a time when mass publicity was only in its infancy, even more so for a scientist. Nevertheless, Darwin’s facial features were heavily emphasised in every caricature around the time of the Descent of Man and the Expression of the Emotions. (p. 506)

And this is how Browne describes, in much more detail, both caricatures in The Power of Place:

Darwin also made an appearance as a minor character in a vast satirical broadsheet published under the name “Ion” in London in 1873 (with another version following afterwards in 1883). This satire was attributed (probably correctly) to clever, mild-mannered George Holyoake, the leading radical secularist of the period… Holyoake had dedicated his life to creating a secular alternative to the established British church… The broadsheet linked ecclesiastical dissent with descent. It was titled Our National Church and provided an all-embracing critique on the fragmenting religious beliefs of the nation, depicting rival sects of Broad Church, Low Church, High Church, Dissenters, “No Church,” Catholicism, and Science. Up in a corner it included three priests of scientific naturalism, Darwin, Huxley, and John Tyndall. This complex picture primarily played on James Martineau’s widely publicised attempts during the 1870s to unite all clergymen under the single umbrella of a “national” church, and evolutionary theory was merely one of several perceived threats to the theological establishment. The print showed the dome of St. Paul’s Catherdral as a giant umbrella unable to shelter religious traditionalists from the stormy winds of doctrinal unrest. Nonconformists pull the chocks away, atheists rant in a corner, Catholic converts follow a signpost “To Rome,” and neither the broad churchmen not the low churchmen can handle the dome’s straining guyropes in the gale. A donkey rudely calls, “Let us bray.” It was fair comment, said the radical divine Moncure Daniel Conway. Huxley, Tyndall, and the renegade clergyman Bishop Colenso push upwards towards the apish figure of Darwin on a hillside, who calls, “This way to daylight, my sons.” The tightly packed text informed readers that over the horizon lay the dawn of an intellectual era which would dispel “the chilling influence of the church.” The second version, usually printed in red and black, was revised to emphasize the evolutionary point. This later version showed an ape carrying the flag of Darwinism, followed by a trail of well-known agnostic philosophers and dissenting clergymen, including Spencer (“Philosophy”), Conway (“We must move on”), Huxley, and Tyndall (“Science”), all aiming for a plinth in which stood Darwin’s bust surrounded by a cloud of “Protoplasm.” Both versions of the print were in Darwin’s personal collection, although it is not known how many others were printed and distributed, or to whom. The artist, whoever he was, considered Darwin and his theory an integral part of the secular, highly politicised world coming into being around him.

So, the first caricature (White says [1872], Browne says 1873), and the second (White says 1882, Browne says 1883), are well known to historians of science (both versions are on The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online as well: 1st/2nd). Darn, I thought I was seeing something untouched by historians, not knowing that it is featured in two books that sit on my shelves. But they will still be useful to me for the paper I will write concerning Tyndall and Darwin, which work on really begins this fall semester.

———-

Second, an 1883 caricature print published by Maclure & MacDonald, Lith, London:

A Versatile Vivisected View of the Monkey House (from the Zoological Gardens)

A close up of the left side shows Tyndall holding I know not, Joseph Dalton Hooker possibly examining a plant, Thomas Henry Huxley comparing the anatomy of his hand to that of a fish’s fin, and Sir Richard Owen seemingly jealous of Huxley:

Tyndall, Hooker, Huxley, and Owen

All four are designated as F[ellows of the] R[oyal] S[ociety], but I don’t know what GL stands for.

Has anyone seen these caricatures before?

New Scientist: The man who discovered greenhouse gases

New Scientist has an article by Stephanie Pain, “The man who discovered greenhouse gases” (13 May 2009), that gives Darwin’s friend John Tyndall some recognition in the Darwin Year:

As an antidote to this year’s Darwin-mania, we celebrate a piece of science from 1859 that wasn’t remotely controversial at the time, but which underpins the hottest political potato of our era: climate change. In May 1859, six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Irish physicist John Tyndall proved that some gases have a remarkable capacity to hang onto heat, so demonstrating the physical basis of the greenhouse effect. Charles Darwin had journeyed round the world and ruminated for 20 years before presenting his inflammatory ideas on evolution. Tyndall spent just a few weeks experimenting in a windowless basement lab in London.

And:

Many people think the greenhouse effect is a late 20th-century invention. Yet the physical basis for anthropogenic global warming was established six months before Darwin published On the Origin of Species,” says [Mike] Hulme. “Unlike Darwin, Tyndall’s findings didn’t cause a revolution in thinking. It was a long, slow process before people recognised the implications.”

So, while Darwin connected man to the rest of the natural world, Tyndall was not quite to the point of thinking how man affects the natural world.

Transcribing Too Many Letters?

Each week in my historical writing course we have to write up a review of the book we read for that week, and make it available for all other students in the class to read. A fellow graduate student told me today, while reading my review of Mary Murphy’s Hope in Hard Times, that I am beginning to write like a nineteenth-century Englishman. He said I have been transcribing too many Tyndall letters!

On another note, I wish we could have a little “tropic sunshine” here in Montana. Tyndall used “tropic sunshine” in a letter, and now I like to use it. Maybe I do need a break from transcribing…

Busy Semester

Sorry for the lack of posts. Been very busy this semester between classes (why did not anyone tell me how much reading history graduate students must do?). Just finished transcribing another set of 50 letters. My fellow transcriber is house-sitting in Scotland (yeah, house-sitting in Scotland!), and she took letters with her to work on. 

I am planning a research trip to London for this fall. The archives of the Royal Insititution of Great Britain hold the most material available on Tyndall. You can see the scope of that collection here.