John Tyndall Co Carlow’s Brilliant ‘Polymath’
Seán Duke explains how much we owe to the founding father of spectroscopy.
he first researcher to identify the ‘greenhouse effect’, to explain why the sky is blue, and to develop optically pure air - the foreruner of today’s cleanroom technology, which is used in the manufacture of high-tech electronic devices. These are just some of the many reasons why John Tyndall, from Leighlinbridge Co Carlow was certainly one of the most famous 19th century scientists in Britain and Ireland. A multitalented man, he was also a brilliant science communicator, whose public lectures at the Royal Society in London were legendary, as were his many popular books on scientific topics. When he died in 1893 he died a rich and hugely successful man. Not bad for a man born into a humble Protestant family in rural Ireland. Tyndall’s ancestors were from Gloucestershire and had arrived in the southeast of Ireland in the 17th century. His background was not a privileged one, and his father worked as a police constable. He attended local schools, where he learned subjects such as technical drawing and maths. He worked in Ireland as a surveyor for the Government doing land surveys and
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mapping. He moved to England in 1842, now in his early twenties and did the same. He benefitted from the railway building boom in the UK in the 1840s, and made a lot of money working for the railway companies, doing surveying work in the second half of that decade. It seems, however, that although he was always adept at making money, money was not his God. His main interest was in science and learning generally, and he went into teaching in 1847 at an English boarding school in Hampshire. He moved to Germany a year later, to do a PhD under Robert Bunsen, of bunsen burner fame, at the University of Marburg. He returned to England in 1851 and joined the Royal Society in London one year later. He would remain at the Royal Society all his working life, and became its Director.
the basis for modern communications, particularly the Internet. He also did a lot of work on what would today be called ‘cleanroom’ technology. His work involved studying things that float in the air, and he developed some of the very earliest ‘optically pure’ air. Today, cleanrooms are used as manufacturing sites for producing advanced semiconductors and opto-electronic devices.
Science communicator
Institute
The large and well-respected Tyndall National Institute in Cork was named in Tyndall’s honour. The reason the Institute was named after Tyndall is that he did a lot of research in areas that the Tyndall is interested in today such as the behaviour of light. Tyndall did some of the earliest investigations into the ‘guiding’ of light, and this is essentially what underlies optical fibre technology, which forms
Tyndall was a great believer in demonstrating things to students or the public in order to explain them. He gave lectures to the public on all kinds of topics, and he proved to be a brilliant natural science communicator and these lectures were very popular and attracted large crowds. This work also made him famous, and ultimately made him rich too. He succeeded the famous Michael Faraday as the Director of the Royal Institution and he continued the work of public outreach that Faraday had started. Tyndall was an archetypal 19th century ‘polymath’, meaning he was interested in lots of different things. He belived in getting the message over by actually demonstrating things to the general public. He was profilic, publishing many books, 17 in total, and wrote 145 scientific papers.
SCIENCE SPIN Issue 48 Page 33