John Tyndall FRS was a prominent 19th-century Irish physicist.
36 Facts About John Tyndall
2.
John Tyndall was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1868.
3.
John Tyndall's father was a local police constable, descended from Gloucestershire emigrants who settled in southeast Ireland around 1670.
4.
John 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.
5.
John Tyndall was hired as a draftsman by the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in his late teens in 1839, and moved to work for the Ordnance Survey for Great Britain in 1842.
6.
In 1847, John Tyndall opted to become a mathematics and surveying teacher at Queenwood College, a boarding school in Hampshire.
7.
John Tyndall's Marburg dissertation was a mathematical analysis of screw surfaces in 1850.
8.
John Tyndall stayed in Germany for a further year doing research on magnetism with Knoblauch, including some months' visit at the Berlin laboratory of Knoblauch's main teacher, Heinrich Gustav Magnus.
9.
John Tyndall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1852.
10.
About a decade later John Tyndall was appointed the successor to the positions held by Michael Faraday at the Royal Institution on Faraday's retirement.
11.
John Tyndall visited the Alps mountains in 1856 for scientific reasons and ended up becoming a pioneering mountain climber.
12.
John Tyndall visited the Alps almost every summer from 1856 onward, was a member of the very first mountain-climbing team to reach the top of the Weisshorn, and led one of the early teams to reach the top of the Matterhorn.
13.
Articulate friends of Forbes, as well as Forbes himself, thought that Forbes should get the credit for most of the good science, whereas John Tyndall thought the credit should be distributed more widely.
14.
John Tyndall developed differential absorption spectroscopy using the electro-magnetic thermopile devised by Melloni.
15.
An index of 19th-century scientific research journals has John Tyndall as the author of more than 147 papers in science research journals, with practically all of them dated between 1850 and 1884, which is an average of more than four papers a year over that 35-year period.
16.
In one lecture, John Tyndall demonstrated the propagation of light down through a stream of falling water via total internal reflection of the light.
17.
John Tyndall was an experimenter and laboratory apparatus builder, not an abstract model builder.
18.
Such a kinship was in evidence in experiments by Balfour Stewart and others, cited and extended by John Tyndall, that showed with respect to broad-spectrum radiant heat that molecules that are weak absorbers are weak emitters and strong absorbers are strong emitters.
19.
Besides being a scientist, John Tyndall was a science teacher and evangelist for the cause of science.
20.
John Tyndall spent a significant amount of his time disseminating science to the general public.
21.
John Tyndall gave hundreds of public lectures to non-specialist audiences at the Royal Institution in London.
22.
Much of their contents were recent major innovations in the understanding of their respective subjects, which John Tyndall was the first writer to present to a wider audience.
23.
The majority of the progressive and innovative British physicists of John Tyndall's generation were conservative and orthodox on matters of religion.
24.
John Tyndall was a member of a club that vocally supported Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and sought to strengthen the barrier, or separation, between religion and science.
25.
John Tyndall first met Huxley in 1851 and the two had a lifelong friendship.
26.
Chemist Edward Frankland and mathematician Thomas Archer Hirst, both of whom John Tyndall had known since before going to university in Germany, were members too.
27.
Between 1886 and 1893, John Tyndall was active in the debate in England about whether to give the Catholics of Ireland more freedom to go their own way.
28.
John Tyndall had ardent views about it, which were published in newspapers and pamphlets.
29.
John Tyndall tried unsuccessfully to get the UK's premier scientific society to denounce the Irish Home Rule proposal as contrary to the interests of science.
30.
In several essays included in his book Fragments of Science for Unscientific People, John Tyndall attempted to dissuade people from believing in the potential effectiveness of prayers.
31.
Many of his readers interpret John Tyndall to be a confirmed agnostic, though he never explicitly declared himself to be so.
32.
John Tyndall retired from the Royal Institution at age 66 having complaints of ill health.
33.
John Tyndall became financially well-off from sales of his popular books and fees from his lectures.
34.
John Tyndall procrastinated on the project and it was still unfinished when she died in 1940 aged 95.
35.
Creasey, whom Louisa John Tyndall had authorised shortly before her death.
36.
John Tyndall is commemorated by a memorial erected at an elevation of 2,340 metres on the mountain slopes above the village of Belalp, where he had his holiday home, and in sight of the Aletsch Glacier, which he had studied.