TYNDALL, JOHN. 



727 



On the wi-st cniist of Arabia the IWie him fur- 

 ther strengthened its military position by garri- 

 soning the island of Tiran and .several points in 

 tlie eoa-t di-t riet of Midian. 



M M \ I.L. JOHN, a British scientist ; born 

 in Lcighlin 1 '.ridge, t'urlow, Ireland, on Aug. 21, 



died in Hash-mere, Surrey, England, on 

 i. IS'.i:?. Although of Knglish ancestry, for 

 he iraeed his descent to William Tyndale, who 

 was liunied at the stake in \'M't for having trans- 

 lated the Mible into Kurdish, his iininediate an- 

 cestors had settled in Ireland, whence they had 

 Mine from Gloucestershire about two centuries 



lli< father was in humble circumstances, 

 and, after learning a trade, became connected 

 with the Irish constabulary. He was a man of 

 singular force of intellect and independence of 

 character, and, although his education had been 

 neglected, he taught himself on various subjects. 

 Prof. Tyndall has said of him : 



I had a father whose memory ought to be to me a 

 stay and an example of unbending rectitude and 

 purity of life. Socially low, hut mentally high and 

 independent, by his own inner energies and affinities 

 he obtained a knowledge of history which would put 

 mine t<> shame, while the whole of the controversy 

 u 1'rotestant ism and Romanism wus at his 

 fingers' ends. Still this man, so charged with the 

 ammunition of controversy, was so respected by his 

 Catholic fellow-townsmen that they, one and all, put 

 up their shutters when he died. 



From this father the boy received his earliest 

 instruction, and learned the Bible almost by 

 heart. He attended the public schools until he 

 was nineteen years of age, and was an excellent 

 scholar, showing a special fondness for mathe- 

 matics. But he had also an eariy interest in 

 natural things, and his father flattered this tend- 

 ency by calling him " Newton " and by teach- 

 ing him lines concerning the great natural phi- 

 losopher before he was seven years old that he 

 never forgot. It is also said that the first germ 

 of science that was dropped into his mind came 

 to him from the father of Lord Kelvin (Sir Wil- 

 liam Thomson), who was then a teacher of 

 mathematics in the Belfast Institution. It is 

 also told how from reading the results of Sir 

 Humphry Davy's experiments on radiant heat 

 he determined to do something of that kind, and 

 in after years, when he came to occupy the place 

 filled by Davy at the Royal Institution, he did 

 "do something of that kind." 



In 1839 he entered the employ of the Ordnance 

 Survey, then stationed at Leighlin. His chief 

 was Gen. George Wynne, who enabled him to ac- 

 quire a practical knowledge of every branch of 

 Hie survey work, and he was in turn a draughts- 

 man, a computer, a surveyor, and a trigonomet- 

 rical observer. It was at this time that an incident 

 occurred which had much to do with his subse- 

 quent career. One of the officials who had be- 

 come interested in Tyndall's work asked him one 

 day how his leisure was spent. The answer not 

 being satisfactory, he rejoined :" Von have five 

 hours a day at your disposal, and this time 

 ought to be devoted to systematic study. Had I. 

 when at your age, had a friend to advise ID 

 now advise you, instead of being in a subordinate 

 position, I might have been at the head of the 

 survey." Next morning Tyndall was at his 

 books before 5 o'clock, and for twelve years never 



swerved from the practice. The opportunities 

 vaneeiiient were few (for he said, "On 



quitting the Ordnance Survey in isj:', my salary 

 was a little under twenty shillings a week "), and 

 he determined to come to America, whith- 

 tain of his relatives had already made a home, 

 liut an opening was found for him as a railway 

 engineer. lie says of this period : 



Tin n came a pause, and after it the mad time of the 

 railway rnuniu, when I w us able to turn to account the 

 knowledge I had gained upon the Ordnance > 

 In Staffordshire, < 'h< shin-, Lancashire. Durham, and 

 Yorkshire, more especially in the lu-t. I was in the 

 thick of the fray. It was a time of terrible toil. The. 

 day's work in the field usually begin and ended with 

 the day's light In my own modest sphere I well re 

 member tbf refreshment 1 occasionally derived In-m 

 five minutes' sleep on a deal table, with "Babbage 

 and C'allct's Logarithm.- " tinder my head for a pil- 

 low. On u certain day, under grave penalties, certain 

 levels had to be finished, and this particular day was 

 one of agony to me. The atmosphere seemed filled 

 with mocking demons, laughing at the vanity of my 

 efforts to get the work done. My leveling staves 

 weiv snapped, and my theodolite was overthrown by 

 the storm. When things are at their worst a kind of 

 anger often takes the place of fear. It was so in the 

 \'Yt sent instance. I pushed doggedlv on, and just at 

 nightfall, when barely able to read the figures on my 

 leveling staff, I planted my last " bench mark " on a 

 tombstone in Ilaworth Churchyard. Close at hand 

 was the vicarage of Mr. Bronte, where the genius was 

 nursed which soon afterward burst forth and aston- 

 ished the world. 



When the railway work slackened he accepted 

 an appointment as master in (^ueenwood College, 

 Hampshire. It was here that he developed his 

 remarkable capacity as a teacher. Such was his 

 influence over the students that he was invariably 

 called upon to quell their disturbances, which he 

 did by moral influences and pure force of char- 

 acter. Here also he became associated with Ed- 

 ward Frankland, the distinguished chemist. 

 He did not stay long, for, as he writes : 



I did not put my money in a napkin, but cherished 

 the design of spending it in study at a Gennan uni- 

 versity. I had heard of German science, while Car- 

 lyle's references to Gennan philosophy and literature 

 caused me to regard them as a kind of revelation 

 from the gods. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1848, 

 Frank laud and I started for the land of universities, 

 as Germany is often called. 



To Marburg in Hesse Ca-sel the friends went. 

 The university in this picturesque town was then 

 famous largely on account of the chemical work 

 by Biiiisen. the Nestor of chemists, who still 

 lives in Heidelberg. He tells his own story best : 



I concentrated my eh ief attention upon mathematics. 

 physics, and chemistry. Prof. Stegmann gave me 

 the subject ot'mv dissertation when I t<>k my degree. 

 Its title in Knglish was "On u Screw Surface with 

 Inclined Generatrix, imd on the Conditions of Equi- 

 librium on sueh Surfaces." I resolved that if 1 could 

 not without the slightest aid accomplish the work 

 fn>m bcL'innaiiLT t<> end. it should not be accomplished 

 at all. Wunderinir union-: the j>ine woods and pon- 

 dering the subject, 1 became more and more master of 

 it ; and when my dissertation was handed in to the 

 philosophical faculty it did not contain a thought 

 that was not my own. 



He spent two years in Marburg, and there in 

 conjunction with Prof. Knoblauch he made his 

 first investigation in physics, which he published 

 in the " Philosophical Magazine " in 1S50 as "On 

 the Magneto-optic Properties of Crystals, and 



