LAUSR

John Tyndall has become a familiar figure for climate change researchers and historians of science alike. The Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research bears his name. He features prominently in chapter 1 of Spencer Weart’s Discovery of Global Warming and chapter 6 of James Fleming’s Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, for his work on the absorption of radiative heat by gases, particularly water vapor and carbon dioxide, which served as the foundation for later work linking human action to climate change1,2. As a historian of science, I first encountered Tyndall in Theodore Porter’s Rise of Statistical Thinking, where he figured as a fierce proponent, along with Thomas Huxley, of scientific naturalism — the doctrine that scientific problems could be reduced to molecular physics3. It is this issue that also dominates a great deal of the excellent 2015 compilation, The Age of Scientific Naturalism, edited by Bernard Lightman and Michael Reidy, two of the four general editors of the Tyndall Correspondence project4. Now, Roland Jackson, another editor from the project, has written The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual, a thoroughly researched biography of Tyndall that will be an essential companion to anyone interested in using the correspondence, and a powerful suggestion that Tyndall’s complex life and career have much more to tell us about the history of Victorian science, its relation to continental science, the history of public intellectuals and science communication, and even the history of mountaineering. As the title of the book suggests, Jackson’s biography attempts to chronicle and explain how an Irishman, born into a poor (although educated) family, ascended to become one of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. If Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise emphasized the role of industry and commerce in their biographical study of Lord Kelvin5, a sometime rival of Tyndall, and Janet Browne emphasized the networks correspondence and collection in her biography of Charles Darwin6,7 a sometime ally of Tyndall, Jackson emphasizes Tyndall’s rise as a public intellectual. As such, he contributes to a growing body of literature, such as Myrna Perez Sheldon’s scholarship on Stephen Jay Gould, which considers the public intellectual as a category of historical investigation8. Tyndall was a meticulous experimenter, but he was also skilled at using the press, the podium and the dinner table to advocate for his ideas. He was one of the few practicing scientists to write for a popular audience, and he was often criticized by his peers for doing so, but his books sometimes ran to ten editions. The burgeoning publishing industry and his friendship with the publisher William Francis (of Taylor and Francis) provided vehicles for numerous books and articles — Heat as a Mode of Motion, Glaciers of the Alps, Mountaineering in 1861 — that Tyndall wrote for popular audiences. Tyndall, unlike Darwin, could not rely on family wealth, but he was a gifted lecturer, highly sought-after by his colleagues to lecture at their institutions, and he earned his living primarily as a lecturer at the Royal Institution in London. His Belfast address became well known for his full-throated argument for the inseparability of the body and consciousness for the necessary separation of science and religion. When he wasn’t lecturing, experimenting or writing, he was a stalwart figure in London society. According to Vanity Fair magazine, he was ‘one of the most welcome of dinner companions,’ because ‘social habits have taught him the scientific use of conversation’. In writing about Tyndall, Jackson has aimed to “let Tyndall’s life unfold as it did”. Jackson makes this as a stylistic choice, not an ontological claim, and he is faithful to chronology (with a few exceptions) and sparing in his interpretive voice. The result is that Tyndall’s social engagements, laboratory work, his writing, his lecturing, his government service and his mountaineering expeditions are all interwoven through the story, often tightly. For instance, a paragraph on the meritocratic reforms of the Royal Society might be followed by a paragraph on Tyndall’s experiments on heat, followed by a passage on publishing, a passage on lecturing and finally back to the Royal Society. This strict fidelity to the course of Tyndall’s life can make it hard to keep track of key themes, but it also conveys an elision between public and private spaces in Victorian science. Lightman and Reidy also note this in their book on scientific naturalism4. Tyndall literally lived at the Royal Institution for a good portion of his life. He immersed himself in London society, and although he often bemoaned the degree to which it interfered with his research, he actually enjoyed it, by Jackson’s assessment. His studies in Germany, and the foothold he gained in the company of German scientists, positioned him as one of the most important intermediaries between British and continental science at the time. Thomson, for instance, would ask him for news from Helmholtz and DuBois-Reymond. Jackson may also have chosen to use a light touch to better resist the teleological pull of Tyndall’s signature work on radiative heat absorption. He is careful to note, in fact, that Tyndall was not even the first person to establish the absorptive properties of gases. That credit went to the American scientist Eunice Foote, who made the discovery three years earlier. We no longer view Tyndall’s discovery as a crucial event, the ‘first’ discovery, but instead as another unfolding of Tyndall’s view of nature. In one of his best expositions of Tyndall’s science, Jackson grounds Tyndall’s work on radiative heat in his belief that the explanation of natural phenomena, in this case the transmission of heat, could be found in the molecular structure of matter. It was the gas molecules themselves, Tyndall argued, that absorbed and re-emitted radiation. Even more surprisingly, his work on the motion of glaciers, which he had observed on trips through the Alps, was formative for his work on gases. Jackson has clearly spent an enormous amount of time with Tyndall’s correspondence. He knows his subject with the intimacy of someone who has sat with him for days, months, even years, and he does a good job of transmitting that familiarity to his readers. We learn of Tyndall’s many insecurities, his shrewd strategies for networking while pretending to be uninterested in society life and his nuanced ambivalence towards religious belief, which provides a useful counterpoint to his staunch materialism. Still, we are often left wishing that Jackson had complemented his vivid portrayal of Tyndall’s life with OXFORD UNIV. PRESS: 2018. 576 PP. £25.00