Abstract
In 1887 John Tyndall retired from his post as superintendent of the Royal Institution on account of his ill health. Insomnia, headaches, dyspepsia, and general fatigue combined to weaken him beyond the capacity of sustained research. Though he continued to experiment after retiring, his days of significant original research were over, and after six more years of continued decline, Tyndall died on December 4, 1893, from an accidental overdose of chloral administered by his devoted wife Louisa. Realizing that she had mistaken the chloral for magnesia, she said to him, “John, I have given you chloral,” and Tyndall, ever one to look facts in the face, replied, “Yes, my poor darling, you have killed your John.”1 Louisa was devastated by her fatal mistake; she spent the rest of her long life collecting materials for a definitive biography of Tyndall, which she did not live to see published, and battling the increasing obscurity surrounding Tyndall’s name.
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Notes
Quoted from the report of Tyndall’s inquest in A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, The Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan, 1945), 279.
For more on Maxwell, see Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: Macmillan, 1882);
Basil Mahon, The Man Who Changed Everything (Chichester: Wiley, 2003).
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Robert Clifton, the director of the Clarendon, had fallen back on this method in despair of finding the necessary funding for including original research in his teaching program; see Robert Fox, “Clifton, Robert Bellamy (1836–1921),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn), http://ezproxy.ouls.ox.ac.uk:2117/view/article/51936. However, some laboratory directors deliberately chose not to encourage their undergraduate students in research: William Grylls Adams, at King’s College, London, was successful in his physics teaching program, in spite of the fact that it included no original research.
See Robert Fox and Anna Guagnini, Laboratories, Workshops, and Sites (Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 1999), 64n.
John Tyndall, “On the Study of Physics” (1854), Fragments of Science, 5th edn (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1876), 302.
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D. S. L. Cardwell, The Organisation of Science in England, revised edn (London: Heinemann, 1972), 215.
J. J. Thomson, Recollections and Reflections (London: G. Bell and Sons, Ltd., 1936); the only time that Tyndall’s name appears—without commentary—is in a brief list of scientists who participated in H. E. Roscoe’s penny lecture series in Manchester (24).
Romualdas Sviedrys, “The Rise of Physical Science at Victorian Cambridge,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 2 (1970): 127–51.
John Tyndall, Six Lectures on Light, 2nd edn (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1875), 43.
Robert Routledge, A Popular History of Science (London, 1881), vii.
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Gwendy Caroe, The Royal Institution (London: J. Murray, 1985), 104 and 93.
See W. H. Brock, “Exploring the Hyperarctic: James Dewar at the Royal Institution,” in “The Common Purposes of Life,” ed. Frank A. J. L. James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 169–90.
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Henry E. Armstrong, James Dewar, 1842–1923 (London, 1924), 7.
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T. H. Huxley, “Professor Tyndall,” The Nineteenth Century 35 (January 1894): 1–11;
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[Edward Frankland], “Obituary Notice for John Tyndall,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 55 (January–April 1894), xviii–xxiv.
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J. W. Gregory, “Tyndall,” Natural Science 4 (January 1894): 10. See also chapter four.
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Oliver Lodge, Past Tears (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1931), 66.
Oliver Lodge, “Tyndall, John (1820–1893),” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th edn, 33 (Edinburgh, 1902), 518.
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© 2011 Ursula DeYoung
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DeYoung, U. (2011). Science after Tyndall. In: A Vision of Modern Science. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118058_6
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