Lives of the electricians

by William T. Jeans

PROFESSOR TYNDALL.

CHAPTER I.

“Precious is the new light of knowledge which our Teacher conquers for us; yet small to the new light of Love which also we derive from him: the most important element of any man’s performance is the Life he has accomplished.”—Carlyle.

The position of Professor Tyndall in the world of science is somewhat unique. He is one of our most popular teachers of physical science; he is one of our most successful experimentalists; and he is one of our most attractive writers. By his discoveries he has largely extended our knowledge of the laws of Nature; by his teaching and writings he has probably done more than any other man in England to kindle a love of science among the masses; and by his life he has set an example to students of science which cannot be too widely known or appreciated. There are men who have made greater and more useful discoveries in science, but few have made more interesting discoveries. There are men whose achievements have been more highly esteemed by the devotees of pure science, but rarely has a scientific man been more popular outside the scientific world. There are men whose culture has been broader and deeper, but who have nevertheless lacked his facility of exposition and gracefulness of diction. The goddess of Science, which ofttimes was presented to the public with the repulsive severity of a skeleton, he has clothed with flesh and blood, making her countenance appear radiant with the glow of poesy, and susceptible even to a touch of human sympathy; while amongst scientific contemporaries, though he does not rank as one of those creative minds that mark an epoch in the history of physical philosophy, he may yet be said to have “built many a stone into the great fabric of science, which gives it an ever-broader support and an ever-growing height without its appearing to a fresh observer as a special and distinctive work due to the sole exertion of any one scientific man.” He commenced his scientific career at the time when Sir William Grove began to elaborate that theory of the co-relation of the physical sciences which Newton suspected and Faraday elucidated; namely, “that the various affections of matter, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and motion are all correlative or have a reciprocal dependence: that neither, taken abstractedly, can be said to be the essential or proximate cause of the others, but that either may, as a force, produce the others; thus heat may mediately produce electricity, electricity may produce heat; and so of the rest.” Professor Tyndall has extended or simplified our knowledge of these forces. Indeed he may be said to have revealed some hidden links in the chain of causation. He has extended and consolidated our knowledge of magnetism; as an explorer and discoverer in the domain of radiant heat he stands almost alone; and as a lecturer and experimentalist he has probably done more than any other man to popularise the science of electricity.

There is a growing tendency in the present day to appreciate personal achievement more highly than ancient lineage; and it is becoming more a matter of boast in the intellectual world to say that an eminent man was self-made than to say he was of noble birth. The subject of this memoir can boast both of high descent and of lowly birth. “I am distantly connected,” he says, “with one William Tyndale, who was rash enough to boast, and to make good his boast, that he would place an open Bible within reach of every ploughboy in England. His first reward was exile, and then a subterranean cell in the Castle of Vilvorden. It was a cold cell, and he humbly, but vainly, prayed for his coat to cover him and for his books to occupy him. In due time he was taken from the cell and set upright against a post. Round neck and post was placed a chain, which being cunningly twisted, the life was squeezed out of him. A bonfire was made of his body afterwards.”

It is said that the martyr Tyndale was descended from the ancient barons of Tyndale in Northumberland, whose title eventually passed into the family of the Percies, and that the said ancestors, leaving the north during the war of the Roses, afterwards sought and found refuge in Gloucestershire. Of one of these refugees the martyr of Vilvorden was the great-grandson, and was, it is believed, born in 1484. Both family tradition and documents show that some members of the Tyndale family, who were cloth manufacturers, migrated from Gloucestershire to the county of Wexford in Ireland about two centuries ago. One William Tyndale landed on the coast of Ireland in 1670, and his descendants in later years became scattered over Wexford, Waterford, and Carlow. Their fortunes varied; but for our purpose it is sufficient to know that the grandfather of the Professor had a small estate in Wexford; and that on removing thence to the village of Leighlin Bridge on the banks of the Barrow, county Carlow, he continued to prosper until he got into easy circumstances. But throughout the whole race of Tyndale, from the Martyr down to the Professor, intellectual independence appears to have been preferred to worldly independence, and it was the exercise of this trait that cost the Professor the small patrimony which his grandfather had acquired. A high sense of rectitude and a benevolent disposition are not incompatible with excessive susceptibility to opposition; and hence persons of high principles sometimes stand like adamant on points that to worldly minds appear too trifling even for controversy, much less for self-sacrifice. Though the opinions of the Tyndales may have differed, the leading principles that governed their conduct appear to have been maintained with remarkable consistency and self-denial. John Tyndale, the father of the Professor, differed in opinion with his own father, William Tyndale of Leighlin Bridge, on some point that has long since been forgotten, but in consequence of that difference William revoked his will in favour of his first-born son, John, and left his property to two sons of a second marriage.

Leighlin Bridge, where John Tyndall was born in humble circumstances in 1820, was a thriving town of 2,000 inhabitants, forty-six miles south-west of Dublin. It was then the entrepot where the great southern road from Dublin to Waterford and Cork crossed the Barrow, and it has consequently been declining ever since the development of the railway system diverted the traffic. It was not destitute of historical associations, which to the Irish mind were of an exciting character. Nor was the country destitute of natural attractions. When Tyndall was a youth its general aspect was described as soft and agreeable, with little of forcible or imposing scenery, yet free from those harsh features which so frequently mar the effect of Irish landscape. In some parts it so closely resembled the “champaign, ornate, and agreeable districts of central England,” that it was said constantly to remind an English traveller passing through the country of the “equable, grateful scenery, the calm and soft-faced prettiness of territorial view to which his mind had been accustomed.”

Yet to the ordinary English reader its loneliness would appear to have little that was likely to fire the opening mind of the Apostle of Physical Science. It need not, however, appear an inauspicious birthplace to those who believe that it is no mere accident that has made great enthusiasts generally proceed from lonely or sterile countries.

Let us therefore look a little more into this home from which so much light was to be reflected in after years by its then youngest inhabitant. The Professor’s father, being left dependent on his own resources, early joined the Irish Constabulary force and remained in it for several years. He was regarded as a man of exceptional ability and unswerving integrity, and was respected by all who knew him. A sturdy politician and a zealous Orangeman, he preserved as a precious relic a bit of flag which was said to have fluttered at the Battle of the Boyne. In such a man Protestantism was no mere hereditary faith. It was evolved from his own inner consciousness, and was part of his intellectual being. His earnest and capacious mind had mastered the works of Tillotson, Jeremy Taylor, Chillingworth, and other writers who were not only the pillars of the Protestant faith, but still remain unsurpassed as masters of English prose. In our own day men of respectable theological attainments are content to reflect, in lunar-like scintillations, the intellectual splendour, the massive diction, the rich and glowing periods that adorn their pages; and no better evidence could be given of the fine intelligence of John Tyndall, of Leighlin Bridge, than to say that his delight was in the works of these great men. It is the fashion nowadays for critics of the “newspaper” school to sneer at their “pompous grandeur,” but it is those living writers who in elevation of thought and graces of style show the greatest affinity to them that are the most popular. It was with such works that John Tyndall, père, sought to imbue the mind of his only surviving son; and the subtle thoughts and inspiring sentiments which he gathered from such classic ground must have had an invigorating effect on his son’s susceptible mind. Besides his early familiarity with the works of these powerful thinkers, it is said that he soon knew the Bible almost by heart. This species of intellectual discipline has sometimes been pointed to as presenting a strange contrast with his excursions in later life into those regions of natural philosophy which have sometimes been regarded as antagonistic to theology. But it is more than probable that this early training did much to model and chasten the rich, transparent, simple language in which he has so beautifully expounded the laws of Nature. There is high authority for saying that he could have had no better model. Alexander von Humboldt, after reviewing the whole course of ancient literature for “images reflected by the external world on the imagination,” says that “as descriptions of nature the writings of the Old Testament are a faithful reflection of the character of the country in which they were composed, of the alternations of barrenness and fruitfulness, and of the Alpine forests by which the land of Palestine was characterised. The epic or historical narratives are marked by a graceful simplicity, almost more unadorned than those of Herodotus, and most true to nature. Their lyrical poetry is more adorned, and develops a rich and animated conception of the life of nature. It might almost be said that one single psalm (the 104th) represents the image of the whole cosmos.... The meteorological processes which take place in the atmosphere, the formation and solution of vapour, according to the changing direction of the wind, the play of its colours, the generation of hail, and the rolling thunder are described with individualising accuracy, and many questions are propounded which we in our present state of physical knowledge may indeed be able to express under more scientific definitions, but scarcely to answer satisfactorily.” Most of our great writers have acknowledged that the literature that first made a lasting impression on their mind materially influenced their style of writing, and in the writings of Professor Tyndall will be found a good deal of the beautiful simplicity and poetic feeling which abound in Hebrew literature.

The origin of his love of nature is a problem that has exercised his own mind. “I have sometimes tried,” he says, “to trace the genesis of the interest which I take in fine scenery. It cannot be wholly due to my early associations; for as a boy I loved nature, and hence to account for that love of nature I must fall back upon something earlier than my own birth. The forgotten associations of a foregone ancestry are probably the most potent elements in the feeling.” He then accepts as exceedingly likely Mr. Herbert Spencer’s idea that the mental habits and pleasurable activities of preceding generations had descended with considerable force to him. He has, indeed, repeatedly supported the view that intellectual character is largely formed from ancestral peculiarities; and if that be so, he may surely be said to have reproduced some of the higher mental characteristics of the Irish race with marvellous exactness. “In the Celtic genius,” says Michelet, “there is a feeling repugnant to mysticism, and which hardens itself against the mild and winning word, refusing to lose itself in the bosom of the moral God. The genius of the Celts is powerfully urged towards the material and natural; and this proneness to the material has hindered them from easily acceding to laws founded on an abstract notion.... In the seventh century St. Columbanus said: ‘The Irish are better astronomers than the Romans.’ It was a disciple of his, also an Irishman, Virgil, Bishop of Saltzburg, who first affirmed the rotundity of the earth and the existence of the Antipodes. All the sciences were at this period cultivated with much renown in the Scotch and Irish monasteries.” These characteristics appear to predominate in the Irish intellect at the present day. Physical science, which is the glory of our age, owes much to Ireland. Sir William Thomson, one of the most versatile and brilliant of natural philosophers, was born in Ireland; so was George Gabriel Stokes, one of Newton’s worthiest successors in the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge as well as President of the Royal Society; Henry Smith, the greatest mathematician of his time at Oxford, who died in 1883, was an Irishman; Sir William Rowan Hamilton, the Astronomer-Royal for Ireland, was also one of Ireland’s most precocious sons; and in such a constellation of Irish genius Professor Tyndall excels as a popular expositor of the laws of nature.