Talk:John Tyndall

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[edit] Tyndall's nationality

  • Is it so difficult to understand that Tyndall, like Wilde, Shaw and so many others, was Irish and not British? if you insist on propagating "knowledge" via the Internet, please try to get your basic geography in order. - MS - (18:53, 28 September 2003 80.200.132.74)
  • Tyndall describes himself as British. He strongly believes that there is no such distinction. Whether or not you think he is "technically" irish, it is perhaps worth mentioning that he considered himself british. (19:05, 28 September 2003 80.255)
  • At the time when he lived, Ireland and Great Britain formed part of a single state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. However, his family had been established already for several centuries in Ireland (see article on Tyndall family), and as such he was as British as Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Charles Stuart Parnell, and as Irish as the 1st Duke of Wellington, etc. Let us agree then that he was Anglo-Irish! - Seneschally yours! (15:55, 4 June 2006 Seneschally)
  • Everyone in Ireland was considered British at that time, since Ireland was a British colony. Yes, including all of those rebels who fought to have that title removed. But that doesn't mean they weren't Irish. And there IS a distinction between Ireland and Britain - one is an independent country and the other is a collective English colony. Even in the context of the 19th century, he was Irish. I don't see why you felt the need to make that comment. Do you accept the IRA as British then? (14:23, 7 November 2006 62.221.5.234)
  • John Tyndall worked in the Irish ordinance survey. Upon completion he transferred to the English survey, where he was in fact dismissed. Reason - he lodged a formal protest to the survey regarding its inefficiency and its treatment of the Irish. After working on the railroads for some years, he went to Germany to further his research, before returning to England as a lecturer at the Royal institution, where he is noted to have made vast contributions to his field. He later went on to lecture in America. He was Irish. Too bad he couldn't get a fair deal at home under British colonial rule. (16:21, 8 November 2006 62.221.5.234)
  • For the last year we've been transcribing Tyndall's correspondence for eventual publication (we're historians of science at York University in Toronto). You're both half-right - but what really animated Tyndall, at least in his first years, was religion, which was inextricable from his communal / national identity. Tyndall considered himself an Irishman when writing his letters to the *Liverpool Mercury* complaining about the treatment of his co-workers on the English survey. But in his early years he also followed his father John, a staunch Orangeman, in his dislike of the Catholic majority with whom his fellow Protestants lived in an uneasy truce. Tyndall (jr) enjoyed debating various theological principles, like transubstantiation, with local Catholics. Sometimes the truce was broken. During a contentious election in 1840 or 1841 his uncle Caleb shot into a Catholic mob that had surrounded his house and was chanting insults - the bullet hit a woman in the leg, and he was put in jail, though more for his own protection. Around the same time his father was struck in the head by another large gathering of Catholics. In his private correspondence with his father he was very disparaging of Catholics, using awful names to describe them - but Tyndall still saw himself as an Irishman. (01:13, 14 March 2007 24.141.232.123)

[edit] Blavatsky quotation from Tyndall?

In response to a question someone placed at the Wikipedia Reference Desk, can anyone find if Tyndall said the following, and where, as quoted by H.P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled"(1877): [1]("It is not so long since Professor Tyndall ushered us into a new world, peopled with airy shapes of the most ravishing beauty. "The discovery consists," he says, "in subjecting the vapors of volatile liquids to the action of concentrated sun-light, or to the concentrated beam of the electric light." The vapors of certain nitrites, iodides, and acids are subjected to the action of the light in an experimental tube, lying horizontally, and so arranged that the axis of the tube and that of Vol. 1, Page 128 THE VEIL OF ISIS. the parallel beams issuing from the lamp are coincident. The vapors form clouds of gorgeous tints, and arrange themselves into the shapes of vases, of bottles and cones, in nests of six or more; of shells, of tulips, roses, sunflowers, leaves, and of involved scrolls. "In one case," he tells us, "the cloud-bud grew rapidly into a serpent's head; a mouth was formed, and from the cloud, a cord of cloud resembling a tongue was discharged." Finally, to cap the climax of marvels, "once it positively assumed the form of a fish, with eyes, gills, and feelers. The twoness of the animal form was displayed throughout, and no disk, coil, or speck existed on one side that did not exist on the other." This does not sound like the down to earth prosaic researces by Tyndall described in the Wikipedia arricle. Edison 04:39, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Blavatsky was a cheap conwoman. Chug enough laudanum and you'll see serpents heads, tulips and all kinds of stuff. 83.70.35.39 19:59, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I agree that it doesn't sound at all like Tyndall, but I'm open to correction, as I trust we all are. -- Astrochemist 00:23, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tag removed

This article had a tag saying that its neutrality was in question and to "Please see the discussion on the talk page." No discussion was here, so I removed the tag. -- I understand that there are about six comments on this page (all unsigned) concerning Tyndall's nationality. Is that why the article was tagged? Does the article contain anything that is questionable concerning John Tyndall's life and work? I also can understand if there is debate on British vs. Irish, but that would seem to be a question of accuracy and not neutrality. A response will be appreciated. -- Astrochemist 19:30, 30 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Another slant on Tyndall

Working on the T.H. Huxley page I made some notes on his closest friends. These were my notes on Tyndall:

Huxley's closest friend throughout his adult life was the physicist John Tyndall. Tyndall was born in an Irish Protestant family, and after quite a good school education and a PhD under the great Bunsen at Marburg in Germany, spent the rest of his life in London. The PhD, a German invention, could be done in two years, and was by Tyndall (therefore the degree represented a standard more like the MSc today).
Despite this good start he had every bit as hard a time as Huxley to get a scientific appointment. When it came, it was as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution: later Tyndall succeeded the experimental genius Michael Faraday as the Superintendant of the R.I. and worked with Huxley in many ways to improve science and science education. Like Huxley he wrote articles and gave lectures for a wide audience (McMillan & Meehan 1980). He was a fit man, and went climbing in the Alps regularly; and though his religious views changed he was always an Orangeman:
"Sooner than hand over the Loyalists of Ireland to the tender mercies of the priests and Nationalists I would shoulder my rifle among the Orangemen." (The Times, London, 3rd June 1886).
His wife accidentally killed him in 1893 when she gave him chloral intead of magnesia; in her grief she delayed his biography by many years (Eve & Creasey 1945).

I think this raises a few questions about the Tyndall page as is:

1. "Tyndall was to a large extent a self-made man" is quite wrong. How can you talk about him not having any advantages when he had a great deal that Huxley and Wallace did not have? Good schooling followed (albeit by a few years of work) by a PhD under Bunsen is about as good a start as anyone ever had in those days!

2. The issue of his background has been burked. He was both Irish and British; and furthermore he was about the strongest supporter of the Empire as you can get. He was an Orangeman, and if anyone doesn't like it, that's just too bad. Wiki must be in the business of truth or it is going to be in trouble all over the place.

3. Text considerably under-rates the significance of his work on diamagnetism.

4. Also (minor points): not sound to link Darwin with him in any way; just happened to be alive at the same time!! And the intense application over his PhD is largely rhetoric; Germany invented the PhD, but its content was far more modest than would be the case today.

I leave the page untouched at the moment, but it can't stay like it is, hiding under a bush! Macdonald-ross 17:24, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

New image. More avail.@ . Fred ☻ 22:11, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
New image. More avail.@ . Fred ☻ 22:11, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nationality

Tyndall's nationality was British; that applies to any citizen of the UK irrespective of whether they were born in England, Scotland, Wales or (19th Century) Ireland. It is a matter of legality, not editorial whim. In addition, JT was an Orangeman, and would most certainly have described himself as British, born in Ireland. Macdonald-ross (talk) 22:51, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Indeed you are partly correct about the citizen issue but what he would have described himself is conjecture [No, I don't think it is; there's plenty of evidence that Tyndall was a huge Empire loyalist Macdonald-ross (talk) 12:13, 24 April 2008 (UTC)] and therefore unencyclopaedic, but the link to United Kingdom in the infobox is not correct because that entity did not exist when he lived. The proper link should be British which was the legally extant entity into which he was born and died. I have changed it. ww2censor (talk) 03:29, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Footnote on ethnicity: English, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, French &c. are not ethnic categories. Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Gallic, Nordic &c. are ethnic categories, though not very useful ones in view of degree of the hybridisation in Europe. Personally, I would suggest leaving that blank in most European biographies. Macdonald-ross (talk) 12:13, 24 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] JT on evolution?

You strike me as obviously clueless about John Tyndall. I believe you shouldn't be doing the modifications you're doing to this article without first educating yourself about your subject. And I'm not just taking about Tyndall and evolution here; I talking about the whole article.
Tyndall's most famous public statement about evolution was in 1874 when he was the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and gave the lengthy President's Address to the annual meeting of the Association, held that year in Belfast. That is the Belfast Address mentioned in the Wikipedia article, which you can read on the internet at http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/belfast.html. The word DARWIN appears about twenty times in the Belfast Address. According the biography of Tyndall written by Norman McMillan "the story of the Belfast Lecture appeared on the front pages of papers throughout Europe and North America" in 1874 (and now over 130 years later you can still find tons of pages on the internet about it). When Tyndall visited the US in 1872 he was well established as prominent public advocate of evolution, which you can verify by reading almost any standard account of the reception and debate of evolution, 1860 - 1872. Lots of such accounts are on the internet because when I searched for ("john tyndall" evolution darwin) at google I saw TONS of pages. Tyndall was one of the leading PUBLIC figures of Victorian science, in the prestigious position of official successor to Faraday at the exceedingly prestigous Royal Institution, and, to quote the Wikipedia article, "Tyndall was an evangelist for the cause of science". You say about his public advocacy of evolution "I can't find a ref to support this". You didn't look for a ref!
I urge you to quit editing the article, and invest a lot of your time in learning about the subject before going back to writing about it. My main problem with what you've done so far is not that you've deleted stuff, but that you haven't added any new content and you've left too much rubbish and irrelevant stuff in. But you can't decently cut out the junk and genuinely improve the quality until you've learned your subject, sir. Repeating myself, you're not qualified to edit, but you can become so by doing some research. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Seanwal111111 (talk • contribs) 04:33, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Christmas Lectures

I've taken out this sentence: (The Royal Institution commemorates Tyndall with a series of eponymous BBC-televised Christmas lectures by eminent scientists) because 1. they are now on Channel 5, not the BBC 2. they do not bear Tyndall's name; they are just called the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, and 3. they were instituted by Faraday (in 1825), not JT. OK? Macdonald-ross (talk) 11:32, 26 April 2008 (UTC)