By Brian Smyth
On 19 August 1874 John Tyndall, then professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, delivered his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Belfast. This later became known as the ‘Belfast Address’. It considered the relationship of science to philosophical materialism and traced the history of science from ancient Greece to a celebration of the theories of Charles Darwin, just fifteen years after he had published On the origin of species. Tyndall spoke about science in the Middle Ages and the negative effect of Christianity on the development of science, citing the examples of Copernicus, Bruno and Galileo. The Address was controversial at the time, drawing a negative reaction from both Protestant and Catholic clergy in Belfast, but it transformed how modern science came to be viewed.
The Christian churches and science have had a strained relationship over the past few hundred years. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy for supporting the Copernican hypothesis, published in 1543, just before the author’s death. A little later, in 1633, Galileo was placed under house arrest for suggesting that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Galileo did not receive an apology from the Catholic Church until the 1990s, in the pontificate of John Paul II. In June 1860 in Oxford there was the Huxley/Wilberforce debate on Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which Huxley stated that ‘he would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop’. It is probable that Darwin might have delayed publication of his theory of evolution had Alfred Russell Wallace not written to him with an almost identical theory. Soon afterwards, in 1874, John Tyndall upset the Christian churches with his Belfast Address by suggesting that a creator was unnecessary. The nineteenth century was perhaps more enlightened than previously in that Tyndall was neither imprisoned nor executed.
EARLY LIFE AND CAREER
John Tyndall was born in Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow, c. 1820 to John Tyndall and Sarah Macassey. His father was a cobbler who in 1820 joined the Irish constabulary, moving first to Nurney, Co. Kildare, and then to Castlebellingham, Co. Louth, and then back to Leighlinbridge in 1836. His father was an Orangeman, and the household was Protestant and unionist. Later, when in England, John Tyndall opposed Home Rule for Ireland.
Tyndall was educated in local schools before working for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland and England, and he was a surveyor for the railways in England. After the railway boom, he became a teacher in 1847 at Queenwood College in Hampshire. It was there he developed an interest in teaching science and engineering, which he pursued for the remainder of his career. In 1848 he travelled to Marburg University, where he studied chemistry under Robert Bunsen (of burner fame) and was awarded a Ph.D for his ‘Screw surfaces with inclined generatrix, and the conditions of equilibrium for such screws’. Tyndall returned to teaching at Queenwood in 1851. He attempted to obtain an academic position at several universities but was unsuccessful, perhaps owing to his modest Irish background.
ROYAL INSTITUTION
Tyndall was appointed to the chair in Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in London in 1853, eventually succeeding Michael Faraday in 1867 as the director, and he remained there for the rest of his career. At the Royal Institution he started doing research. He was interested in the scattering of light by particles in the atmosphere and explained why the sky is blue—the ‘Tyndall effect’. He undertook research in meteorology and was one of the first to identify the ‘greenhouse effect’. In addition, he gave public lectures explaining difficult concepts to the lay person in an entertaining way, often with practical demonstrations. He was a highly respected public lecturer and a leading natural philosopher of his time. He continued the Christmas Lectures initiated by Faraday in 1825, which continue to this day.
Tyndall was a member of the X Club, which had nine members plus the always absent tenth member, Charles Darwin. This was a dining club of the type popular in Victorian England, where like-minded men with similar interests met together to discuss and share new ideas and information. All the members had epithets, Tyndall’s being ‘Xcentric’. The club was in existence between 1864 and 1893, by which time many of the members had moved away from London and some had died.
Apart from science, Tyndall was a keen mountaineer and spent his summers in the Alps. On marrying Louisa Hamilton in 1876, he built a house at Bel Alp in Switzerland, where he spent months walking and climbing each summer. The book Hours of exercise in the Alps, among many others, details some of his exploits there. His climbing career was impressive, including the first traverse of the Matterhorn from the Italian side in 1868, three ascents of Mont Blanc, the first ascent of the Weisshorn (1861) and many other Alpine peaks.
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE (BAAS)
The BAAS, now the British Science Association, was founded in 1831 to promote all branches of science and to improve the perception of scientists and science by the public. It elects a president, and an annual meeting is held during which the president gives an address. In 1874 the meeting was held in Belfast and the president was John Tyndall. (A number of the presidents of the BAAS have been Irish. The first was Professor Humphrey Lloyd in 1835 and the most recent was Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 2011–12.)
Tyndall was a reluctant president of the BAAS. In June 1874 he travelled to Switzerland, as usual, and proceeded to work on his BAAS address, which he completed during the summer. He left Bel Alp on 8 August and arrived in Belfast on the 19th. The address was given in the Ulster Hall that evening.
Tyndall started with a history of science from Greek and Roman times, in particular the role of Lucretius, Epicurus and Democritus in relation to early atomic theory. He spoke about the influence of Aristotle on medieval thinking, in which he considered little scientific advancement had been achieved. He acknowledged the contribution of Copernicus and Galileo and the problems they had with the teachings of the Church at the time. He considered the vastness of geological time compared to the age of the earth put forward by the theologians, c. 6,000 years, arrived at by the Church of Ireland archbishop James Ussher, based on biblical chronology, in Annales Veteris Testamenti (1650). Tyndall concluded his address with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution (1859), which was relatively new at the time, according to which a ‘creator’ was unnecessary. Darwin had seen a draft of Tyndall’s Belfast Address and was happy with its contents. Tyndall presented his audience with a non-religious evolution of the universe and life, which challenged the religious thinking of the time. He considered that cosmology should be a scientific discipline and have nothing at all to do with the Church.
REACTION
The Belfast Address appeared in Nature the next day. Tyndall had been involved in the foundation of this journal, which is still published today; it was where many members of the X Club published their work. The Belfast Address was seen as a major event in the relationship between science and religion, rekindling the difficulties for the Church in the wake of Darwin’s theories. In Belfast, Catholic and Protestant clergy opposed Tyndall. He had challenged the authority of the clergy—something the clergy were not used to at that time—and a number of sermons and pamphlets resulted. One writer, Patrick Francis Moran (later cardinal archbishop of Sydney), also from Leighlinbridge, produced a document for his uncle, Cardinal Paul Cullen, arguing that the Address was blasphemous. The Belfast Address encouraged the Victorian public to question the role of religion in a modern industrial society.
In the sixth edition of Fragments of science (1892), Tyndall wrote an ‘Apology for the Belfast Address’, but rather than an apology this was a clarification and restatement of his earlier views.
LATER LIFE
In 1893 Tyndall became ill with a leg infection. He developed rheumatism and a chest infection. He took chloral to help him sleep and he died from accidental chloral poisoning on 4 December 1893. He was buried in Haslemere, Surrey, near his Hindhead home. Louisa survived him by 47 years and is also buried in Haslemere. Tyndall’s personal library has been broken up but part of it is on display in Carlow Museum. He is commemorated in Leighlinbridge by a plaque and a bronze bust. A nearby school, Tyndall College in Carlow, and the Tyndall National Institute, a research flagship of University College Cork in the field of information and communications technology, are named in his honour. Tyndall is commemorated by towns, mountains and other geographical features throughout the world. At Bel Alp a monument was erected by his widow, Louisa.
A Tyndall Correspondence Project was launched both in London at the Royal Institution and in Dublin at Trinity College in 2015. It is nearing completion, under the direction of Bernard Lightman of York University, Toronto, and will make available c. 6,000 pieces of correspondence to and from Tyndall.
Brian Smyth is chair of the National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology.
Further reading
W.H. Brock, N.D. McMillan & R.C. Mollan, John Tyndall: essays on a natural philosopher (Dublin, 1981).
J. Roland, The ascent of John Tyndall (Oxford, 2018).
J. Tyndall, Fragments of science, Part 2 (New York, 1892).