The 161 letters in this volume encompass a period of dramatic change for the young John Tyndall, who would become one of Victorian Britain’s most famous physicists. They begin in September 1843, in the midst of a fiery public conflict with the Ordnance Survey of England, and end in December 1849 with him as a doctoral student of mathematics and experimental science at the University of Marburg, Germany. In between, Tyndall was fired from his position in the Ordnance Survey, worked as a railway surveyor at the height of British railway mania, read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Lord Byron, taught mathematics, and seriously contemplated emigration to the thriving new city of Cincinnati, Ohio. He began lasting friendships with Thomas Archer Hirst and Edward Frankland, who, along with Tyndall, would eventually become influential figures in nineteenth-century science. The letters also allude to some of the most important events of the 1840s. Documenting a period of political agitation, professional uncertainty, and personal transformation, this volume traces the events that led to Tyndall’s decision to devote himself to natural philosophy.

This volume contains 266 letters covering a period of twenty-two months, when Tyndall was in his midthirties and had been employed by the Royal Institution as professor of natural philosophy since September 1853. Many of the letters printed here concern the lectures he delivered at the RI and other institutions and his attempt to establish his reputation as a researcher. Although he published in several other areas ‒including the cleavage of rocks, colorblindness and glaciers ‒the main focus of his research was the newly discovered and problematic phenomenon of diamagnetism. Tyndall reported his experimental results and theoretical views on this subject in several lectures and papers that greatly enhanced his scientific standing, which was further extended by his contact with other scientists, not only in London but across the British Isles and in France and Germany. By the end of this period, Tyndall was a man of science with a European reputation that was recognized in November 1856 when the Royal Society elected him a member of its Council. 
 

The 308 letters in this volume cover a critical period in Tyndall’s personal and scientific lives. The volume begins with the difficult ending of his relationship with the Drummond family, disputes about his work in glaciology, and his early seminal work on the absorption of radiant heat by gases. It ends with the start of his championship of Julius Robert Mayer’s work on the mechanical equivalent of heat. In between, Tyndall carefully establishes his own priority for his work on radiant heat, and he accepts the position of professor of physics at the Government School of Mines. The lure of the Alps also becomes ever stronger. In this period comes perhaps Tyndall’s greatest mountaineering achievement, the first ascent of the Weisshorn, and a remarkable winter visit to Chamonix and the Mer de Glace. As his reputation grows, Tyndall continues to make his way in society. He is elected to the elite Athenaeum Club on January 31, 1860.
 

The 230 letters in this inaugural volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall chart Tyndall’s emergence into early adulthood, spanning from his arrival in Youghal in May 1840 as a civil assistant with just a year’s experience working on the Irish Ordnance Survey to his pseudonymous authorship of an open letter to the prime minister, Robert Peel, protesting the pay and conditions on the English Survey in August 1843. The letters, which include Tyndall’s earliest extant correspondence, encompass some of the most significant events of the early 1840s. Tyndall’s correspondents also discuss their experiences of British military expansion in India and economic migration to North America, among other topics. The letters show the development of many of the traits and talents, both mathematical and literary, that would subsequently make Tyndall one of most prominent men of science in Victorian Britain. They also afford broader insights into a period of almost unprecedented social upheaval and cultural and technological change that ultimately shaped Tyndall’s development into adulthood.