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[For much of the Victorian era the physicist John Tyndall was one of the foremost public figures in Britain. As a popular lecturer on scientific subjects he was considered unmatched, and his published writings sold by the thousands all the way from America to Russia. Yet for the major part of the twentieth century Tyndall’s name lay buried in a few histories of science and the occasional physics textbook. While Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer—each a friend and colleague of Tyndall’s—came to represent Victorian science in its most pugnacious and dramatic period, Tyndall himself remained in obscurity, a man of the second rank known only through association. Now, however, historians are beginning to reassess Tyndall’s influence on Victorian science. William H. Brock, one of the few Tyndall scholars active today, writes in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that Tyndall “did more than any other Victorian scientist to define physics as a separate scientific discipline.”1 Through his topics of research and his career-long popularization of physics as a specific field of scientific research, Tyndall changed the nature of scientific disciplines. But his work reached beyond the boundaries of the purely scientific realm; as a lecturer and popular science writer he helped to establish the place of science and scientists in British culture.]
Published: Nov 12, 2015
Keywords: Royal Institution; British Society; Natural Philosopher; Scientific Authority; Cultural Authority
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