Leighlinbridge’s greatest son
BOATERS can now visit a memorial to the renowned scientist John Tyndall at the Garden of Remembrance on the banks of the River Barrow at his birthplace, Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland.
Tyndall studied mathematics and their application to land surveying. He was hired as a draughtsman by the Ordnance Survey and during the railway building boom of the 1840s his skills were much in demand.
By 1848 he had teamed up with Edward Frankland, who previously worked as a chemical laboratory assistant for the British Geological Survey and together they studied at Marburg University in Germany to further their scientific education.
In 1853, Tyndall attained the prestigious appointment of Professor of Natural Physics at the Royal Institute in London, due in no small part to the esteem his work had garnered from Michael Faraday, the leader of magnetic investigations at the Royal Institute.
Tyndall visited the Alps in 1856 for scientific reasons but ended up becoming a pioneering mountain climber and was a member of one of the early teams to reach the top of the Matterhorn. During this time Tyndall studied glaciers and developed the concept that heat from the sun penetrates the atmosphere more easily than terrestrial radiation from the warmed Earth, causing what we now call the greenhouse effect.
Tyndall explained why the sky is blue in his lecture at the Royal Institution in London. During his research on the radiant energy of air, he constructed a glass tube that simulated the atmosphere, with a source of white light at one end representing the sun. Tyndall observed that blue light scattered more due to its shorter wavelength, while red light penetrates more because it has the longest wavelength of visible light.
When the sun is high in the sky, during the daytime, the distance that light travels through the atmosphere is short and we observe the blue light. With the sun low on the horizon, at dawn and dusk, the distance that light travels through the atmosphere increases and blue light is absorbed before reaching our line of sight and we observe red light.
Throughout his life, Tyndall always tried to explain his theories and experiments in the simplest and most practical way so that even those with limited scientific knowledge could understand his reasoning.
It is through this practical simplification that Tyndall was responsible for a varied array of novel inventions including a system for measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in a sample of exhaled human breath – the basis of which, today, is in daily use in hospitals for monitoring patients under anaesthesia.
The striking memorial by Berlinborn sculptor Ralf Sander features two parallel pillars of blue Carlow limestone, in a reference to alpinism and Tyndall’s glaciological studies. There is a central mirror, made of durable marine-grade stainless steel, placed between the pillars, which allows the sky to be viewed without looking up.
Images on a glass plate portray some of Tyndall’s experimental layouts and glacier studies. A bronze bust of Tyndall, on a limestone pedestal, sits to the side of the installation.
It is a surprising find alongside a quiet, rural navigation but through his environmental and scientific theories, show that Tyndall was indeed a man ahead of his time.
Tyndall died in 1893 and is buried near Hazelmere, England but will always be regarded as Leighlinbridge’s greatest son who began life on the banks of the River Barrow.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to the IWAI, Roger Harrington, John O’Gorman and Towpath Tim for the use of photos in conjunction with this feature.