by Sarah Dry
I have suggested that Tyndall’s greatest legacy was his determination to forge a link between the grandest natural environments on earth and the reduced versions of those places he tried to create in his laboratory. He fought hard to bring these spaces and ways of knowing into contact so they could positively reinforce his vision of the continuity of nature. In his own life, Tyndall used the Alps in many, often contradictory ways, some of which reveal the personal torments to which he was prone. In addition to reveling in the changeability of the landscape, he used the mountains as an escape from the overheated air of London, a way to leave his anxieties behind and lose himself in the rigors of high-altitude climbing. The Alps were also, explicitly, a field upon which Tyndall battled with his scientific peers for priority. The virgin-white fields of snow and ice were figurative blank spaces across which he, and he alone, hoped to leave his footsteps. That required solitude, of a sort, but also publicity. It must be known that he had come to the Alps and what he had done there. He came to the Alps both to get away from his London life and the endless loop of his interior thoughts, and to get on top, to forge a name for himself in a hotly contested new scientific field, to make his voice heard loudest of all. He was deeply divided by these competing desires. He struggled continuously with his desire for solitude, for quiet, for a quasi-spiritual connection with nature that he’d found so compelling in his reading of Emerson, and with his desire for human contact (even in the form of bitter dispute), of movement, of action, and of certainty.
FIG. 2.9. John Tyndall in 1877. He struggled throughout his life to reconcile his desire for solitude and for fame.
His mind, in this respect, seems to have been subtler than his heart. He understood that nature’s power lay in its separation from the minds and hearts of men even as he believed, with a fervor that made it indistinguishable from faith, that the minds (and emotions) of men were themselves products of nature. His own heart was, he felt, ungovernable. He was quick to anger, quick to take offense. His quickness of movement and thought made him a captivating lecturer and a graceful climber, but it redounded against him in the sphere of human emotion. His lifelong tendency to conflict led to disputes for which he is now most known—with the religious establishment on the efficacy of prayer or the relationship between cosmology and religion, as well as over a range of topics including spontaneous generation, the conservation of energy, and, as we have seen, glacier motion. More personally, and ultimately more consequentially, his inability to find a way to regulate his mental dynamo, to soothe his mind and gentle into sleep, led to a lifetime of trouble. Insomnia plagued him, and he turned increasingly to medication to help him sleep. He recorded anguished descriptions of sleepless nights when he sought relief in the chloral his doctor prescribed him. It sometimes took two or three doses before he finally fell into an artificial rest. One otherwise unremarkable day, his wife Louisa made a fatal mistake, administering an accidental extra dose of chloral. They both knew instantly what it meant. “Louisa, you have killed your John,” Tyndall is reported to have said. The doctor was sent for, and every attempt, including shocking him with a galvanic pile, was made to revive the increasingly unresponsive scientist. It was all to no avail, and Tyndall died in the evening of December 4, 1893, age seventy-two.
Louisa, just forty-seven at the time, never forgave herself. She devoted the remainder of her life, some forty-seven additional years, to the task of writing his biography. Weighed down by guilt and the scope and scale of the material, she proved unable to complete the task. When she died in 1940, Tyndall’s own generation was long gone. Few remembered Tyndall. The papers and notes relating to Louisa’s mammoth project were eventually turned over to a pair of scientists who agreed to finish the task. Unlike his peers, whose descendants or students had completed the typical “Lives and Letters” or “Collected Papers” soon after their deaths, Tyndall—having had no students and only a guilt-stricken widow—received no such encomia. The long-delayed biography appeared in 1945 in a nation preoccupied with recovery from World War II, which had largely forgotten him and which accordingly took little notice.49
FIG. 2.10. John and Louisa Tyndall in the library at their home, c. 1887.
Today, Tyndall is receiving his measure of remembrance. His findings now look prophetic, the first glimmerings of understanding about the way our global climate works and the way human beings have, unintentionally, altered that climate in dramatic ways. Looking closer, it is clear how very different the preoccupations of Tyndall and his contemporaries were from ours. That his obsessions—ice, glaciers, water vapor, heat—look so much like ours do today should not fool us. Tyndall’s study of heat was grounded in his deep appreciation of the recently revealed laws of thermodynamics, not in an appreciation of the living, green earth to which we are now so attuned. It is not too much to say that the second law of thermodynamics, with its commanding prescription about the very cold future of the cosmos and all its contents, gave him the eyes with which he saw the world.
Today we are intensely aware of the connectedness of the parts of the earth, but our version of what it means to be linked to each other and to physical phenomena is very different indeed from Tyndall’s. We no longer look at the world through entropy-tinted glasses. Nor do we find ourselves struck by the unimaginably long time spans that have gone into making our planet—and which stretch out ahead in the future of the universe. Instead, we see volatility and ever-diminishing quantities of what was once a seemingly endless resource: time itself. Time, we feel, is running out as we rush to understand the mechanisms of our planet’s climate and, just possibly, to make changes to our behavior to prevent an ever-hotter future.
The easiest difference to spot—and it is a glaring and significant one—is the fact that neither Tyndall nor his contemporaries imagined that human beings might pour so much of that other great absorber of radiant heat, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere that it would change the climate of the earth. For all their imaginative musings about the past climate of the earth, and therefore the possible future climates of the earth, not one of them imagined that they had already embarked on the largest, and most momentous, experiment in the sciences of the earth ever undertaken.
Tyndall never lost his sense of wonder at the action of Nature, a wonder that was imbued with a feeling of awe at the almost infinite grandeur of natural beauty, the way it pervaded every molecule of creation with an almost uncanny reach. Even places to which humans had scant access—places where humans were not, in the normal course of events, expected to be—were drizzled with beauty. Despite (or is it because of?) his commitment to a purely materialist vision of the cosmos—one from which God had been excused as the origin of all causes—Tyndall was persistently moved to his very core by his own ineffable experience of wonder. Having rejected the idea that wonder could be a gift from God, he was left to wonder more deeply still at how such feelings could arise from the movement of energy through matter, from molecules in motion and nothing more.
He wrote feelingly of the remarkable power of the human imagination to peer behind the veil with which Nature obscured herself, but he never lost sight of Nature’s deeper power. Entering the hut in which he and his companions spent the night during their 1859 expedition to the Mer de Glace, he noticed one more instance in which Nature outraced the faculties of men. Though the hut had been carefully closed up, fine snow crystals had found their way in through tiny crevices to form on one of the windows a “festooned curtain formed entirely of minute ice crystals. It appeared to be as fine as muslin; the ease of its curves and the depths of its folds being such as could not be excelled by the intentional arrangement of ordinary gauze.”50 Nature, without intention, produced beauty that dwarfed the greatest achievements of man. Explain that, Tyndall challenged his reader—and himself—time and time again.
Holding his hand to the windowpane and melting the ice beneath it, Tyndall watched it refreeze before his eyes as “atom closed with atom, and the
motion ran in living lines through the pellicle, until finally the entire film presented the beauty and delicacy of an organism. The connexion between such objects and what we are accustomed to call the feelings may not be manifest, but it is nevertheless true that, besides appealing to the pure intellect of man, these exquisite productions can also gladden his heart and moisten his eyes.”51 Though it already felt strange to say it (“the connexion . . . may not be manifest”), Tyndall felt compelled to point out the link between emotions and the apprehension of order in nature. Emotions coursed through Tyndall in the same way that the heat from his hand coursed through the icy pane of glass. In both cases, the same physical principles were at work, and yet it was impossible to escape the uncanniness of a world—the world which Tyndall could not help but inhabit—where emotions and atoms were similar kinds. How could Nature make him feel so many things when feelings were nothing more than molecules? The thought provoked its own strange compulsion, a mental loose tooth to be explored again and again.
Throughout his life Tyndall experienced a symphony of emotion that was only heightened, not diminished, by his awareness of the mysterious materiality of his feelings. In Tyndall’s appreciation of the beauty of Nature, there was always also a piquant awareness of this strange and exquisite paradox. The forms of Nature produced by physical laws could produce such intense emotion in human beings, who were themselves mere matter organized according to the same physical laws. There was, in the end, nothing to do but wonder, and keep looking. “In the application of her own principles,” Tyndall wrote feelingly, “Nature often transcends the human imagination; her acts are bolder than our predictions. It is thus with the motions of glaciers; it was thus at the Montanvert on the day now referred to.”52
3
SEE-THROUGH CLOUDS
The peak of the island of Tenerife appeared for only a moment as the RMS Titania eased into harbor, but Charles Piazzi Smyth was ready for it. He caught the clouds “unveiling for a moment the chief glory of the island, showing it for an instant as a reward after the toil of the voyage.” He knew that his next vision of the peak would come only following a hard climb up the mountain. For the time being, he exulted in the chance to see “a higher and purer sphere.”1
Though it felt serendipitous, the vision of the peak was far from an accident of cloud and wind. Instead, it was a direct consequence of what Piazzi Smyth called a “certain,” as in definite, “line of separation between the land-cloud and the sea-cloud.” Whatever caused that line may have remained uncertain, but the line itself was not. The line was, in fact, a stable and even celebrated feature of the landscape. When the great Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt had stopped at the island in 1799 at the beginning of what would become his epic five-year journey to South America, he too had noticed the curious phenomenon by which the clouds parted to reveal the top of the peak.2 Some thirty years later, Charles Darwin had witnessed the same meteorological unveiling when he visited the island in January 1832 at the beginning of his own voyage to South America. He mentioned it in his Naturalist’s Voyage, remarking how “we saw the sun rise behind the rugged outline of the Grand Canary Island, and suddenly illuminate the Peak of Teneriffe, whilst the lower parts were veiled in fleecy clouds.”3
FIG. 3.1. The peak of La Palma seen above the cloud line in a drawing by Charles Piazzi Smyth in 1856. Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin had observed and written about the same meteorological feature. Credit: Royal Observatory Edinburgh.
In his own narrative describing his journey to test the possibilities of mountaintop astronomy, Piazzi Smyth mentioned the existence of a scientific explanation for the delineated cloud lines before remarking that at the moment he caught sight of the peak through the clouds, “the effect on the feelings was such, that there could have been few persons with whom the leading idea would have been the physical explanation.” Clouds and their motions evoked feelings more readily than thoughts, suggested Piazzi Smyth. Or did they? Piazzi Smyth was coy about whether he was one of the people for whom physical explanations did in fact dominate. He claimed that awe and wonder preceded scientific understanding, but in the telling, Piazzi Smyth is scientist first, wonderer second.
That the clouds, as the most visible and visibly changeable aspect of the weather, might produce strong emotions had the self-evident truthfulness of cliché for Piazzi Smyth. In the early decades of the century, the English painter John Constable had offered a newly prominent role for the sky—formerly mere backdrop—as “the keynote, the standard of scale, and the key organ of sentiment” in landscape painting.4 By sky, he really meant clouds. In his finished paintings and in his remarkable series of cloud studies, he single-handedly transformed clouds into the primary pictorial mechanism for delivering emotional impact. This did not mean banishing the techniques of science from art. On the contrary, scientific techniques for Constable worked in the service of emotional veracity. He believed that a large portion of the “artistic” quality of a work he painted lay in the authenticity of the emotions it provoked. Did it make the viewer feel as if she were standing in a field, watching the scene unfold before her? If scientific tools and practices could increase the emotional impact of a painting, this was all to the good.
Constable, the consummate artist, had learned to see the clouds partly through the eyes of Luke Howard. When in 1803, Howard had offered a newly standardized nomenclature for clouds, he provided a new set of tools for capturing the felt reality of clouds, in words and pictures. For Constable and the painters he influenced, scientific understanding of the clouds could be utilized to generate a convincing subjective experience. For scientists, the trick was to devise methods for describing clouds that captured not the feelings produced by clouds but their changing nature. As important as Howard’s imposition of order on what had previously seemed impossibly disordered was his insight into the ways in which clouds were transformed into other clouds. The study of changing types, rather than fixed forms, was written into his project from the start. The role of emotion in the service of Howard’s science was less certain. What was clear, instead, was how difficult it was to separate the two. Clouds were interesting, useful, and important precisely because of the ways they elided—glided across—the boundary between objectivity and subjectivity, between science and art, between fact and feeling.
In the same way that Tyndall and Forbes’s dispute over glacier motion hinged not on who had the better explanation but on what counted as an explanation, so the men who wished to study clouds scientifically were at pains, in 1856, to define what exactly that might mean. In 1804, Howard had provided one explanation—to know a cloud meant to identify it and to name it. This natural historical approach treated clouds as specimens of nature that could be observed and collected in much the same way as butterflies. And just as biologists could tell a great deal about butterflies by their taxonomic descriptions, so would it be possible to learn much about the geography of clouds by this technique. Though Howard emphasized how important it was to attend to the modifications of clouds, he made no suggestions about the physics of cloud transformation, nor about the role of clouds in the generation of storms.
By 1856, clouds were increasingly subject to a new sort of scrutiny and to new ways of being known. A new government office for weather, called the Meteorological Department, was established in 1854 with the intention of increasing knowledge about the weather for both practical and scientific benefit. The doubled mission of the office was evident in the choice of an Admiralty captain as its first head. Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who had captained the Beagle, the ship upon which Darwin had served as naturalist (and from which he had observed the clouds at Tenerife), was a practical navy man whose interest in clouds was to protect the sailors who served under him, and, by extension, any Briton who might come to harm during a powerful and unexpected storm. While government bureaucrats and scientists both agreed that reliable predictions of coming weather were far off, FitzRoy took a pragmatic ap
proach to the matter. He thought that it was more important to use knowledge of the weather to save lives than to wait until a “mature” science could be established on the basis of statistics. This would lead to both pathbreaking and highly controversial action on his part.
* * *
Piazzi Smyth was thirty-seven when he arrived at Tenerife.5 It was an expedition toward which his whole life had led him. He had been born under a Neapolitan sky and christened with a name like a prophecy: Charles Piazzi Smyth. Sandwiched between solid Scottish nomenclature nestled the surname of Giuseppe Piazzi, a great Italian astronomer and friend of his father. The exoticism and ambition, of both his Italian namesake and his own father, himself an accomplished naval officer, both took root in the child. By the age of sixteen, he was well on his way, literally and metaphorically, as he departed the Bedfordshire school where he’d been studying and sailed along the west coast of Africa until he reached the farthest point of the continent. He landed at the Cape of Good Hope in 1835 where, by prior arrangement, he was to spend the next ten years as an apprentice to the Royal Astronomer at the Cape, Thomas Maclear.
He learned how to locate and precisely map the stars—vastly more of them visible in the dry air of the Cape than in Britain. He worked hard in helping measure the length of an arc of the meridian. He spent parts of five winters surveying the land in the pursuit of geodetic precision, enduring cold mist and icy winds in the mountains of the western Cape. He traced the faint, dusty glow of the zodiacal light, scattered by dust held in the plane of the solar system, a delicate, elusive phenomenon that hovered on the edge of visibility.
Seeing required training, and so did recording what he saw. He sketched from an early age and developed a fluent, veridical style. He drew the view from his room at the school in Bedford, the people on board the ship that carried him to the Cape, and the buildings that he encountered once there. He sketched Halley’s Comet as it passed in 1835–1836. He was the first person to make photographs in Africa, experimenting with making rudimentary images of plants even before he had learned which chemicals to use. As early as 1843 he was able to take images that survive today—people and buildings in southern Africa, including one of the Cape Observatory (possibly the oldest photograph of any observatory).
