John Tyndall - Main Scientific Work

Main Scientific Work

Beginning in the late 1850s, Tyndall studied the action of radiant energy on the constituents of air, and it led him onto several lines of inquiry, and his original research results included the following:

• Tyndall explained the heat in the Earth's atmosphere in terms of the capacities of the various gases in the air to absorb radiant heat, a.k.a. infrared radiation. His measuring device, which used thermopile technology, is an early landmark in the history of absorption spectroscopy of gases. He was the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised that the Earth's atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect, but he was the first to prove it. The proof was that water vapor strongly absorbed infrared radiation.

• He devised demonstrations that advanced the question of how radiant heat is absorbed and emitted at the molecular level. He appears to be the first person to have demonstrated experimentally that emission of heat in chemical reactions has its physical origination within the newly created molecules (1864). He produced instructive demonstrations involving what he called calorescence, which is the conversion of infrared into visible light at the molecular level. Among his key laboratory tools were substances that are transparent to infrared and opaque to visible light; or vice versa. He usually referred to infrared as "radiant heat", and sometimes as "ultra-red undulations", as the word "infrared" did not start coming into use until the 1880s. His main published reports of the 1860s were republished as a 450-page collection in 1872 under the title Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat.

• In the investigations on radiant heat in air it had been necessary to use air from which all traces of floating dust and other particulates had been removed. A very sensitive way to detect particulates is to bathe the air with intense light. The scattering of light by particulate impurities in air and other gases, and in liquids, is known today as the Tyndall Effect or Tyndall Scattering. In studying this scattering during the late 1860s Tyndall was a beneficiary of recent improvements in electric-powered lights. He also had the use of good light concentrators. He developed the nephelometer and turbidimeter and similar instruments that show properties of aerosols and colloids through concentrated light beams. Particulates suspended in air are visible to the naked eye in a darkened room with sunlight coming through a crack in the curtains. Mostly visibly that's light reflecting off large particulates which is not the same as light scattering off small particulates. But with dark background illumination and customized light beams, and without microscopes, very low concentrations of particulates very far below the threshold of visibility become visible and quantifiable because of light scattering. When combined with microscopes, the result is the ultramicroscope, which was developed later by others. Tyndall is the founder of this line of instruments, which are based on exploiting the Tyndall effect.

• In the lab he came up with the following simple way to obtain "optically pure" air. He built a square wooden box with a couple of glass windows on it. Before sealing the box, he coated the inside walls and floor of the box with glycerin, which is a sticky syrup. He found that after a few days' wait the air inside the sealed box was entirely particulate-free when examined with strong light beams through the glass windows. The various floating-matter particulates had all ended up getting stuck to the walls or settling on the sticky floor. Now, in the optically pure air there were no signs of any "germs", i.e. there were no floating micro-organisms. Tyndall sterilized some meat-broths by simply boiling them and then he compared what happened when he let these sterilized meat-broths sit in such pure air, and in ordinary air. The broths sitting in the optically pure air remained "sweet" (as he said) to smell and taste after many months of sitting, while the ones in ordinary air started to become putrid after a few days. This demonstration extended Louis Pasteur's earlier demonstrations that the presence of micro-organisms is a precondition for biomass decomposition. However, the next year (1876) Tyndall failed to consistently reproduce the result; some of his supposedly heat-sterilized broths rotted in the optically pure air. From this Tyndall was led to find viable bacterial spores in supposedly heat-sterilized broths. The broths had been contaminated with dry bacterial spores from hay in the lab, he found out. All bacteria are killed by simple boiling, except that bacteria have a spore form that can survive boiling, he correctly contended, citing research by Ferdinand Cohn. Tyndall found a way to eradicate the bacterial spores that came to be known as "Tyndallization". At the time, it affirmed the "germ theory" against a number of critics whose experimental results had been defective from the same cause. During the mid-1870s Pasteur and Tyndall were in frequent communication.

• He was the first to observe and report the phenomenon of thermophoresis in aerosols. He spotted it surrounding hot objects while investigating the Tyndall Effect with focused lightbeams in a dark room. He devised a better way to demonstrate it, and then simply reported it (1870), without investigating the physics of it in depth.

• In radiant-heat experiments that called for much laboratory expertise in the early 1860s, he showed for a variety of readily vaporizable liquids that, molecule for molecule, the vapor form and the liquid form have essentially the same power to absorb radiant heat. (In modern experiments using narrow-band spectra, some relatively small differences are found that Tyndall's equipment was unable to get at; see e.g. absorption spectrum of H₂O).

• He consolidated and enhanced the work of Desains, Forbes, Knoblauch and others demonstrating that the principal properties of visible light can be reproduced for radiant heat, namely reflection, refraction, diffraction, polarization, depolarization, double refraction, and rotation in a magnetic field.

• When studying the absorption of radiant heat by ozone, he came up with a demonstration that helped confirm that ozone is an oxygen cluster.

• Using his expertise about radiant heat absorption by gases, he invented a system for measuring the amount of carbon dioxide in a sample of exhaled human breath (1862, 1864). The basics of Tyndall's system is in daily use in hospitals today for monitoring patients under anesthesia. (See capnometry.)

• Invented a better fireman's respirator, a hood that filtered smoke and noxious gas from air (1871, 1874).

• In the late 1860s and early 1870s he wrote an introductory book and several research reports about sound propagation in air, and was one of the chief participants in a large-scale British project that developed a better foghorn. In laboratory demonstrations motivated by foghorn issues, he established that sound is partially reflected (i.e. partially bounced back like an echo) at the location where an air mass of one temperature meets another air mass of a different temperature; and more generally when a body of air contains two or more separate air masses of different densities or temperatures, the sound travels poorly because of reflections occurring at the interfaces between the air masses, and very poorly when many such interfaces are present. (He then argued, though inconclusively, that this is the usual main reason why the same distant sound, e.g. foghorn, can be heard stronger or fainter on different days or at different times of day.)

An index of 19th century scientific research journals has John Tyndall as the author of more than 147 papers, with practically all of them dated between 1850 and 1884, which is an average of more than four papers a year over that 35-year period.

Tyndall was an experimenter and laboratory apparatus builder, not an abstract model builder. But in his experiments on radiation and the heat-absorptive power of gases, he had an underlying agenda to understand the physics of molecules. This agenda is explicit in the title he picked for his 1872 book Contributions to Molecular Physics in the Domain of Radiant Heat. It is present less explicitly in the spirit of his widely read 1863 book Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion. Besides heat he also saw phenomena of magnetism and sound propagation as reducible to molecular behaviors. Invisible molecular behaviors were the ultimate substrate of all physical activity. With this mindset, and his experiments, he outlined an account whereby differing types of molecules have differing absorptions of infrared radiation because their molecular structures give them differing oscillating resonances. He'd gotten into the oscillating resonances idea because he'd seen that any one type of molecule has differing absorptions at differing radiant frequencies, and he was entirely persuaded that the only difference between one frequency and another is the frequency. He'd also seen that the absorption behavior of molecules is quite different from that of the atoms composing the molecules — for example the gas nitric oxide (NO) absorbed more than a thousand times more infrared radiation than either nitrogen (N₂) or oxygen (O₂). He'd also seen in several kinds of experiments that no matter whether a gas is a weak absorber of broad-spectrum radiant heat, it will strongly absorb the radiant heat coming from a separate body of the same type of gas. That demonstrated a kinship between the molecular mechanisms of absorption and emission. Such a kinship was also in evidence in experiments by Balfour Stewart and others, cited and extended by Tyndall, that showed with respect to broad-spectrum radiant heat that molecules that are weak absorbers are weak emitters and strong absorbers are strong emitters. (For example rock-salt is an exceptionally poor absorber of heat via radiation, and a good absorber of heat via conduction. When a plate of rock-salt is heated via conduction and let stand on an insulator, it takes an exceptionally long time to cool down; i.e., it's a poor emitter of infrared.) The kinship between absorption and emission was also consistent with some generic or abstract features of resonators. The photochemical effect convinced Tyndall that the resonator could not be the molecule as a whole unit; it had to be some substructure, because otherwise the photochemical effect would be impossible. But he was without testable ideas as to the form of this substructure, and did not partake in speculation in print. His promotion of the molecular mindset, and his efforts to experimentally expose what molecules are, has been discussed by one historian under the title "John Tyndall, The Rhetorician Of Molecularity".

In his lectures at the Royal Institution Tyndall put a great value on — and was talented at producing — lively, visible demonstrations of physics concepts. In one lecture, published later in one of his books, Tyndall demonstrated the propagation of light down through a stream of falling water via total internal reflection of the light. It was referred to as the "light fountain". It is historically significant today because it demonstrates the scientific foundation for modern fiber optic technology. During second half of the 20th century Tyndall was usually credited with being the first to make this demonstration. However, Jean-Daniel Colladon published a report of it in Comptes Rendus in 1842, and there's some suggestive evidence that Tyndall's knowledge of it came ultimately from Colladon and no evidence that Tyndall claimed to have originated it himself.