John Tyndall and the Royal Medal that was never struck

The Royal Medal is one of the premier awards conferred by the Royal Society, second only to the Copley Medal, ¹ and was introduced in 1826 after a proposition by the then Home Secretary Robert Peel to George IV. Two Royal Medals were initially awarded each year, and there was much dispute about the criteria in the early years. ² After a review in 1850, the pattern settled down to the award of one in the physical sciences and one in the biological sciences for ‘the two most important contributions to the advancement of Natural Knowledge published originally in Her Majesty's dominions within a period of not more than 10 years and not less than 1 year of the date of the award.’ ³ In 1965 a third medal was introduced on behalf of Elizabeth II, covering the applied sciences. The designated medallists in 1853 were John Tyndall and Charles Darwin, and for the first and so far only time in its history one medal was not presented, having been declined by Tyndall.

Tyndall's background and education

At the time that he was nominated for the medal on 23 June 1853, Tyndall was 32 years old and had only been active as a researcher for 3 years; Darwin was already 44 years old. From a humble upbringing in County Carlow, Tyndall had worked from 1839 as a surveyor with the Ordnance Survey in Ireland, before moving to northern England where he was dismissed in November 1843 for leading complaints about pay and conditions. He eventually found work in September 1844 as a railway surveyor based in Manchester and Halifax until he was enticed in August 1847 to join the staff of Queenwood School in Hampshire, which offered a unique and practically based approach to education in the sciences. Throughout this time he was educating himself in mathematics, the sciences and engineering through books, magazines and lectures at the developing Mechanics Institutes, with at one point the aspiration of becoming a railway engineer. Edward Frankland joined the staff at Queenwood shortly after him. Frankland had visited Germany in the summer to meet many of the German chemists, contacts of Lyon Playfair, in whose laboratory he had worked from 1845. One of these was Robert Bunsen in Marburg. Tyndall decided to go with Frankland to Marburg in 1848, that year of revolution across Europe, to study in Bunsen's laboratory for a PhD, which he completed in an impressively short time in 1850. Indeed, it was Bunsen ‘from whose lips I first heard of diamagnetism’. ⁴

Tyndall now sought to make his way as a natural philosopher, without money or family connections at a time when there were minimal opportunities for paid work in his chosen field and the competition was stiff. Yet within three years he was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution and the designated recipient of a Royal Medal. It was a meteoric rise, founded largely on his work on diamagnetism.

The significance of Tyndall's work on diamagnetism has been underplayed in the literature. His own contribution is underappreciated and its impact on his scientific and social reputation largely ignored. A summary of his contribution is given in the early biography of Tyndall by Eve & Creasey ⁵ and in the collection of essays edited by Brock et al. ⁶ But in the most recent extensive biographical study, Ursula DeYoung gives barely a mention to diamagnetism, dividing his career into three major categories of research: glaciology, molecular behaviour in varying atmospheric conditions, and bacteriology. ⁷ Diamagnetism is in reality the first of his four major areas of research, and the most significant one for establishing his career and early reputation.

Diamagnetism

Michael Faraday's paper announcing his discovery of ‘diamagnetics’, substances that are repulsed from a magnetic pole, was read before the Royal Society on 20 November 1845. ⁸ This finding, implying that all materials are affected by what Faraday called a magnetic field, stimulated major efforts in Britain and mainland Europe over the next 10 years to understand this very weak phenomenon and to integrate it into theories of electromagnetism. Effectively, it became a test case between those who favoured Faraday's developing field theory, including William Thomson ⁹ in this period and later James Clerk Maxwell, and those who took an approach based on A.-M. Ampère's circulating currents or rotating electric charges, diamagnetic polarity and action at a distance. ¹⁰ In mainland Europe, Julius Plücker, ¹¹ a geometer turned physicist, was active early, publishing two papers in 1847. In the first he claimed to have identified a new repulsive force related to the optic axis of crystals, ¹² and in the second that the magnetic force diminished less than the diamagnetic in proportion to the increase of distance from the poles. ¹³ Wilhelm Weber ¹⁴ published related work in 1848 in which he claimed to show that induced currents in bismuth, a diamagnetic material, were opposite to those in iron. ¹⁵ In March 1848 Plücker published a further paper asserting the existence of diamagnetic polarity. ¹⁶ In the meantime, Faraday had identified and described in the Bakerian Lecture for 1848 ¹⁷ what he called the ‘magne-crystallic axis’, as a line in a crystal tending to place itself in the magnetic axis, analogous to Plücker's identification of the optic axis. He explained the effect of the magnecrystallic force as ‘not one of attraction or of repulsion but of position only, and is as far as I can see a new effect or an exertion of force new to us.’ ¹⁸ Plücker continued to work with crystals, writing to Faraday on 20 May 1849 ¹⁹ to convey his new findings that the optic axis was repelled or attracted depending on whether the crystal was negative or positive, respectively, a letter that Faraday had published in Philosophical Magazine. ²⁰

Tyndall and Knoblauch

This was the position when, in November 1849, Tyndall (pictured in figure 1) started to work on diamagnetism with Hermann Knoblauch ²¹ in Marburg, even though he had not yet completed his PhD thesis. Knoblauch was one of a strong group of German savants, including Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond, Siemens and Clausius, who studied in Magnus's laboratory in Berlin. The primary focus throughout Knoblauch's career was the study of radiant heat, a subject to which Tyndall himself later turned with great success. Knoblauch did not have much time for the work on diamagnetism, which fell largely to Tyndall, although the advice and help of Knoblauch was substantial. From a practical point of view, Knoblauch helped with the sourcing of crystals and apparatus, and from a theoretical point of view his exploration of the relationship between crystal structure and the transmission of heat in different directions (he published a paper on this in 1852) may well have influenced Tyndall's own efforts to relate observed properties to underlying structure; ideas that would resurface in Tyndall's later work on glaciers and heat in particular. Apart from the two initial papers with Tyndall, Knoblauch published no further work on diamagnetism.

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Tyndall immediately began following up Plücker's work, considering that Plücker might be right with respect to the optic axis but that ‘he never took the time to establish his law’. ²² It soon became clear that Plücker's results did not hold, and it struck Tyndall that the cleavage rather than the optic axis of the crystal might be significant, an idea that would become the basis of his beliefs about the importance of molecular structure. In his first paper, ‘On the deportment of crystalline bodies between the poles of a magnet’, ²³ built on a carefully controlled set of experiments with cubes, discs and thin bars of materials, Tyndall refuted Plücker's conclusion of the optic axis as the prime determinant of behaviour and pointed to the importance of chemical constitution and structure.

The question of diamagnetic polarity also remained contested. Faraday returned to print after a gap of a year with his paper ‘On the polar or other condition of diamagnetic bodies’ read at the Royal Society on 7 and 14 March 1850, ²⁴ stimulated in particular by Weber's paper concluding that diamagnetics are polar in a magnetic field. Faraday asserted that a true polarity must be permanent, not induced or temporary, and opposite to ordinary magnetic polarity.

At this point Tyndall published his second paper with Knoblauch, ²⁵ ‘On the magneto-optic properties of crystals, and the relation of magnetism and diamagnetism to molecular arrangement’. ²⁶ It became the ‘First Memoir’—out of six memoirs and several related papers—in Tyndall's collated work on diamagnetism, ²⁷ and was given also as a paper by Tyndall in August 1850 at the Edinburgh meeting of the British Association, ²⁸ stimulating a sharp debate with Thomson. According to the Athenaeum it gave rise to ‘a very animated discussion’, ²⁹ which Tyndall described as ‘a hand to hand fight’. ³⁰ In this paper, having previously shown that Plücker's statement that the optic axis alone determined the orientation of the crystal in the magnetic field was incorrect, Tyndall and Knoblauch showed that Plücker's new law of the behaviour of optically positive and negative crystals was also invalid. They showed that there was no need to posit an ‘optic axis’ (Plücker) or ‘magnecrystallic’ force (Faraday), replacing it by Tyndall's concept of a ‘line of elective polarity’, and finally demolished Plücker's argument that the magnetic attraction decreases in a ‘quicker ratio’ than the repulsion of the optic axis. Nevertheless, Plücker maintained his position in a further paper published in late 1850. ³¹

The Royal Medal

The citation for Tyndall stated that the award was ‘for his paper “On Diamagnetism and Magnecrystallic Action”, published in the Philosophical Magazine for 1851', ³² the issue that appeared in September. ³³ This paper became the ‘Second Memoir’ and had been presented in July 1851 at the Ipswich meeting of the British Association. ³⁴ It had also been published in Poggendorff's Annalen in late July 1851. ³⁵ It contained further demolition of Plücker's work, as Tyndall used a torsion balance to measure diamagnetism in bismuth and disprove Plücker's proposition that the laws that govern magnetism and diamagnetism are different. Athenaeum reported that Faraday spoke at some length on Tyndall's contribution, which afforded him ‘great gratification that there was one at least among us who has followed up this important subject so perseveringly.’ ³⁶ He ‘felt prepared to admit that that some of Dr Tyndall's results seemed to promise an explanation of Plücker's perplexing results and conclusions’.

By the time the award was made, and these would have been on the record at the time, Tyndall had also published in November 1851 his paper ‘On the polarity of bismuth, including an examination of the magnetic field’, ³⁷ which became his ‘Third Memoir’, and had given a further paper ‘On Poisson's Theoretic Anticipation of Magnecrystallic Action’ ³⁸ in September 1852 at the Belfast meeting of the British Association.

At this point, although no one could have known it, Tyndall was only halfway through his eventual work on diamagnetism, but had established a solid body of experimental evidence and theoretical insight, the latter contrary to Faraday's interpretation but shared by many others in Britain and in mainland Europe. He had also shown his ability to disagree in public with experienced figures such as Thomson and Faraday.

Nominations for the Royal Medal took place over two meetings of the Council of the Royal Society in 1853. ³⁹ On 2 June, three nominations were made:

The decisions on the award of the Royal Medals were made on 3 November. ⁶⁰ The choice of Darwin, against Lindley, seems to have been straightforward, but not so for Tyndall. Not all those who had proposed or seconded candidates attended the Council meeting on 3 November, at which a total of 13 Council members were present: Thomas Bell (the Biological Sciences Secretary), James Booth, Benjamin Brodie, Samuel Hunter Christie (the Physical Sciences Secretary), ⁶¹ J. P. Gassiot, Joseph Hooker, Henry Bence Jones, George Newport, ⁶² Edward Sabine (in the chair), ⁶³ William Sharpey, ⁶⁴ William Smyth (the Foreign Secretary), ⁶⁵ William Spence ⁶⁶ and Nathaniel Wallich. On 4 November 1853 Tyndall heard from Bence Jones that he was the ‘elected candidate’ for a Royal Medal, ⁶⁷ against Hofmann, Frankland, Cayley and Sylvester, and also heard some of the political dealing that had resulted in this outcome; Gassiot had proposed him and Brooke seconded. It is surprising that Bence Jones apparently did not mention Bunsen. Tyndall had learnt from Bunsen and worked in his laboratory in Marburg just a few years before, receiving active support, and would have regarded him as a mentor. Bence Jones would have known this and was perhaps being diplomatic.

Tyndall understood that Bence Jones had been a supporter of Hofmann—indeed, he had seconded his nomination. According to Tyndall's report of his conversation with Bence Jones, Brodie saw that Frankland had little chance and sided with Graham and Bence Jones in favour of Hofmann, after which Cayley had one vote and Tyndall and Hofmann were equal. Cayley had been proposed by Booth and seconded by Hopkins, Booth having also proposed the much more experienced Sylvester, perhaps for reasons of tact. ⁶⁸ Whoever voted for Cayley thus seemed to have switched to Tyndall. It seems likely that this was Booth, but it is not possible to identify the other three who voted for Hofmann initially and therefore the six, including Gassiot, who voted for Tyndall.

It is surprising on the face of it that Tyndall outcompeted Hofmann at this point, and is indicative of the impact he had made in a short time. Hofmann, born in 1818 and having had the full benefit of his German education, had already been appointed as the first director of the new Royal College of Chemistry in 1845. Tyndall, born in 1820, came to natural philosophy late and had only just completed his PhD by 1850. Frankland was the youngest, born in 1825, and had been an assistant in the chemical laboratory of the British Geological Survey in 1845, after which he spent time like Tyndall, and indeed with Tyndall, in Marburg. In addition, the medal had not been awarded to a chemist since 1850, when Thomas Graham received it—the recipients in 1851 and 1852 were the Earl of Rosse (astronomy) and James Joule (physics), respectively. Nevertheless, honour was eventually satisfied all round, as Hofmann received the medal in 1854 and Frankland in 1857.

Tyndall wrote about the medal on Sunday 6 November to Gassiot, who at this time was also trying to entice him to the London Institution, ⁶⁹ at the same time as Sir Henry de la Beche was trying to secure him for the School of Mines at Jermyn Street, and received a reply on 9 November in which Gassiot indicated that he had proposed him for a discovery that he considered would ‘have an important bearing in that great question which has yet to be solved—the true cause of the variation of the magnetic needle’, ⁷⁰ an issue that had recently been exercising Faraday. ⁷¹ He received a congratulatory note from Sabine the same day, and given Sabine's effective patronage of Tyndall, and his interest in magnetism, one can imagine that his vote would also have gone Tyndall's way. Tyndall's work was not directly aimed at understanding terrestrial magnetism and the causes of its variation, but these two letters are indications of the significance of the study of magnetism at the time, both for its intrinsic understanding and for its application in navigation. Indeed, Faraday had recently suggested that magnetic variation was particularly influenced by the effect of temperature on paramagnetic oxygen in the atmosphere. ⁷²

Matters became complicated on 15 November. Gassiot came to see Faraday, and after speaking with him told Tyndall that there were objections. As Tyndall reported, people ‘say that my investigations were partly conducted along with Knoblauch and partly in the private cabinet of Prof. Magnus in Berlin, and add something regarding Plücker's priority which I do not understand.’ ⁷³ Tyndall's instinct was to refuse the medal, and when Faraday told him that he would not offend Gassiot by so doing and that he would have done the same himself, Tyndall resolved so to do. He wrote graciously to Christie, the Physical Sciences Secretary, on the same day. The letter was apparently sent the following day, after Faraday had seen and approved it, ‘saying he would not alter a single word.’ ⁷⁴ In the letter Tyndall wrote to ‘resign all claim to the Medal and thus restore to the Council the liberty of making a better choice.’ ⁷⁵ He also made it clear that he had never sought a Royal Medal; it was ‘a consummation on which I never based a hope’. As Faraday said, Tyndall by this action had ‘the Council at your mercy, you make them your debtors for ever and destroy all earwigging and petty whisperings.’ ⁷⁶ Tyndall met Gassiot to agree an exchange of letters and wrote to him on 18 November to clarify his grounds for rejecting the medal. ⁷⁷

Perhaps it would have been politic to leave matters here, but Tyndall had a strong moral code, frequently expressed in his journal and letters, and felt that in all conscience he should write again to Gassiot to explain what he really felt. He did so on 20 November disavowing the ability of some of the Council members to judge his work, and asking Gassiot to replace his original letter with a revised one. Tyndall asked for the phrase ‘eminently qualified judges’ in his first letter to be replaced by ‘men of eminent standing in science’ in the second; ‘for how high soever their standing may be it is my conscientious conviction that in the matter before us that have not qualified themselves to judge aright and that they are now taking up a position which they will be unable to stand by at a future date.’ ⁷⁸ Gassiot replied that he ‘would sooner hold the position you have so promptly taken than be the recipient of 20 medals.’ ⁷⁹ Tyndall's letters of 15 November to Christie and 20 November to Gassiot were read out at the Council meeting on 24 November, and the President was requested ‘to inform the proper authorities that the Royal Society have awarded a Royal Medal to Mr. Charles Darwin’. ⁸⁰ According to Tyndall, it was the letter to Gassiot that caused the Royal Society to write to the Queen ⁸¹ informing her that only one Medal would be awarded. ⁸² Tyndall, despite his feeing of moral righteousness, may have had a slight regret at sending this letter, since he wrote in his journal: ‘If I consulted my own feelings I should simply permit the letter I wrote to Christie to stand upon the minutes, reserving to myself the resolution not to accept a medal with a trace of suspicion attached to it.’ ⁸³

Tyndall learned from Gassiot on 25 November that Charles Wheatstone, ⁸⁴ who was not a member of Council at the time of the decision, had said at the Committee for the Kew Magnetic Observatory that Plücker had really made the discovery, and the medal ought to be awarded to him if to anybody. ⁸⁵ In a subsequent conversation with Bence Jones, Tyndall learned that Wheatstone's motivation seemed to be to secure the medal for Hofmann, though when understanding that it could not be awarded to another, had suggested it should go to Tyndall and Knoblauch. ⁸⁶ Tyndall was also not impressed by the apparent opposition of Hopkins, a member of Council at the time of the decision but not present at the decisive meeting, who had ‘never read a single one of my papers’; ⁸⁷ Tyndall wrote to Hopkins the following day, sending the relevant papers. Hopkins replied later, on 29 December, impressed by Tyndall's refutation of Plücker but with some very pertinent comments on the effect of pressure in tending to lessen the distances between constituent particles perpendicularly to the applied pressure. ⁸⁸ Hopkins had in fact written to Gassiot approving of Tyndall's action. ⁸⁹ William Francis, the publisher of Philosophical Magazine and a close friend of Tyndall's, told him that Thomas Huxley was furious with him for refusing the medal. ⁹⁰

The presentation of medals took place at the Royal Society on 30 November. Sabine received the Copley Medal on behalf of Dove, and Darwin his Royal Medal. Huxley then stood up to ask ‘why his intimate friend whom he would not name was not beside Mr Darwin.’ ⁹¹ Tyndall's two letters to Christie and Gassiot were read out ‘and received with great applause’, although Booth apparently regretted he had sent the second because he thought Tyndall ought to accept the medal if awarded it a second time.

Tyndall gave an amusing account of the machinations to his friend Thomas Hirst: ⁹²

The affair rumbled on into the New Year with a further apparent misunderstanding when Tyndall heard from Hirst on 30 January 1854 that Williamson ⁹⁵ had told Atkinson, ⁹⁶ who had told Hirst, of a rhyme that Bence Jones had made, an adaptation of the familiar English nursery rhyme, which ran:

Hirst said that Williamson had claimed that the intention was to give Hofmann the medal but that Frankland was put up in opposition and, not being able to decide, it was given to Tyndall. Faraday, on seeing the claim, said that it was a ‘manifest absurdity’ and surely the rhyme was done as a joke and not to deprecate Tyndall. Tyndall was inclined to agree, although he recalled that Bence Jones had said something to him about his success depending on a split between Hofmann and Frankland. Faraday read the extract to Bence Jones that evening, who immediately came to Tyndall and told him that he had repeated the rhyme to Sharpey but that he meant Tyndall and Hofmann by the Lion and the Unicorn (in the nursery rhyme, the Lion beat the Unicorn); ‘it would be preposterous to mean Frankland since he had not a single vote. When it was found that Hofmann and I were equal somebody suggested that the medal ought to be given to some mathematician; and the mathematician was the little dog.’ ⁹⁸ Tyndall accepted this explanation and wrote to Hirst to draw a line under it, saying, ‘I hope I shall never hear another word about the Royal Medal.’ ⁹⁹ Hirst replied on 5 February: ‘The explanation of the “little Dog” business although not quite satisfactory, makes matters a little better. Either Bence Jones or Williamson, however, have been guilty of considerable narrow-mindedness and as you say the best way is to leave the matter entirely to them.’ ¹⁰⁰

The aftermath

So ended a somewhat unedifying episode in the scientific and personal politics of the time, and Tyndall's name does not appear in the list of Royal Medallists in the Record of the Royal Society. ¹⁰¹ He might have been better advised to write the letter to Christie and either not to send or to tone down the letters to Gassiot, but his sense of personal honour did not permit this. It would not be the last time that his desire to defend what he believed to be right caused him difficulties with other savants, notable cases being his disputes with J. D. Forbes over the motion of glaciers and his defence of the contributions of J. R. Mayer to the conservation of energy. He was also relatively young. Only 14% of recipients of the Royal Medal in the period 1825–1914 were under 35 years of age, and the average age increased significantly after about 1855. ¹⁰² This episode does not, however, seem to have significantly damaged his relationships among the Fellows, nor affected his career in any substantial way. Indeed, he was invited to give the Bakerian Lecture on this very topic of diamagnetism on the next possible occasion in January 1855, the first of four invitations to give that prestigious lecture. He was later to win the Rumford Medal in 1864 for his work on the absorption and radiation of heat by gases and vapours. He was an important and influential figure in the scientific politics of the mid-century, not least as a member of the X Club, that coterie of nine who were so influential in the period 1865–85, ¹⁰³ and as a Council member and, memorably in 1874, President of the British Association. However, unlike many of his friends in the X Club he never received the Copley Medal nor did he achieve office in the Royal Society, beyond election as a member of Council and Vice-President late in life in 1879–80. He repeatedly stated in his journal and letters that he did not seek awards and positions, rather that they should come to him; however, one cannot help thinking that if he had been offered more he would have been minded to accept, and that the prickly manner in which he dealt with the Royal Medal at the least coloured views towards him within the Royal Society, even if it did him no major damage.

Tyndall's avowal that he did not seek awards and positions is ironic in the context of the purpose for which the Royal Medals were established. As Macleod has pointed out, they were one of the earliest instruments of Royal patronage created specifically to encourage original scientific research. ¹⁰⁴ Yet the existence of the medal can have had no effect at all in encouraging Tyndall; he may well have been entirely unaware of it when he started his research, and he was motivated by the intrinsic desire to understand nature, not by any competitive notions (which it was Peel's intent to foster through the introduction of these medals) ¹⁰⁵ or by the desire for public glory, at least insofar as he confided truthful sentiments to his private journal and letters, including in his letter to Christie. The controversy surrounding the nomination of Tyndall as the medallist was by no means unique: both the purposes of the award and the choice of recipients were frequently disputed. ¹⁰⁶ But Tyndall's award remains the only occasion on which the medal was not in consequence presented.

Footnotes