Clifton | Bristol | 16 April 1852
My Dear Sir
Your letter of the 5th1 has been just forwarded from Edinburgh.
The experiments you refer to on the Conduction of Heat were never published in detail, because though carefully made, the difficulty of obtaining numerical results seemed at the time insuperable. The order of the metals obtained was published in the Proceedings of the R. Society of Edinburgh but without any details.2 The only result particularly worth notice was the correction of the wrong position of Platinum given by Desprez, & which has been since adopted by him.
I have lately been engaged in experiments of a totally different kind made at the expense of the British Association, but an attack of serious illness which has obliged me to leave Edinburgh has of course interrupted them for the present.
After I wrote to you last, I read several of your later papers & was much pleased with the apparent consistency of the results obtained with the Rheostat & Tangent Galvanometer, & I had almost written to ask you what thickness & amount of wire your rheostat consists of – and whether those instruments are to be procured & at what cost in this country.
I saw a Rheostat at Watkins & Hills3 but the wire appeared to me probably much finer than that you used.
I remain my dear Sir | Yours faithfully | James D. Forbes –
John Tyndall Esq | Queenwood College | Stockbridge
RI MS JT/1/F/29
your letter of the 5th: letter 0614.
published in ... any details: J. D. Forbes, ‘Researches on the Conducting Power of the Metals for Heat and Electricity, tending to establish a New Analogy between these principles’, Edinb. Roy. Soc. Proc., 1 (December 1832–May 1844), pp. 5–7.
Watkins & Hills: optical, mathematical and philosophical instrument makers (see letter 0533, n. 8).
Please cite as “Tyndall0618,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on 1 May 2024, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/tyndall/letters/Tyndall0618