Cambridge | 12 March 1857
My dear Sir,
I have had your name (with sundry others) in my memorandum list, but have really been so thoroughly occupied that I could not write before leaving home—Many thanks for your Farridayan Eulogy1 which has afforded me very much pleasure, & to every word of which I most heartily subscribe—I do not know the relative merits of OErsted2 & Faraday3 in regard to priority of discovery leading to the invention of the Electric Telegraph but OErsted is, I believe, more generally considered to have the credit which quite as probably or more so may belong to Faraday—Pray excuse my seeming neglect of your paper,4 but I assure you I read it the moment I received it with the greatest pleasure—
Y[ou]rs very truly | JS Henslow
RI MS JT/1/H/79
RI MS JT/1/TYP/2/490
Many thanks for your Farridayan Eulogy: most likely a positive review Tyndall had written of Faraday’s research. Tyndall wrote one such article for the Westminter Review of January 1856, which praised the third volume of Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity (1855). See ‘Science’, Westminster Review, 65 (1856), pp. 254–61. Tyndall also noted in his journal, on 26 March 1857, that he ‘Corrected a proof for Chapman’, who was then editor of the Westminster Review (Journal, JT/2/13c/920). In the following issue of the Review an article, which might possibly be attributed to Tyndall, critiqued James Forbes’s contribution to the eighth edition of the Encylopedia Britannica. In addition to critiquing Forbes on Faraday’s research into induction, the article also included a laudatory discussion of Faraday’s 27 February lecture to the RI, ‘On the Conservation of Force’. See ‘Science’, Westminster Review, 67 (1857), pp. 584–602, esp. 588–93.
OErsted: Hans Christian Ørsted (1777–1851), a Danish physicist and chemist credited with the discovery that electric currents create magnetic fields (CDSB).
relative merits of OErsted & Faraday: Michael Faraday’s early 1820s research into electricity and magnetism was disputed as lacking originality as compared to Ørsted’s research. See G. Cantor, D. Gooding, and F. A. J. L. James, Faraday (London: MacMillan, 1991), p. 49.
your paper: see n. 1.
Please cite as “Tyndall1352,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on