Nov. 7. 1857
My dear Sir
I am very much obliged to you for your kind thoughtfulness in sending me your papers on the Dynamical Top & on the Perception of Colour,2 as also for your memoir on the Lines of Force3 received some time ago. I never doubted the possibility of giving Faraday’s notions a mathematical form, and you would probably be one of the last to deny the possibility of a totally different imagery by which the phenomena might be represented.4
Very sincerely yours | John Tyndall
Cambridge University Library MSS.Add.7655/II/13 and Add.7655/II/221
James Clerk Maxwell: James Clerk Maxwell (1831–79), a Scottish physicist who held professorships at King’s College, London, and the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work on electromagnetism, but also made contributions to thermodynamics and the study of colour vision (ODNB, CDSB).
your papers on the Dynamical Top & on the Perception of Colour: J. C. Maxwell, ‘On a Dynamical for exhibiting the Phenomena of the Motion of a System of Invariable Form about a Fixed Point, with some Suggestions as to the Earth’s Motion’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 21 (1857), pp. 559–70; and J. C. Maxwell, ‘Account of Experiments on the Perception of Colour’, Phil. Mag., 14 (1857), pp. 40–7.
your memoir on the Lines of Force: J. C. Maxwell, ‘On Faraday’s Lines of Force’, Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 10 (1864), pp. 27–83. Maxwell read this paper in December 1855 and January 1856, and perhaps sent a copy to Tyndall before its later publication. Summaries were published in Phil. Mag. 11 (1856), pp. 404–5; and 12 (1856), pp. 316–20. Maxwell took care to publish in the Phil. Mag. ‘because Faraday reads it and so does Tyndall’, as he stated in a 22 February 1856 letter to William Thomson (Cambridge University Library MSS.Add.7342, M 95).
I never doubted… might be represented: here Tyndall contrasted his own material or particle-based view of polar substances acting by attraction and repulsion (‘diamagnetic polarity’) and Faraday’s ‘field theory’ with its directive force only, which was put into mathematical form by Thomson and later Maxwell. See R. Jackson, ‘John Tyndall and the Early History of Magnetism’, Annals of Science, 72 (2015), pp. 435–89, on pp. 479–81.
Please cite as “Tyndall1452,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on