I know the ice-machine of Harrison;2 wherein the ice is produced by the vaporization of ether. It is truly an excellent apparatus, but I was not aware that he had reduced it to domestic dimensions. Excuse this official sheet: I am in the midst of the Council of the Royal Society3—listening even at this moment to the secretary reading the minutes of the last meeting.
Maggs Auction Catalogue 2006, 1390, no. 179
Miss Guthrie: Probably Anne Leonora Guthrie (1807–93). She was the half-sister of Mary Dawes and lived at 4 Berkeley Street until moving in 1858 to Pool House, Hereford. See N. Denison, Richard Dawes: Education Pioneer and Dean of Hereford (The Somborne & District Society, 2017). This is a fragment of a letter, taken from an auction catalogue.
the ice-machine of Harrison: James Harrison (1816–93), the Scottish-born and Australia-domiciled inventor who later tried unsuccessfully to launch a refrigerated meat trade from Australia. Harrison had made his ice machine available to Tyndall for his experiments relating to the structure and motion of glaciers. See ‘On Some Physical properties of Ice’, Phil. Trans., 148 (1858), pp. 223–4.
I am in the midst of the Council of the Royal Society: Tyndall was a member of the Council from 1860–2, his second of four tenures.
Please cite as “Tyndall1789,” in Ɛpsilon: The John Tyndall Collection accessed on