Just days after Christmas the water was as creamy white as a soothing lotion, and its surface rippled smooth like the product of the masseur's hand, disguising the fast flow of the Patagonian river. We had watched the hand-pulled ferry cross this chilly expanse of water towards us, bobbing and ducking in the flow as its square bow tucked into the river, cutting coarse chunks out from the water's flow.
Hazing the first horse on to the pontoon was the most difficult; the second took less effort, and the third mare, fearing being left behind, jumped from the bank with enthusiasm. The sound from her footing changed abruptly as her hind-quarters broke through the wooden planks of the ferry floor from her effort, wedging against the drums underneath that acted as the craft's floats. The mare tried to rise, kicking and twisting to release herself. Fearing that her panic would break her fragile legs, I threw my body on her neck to pin her down, while crowbars and hammers were brought to rip up planks and release the unfortunate animal. In the event, she suffered little worse than flesh wounds.
That evening, just over a month ago, I described the horse's release in my diary; then I looked at the map to find the name of the river we had crossed. The Rio Tyndall - not a name I associated with Patagonia, the southern region of Chile squeezed between the wall of the Andes and the storms of the South Pacific.
I saw that this river drained off a glacier of the same name, and its milky colour came from the crushed rock flour it carried from the melted ice. It was a name I knew from only one other place: my home in Carlow, where a school hosting a plaque acknowledging John Tyndall hides in the west slopes of the Castlecomer Plateau, and on down the Barrow River where his birthplace is celebrated in the town of Lieghlinbridge. I knew nothing more about him.
On reading up on John Tyndall you find sentences and paragraphs that feature the names of great scientists of the Victorian age such as Huxley, Faraday, Kelvin, Darwin, Pasteur, Joule and Plücker. You also find that, apart from his scientific achievements, Tyndall was a pioneer of Alpine climbing, credited with the first traverse of the Matterhorn from the Italian side when in 1868, when he was 48.
Born in 1820 into a modest Protestant family in Carlow, he was educated in a one-room, non-denominational primary school in the grounds of a Catholic Church. At the age of 19 he left to join the Ordnance Survey Office in Carlow, before being transferred to England, where he was soon dismissed for his formal protests against the treatment of the Irish staff at the Survey. (It is ironic that he is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as an "English physicist".)
Then began his movement into science, and the development of one of his greatest gifts, to educate. He taught mathematics at Queenwood College, a school in the north of England whose founding was inspired by the philanthropist Robert Owen. His achievement there with a colleague was to set up the first school laboratory in the British Isles. In 1849 he was awarded a Ph.D. from Marburg University in Germany where he had funded his own research into diamagnetism, a subject of great interest at the time. Marburg was known for its radical approach to science and his research there helped raise his profile upon his return to England.
His gift for explanation and captivating an audience, which had prospered at Queenswood, accelerated his advancement within Victorian scientific circles.
He would publicly expound on current theories at the Royal Institution with demonstrations of experiments he had designed himself. It was in 1857 that, together with Huxley, Tyndall began publishing his research on glaciers and the effects of pressure on ice, and he defended the work of Faraday by experiments on these rivers of ice.
Tyndall's experimentalist approach made him an agent provocateur against the mathematically biased approach to science in the Victorian era. In 1864, with characteristic determination, he and eight others formed the X Club to promote their views, but also those of a reclusive tenth member, Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species they chose to champion. Within this group Huxley influenced the establishment of the scientific journal Nature, which still remains the watermark of contemporary scientific thought and advancement.
Tyndall was a unionist. Fearing that a Catholic-dominated Irish state would diminish intellectual freedom, he devoted much energy in the last 10 years of his life to combating Gladstone's movement towards Home Rule. His atheism prompted him to oppose not only Catholicism, but Christian theology. He caused consternation in what has been labelled "The Belfast Address" of 1874, where he rejected the notion of a creator, and defended Herbert Spencer's theory of evolution of the senses. As a result, he was denounced by a number of Christian churches.
In the 1870s Tyndall undertook 10 years of correspondence with Louis Pasteur on the theory of germs. Pasteur's technique of sterilisation as a single heating did not kill the bacteria spores, allowing the bacteria to regenerate. In 1877 he produced an enhanced method of complete sterilisation by the use of intermittent heating, still known as tyndallisation. He also performed experiments to show that the sky appears blue because of the dispersal of the sun's rays by molecules in the atmosphere.
Tyndall died in 1893 and is buried in Co Carlow at his home town of Lieghlinbridge.There are mountains named after him in California and New Zealand, glaciers in Alaska, towns in Manitoba and North Dakota, a housing estate in Carlow and a lane in Arklow. As a scientist, it is to my own embarrassment that it took a cold river in Patagonia to alert me to Tyndall's achievement. Oddly enough, he never travelled to South America, though his fame and and his name clearly did.