‘Physics and fashion’: John Tyndall and his audiences in mid-Victorian Britain

This paper explores how the physicist John Tyndall transformed himself from humble surveyor and schoolmaster into an internationally applauded icon of science. Beginning with his appointment as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in 1853, I show how Tyndall’s worries about his social class and Irish origins, his painstaking attention to his lecturing performance and skilled use of the material and architectural resources of the Royal Institution were vital to his eventual success as a popular expositor and ambassador for science. Secondly I explore the implications of Tyndall’s ‘popularity’ with respect to debates over the meaning and value of scientific ‘popularisation’. In support of recent work challenging diffusionist models of science communication, I show how Tyndall’s interactions with his audiences illustrate the symbiotic relationship between producer and consumer of ‘popular’ science. By examining the views of Tyndall’s critics—notably the ‘North British’ group of physicists—and his defenders and rivals in the domain of popular scientific lecturing, I show that disputes over Tyndall’s authority reflected anxieties about what constituted popular science and the transient boundaries between instruction and entertainment. The term ‘popularisation’ enjoyed many different uses in these debates, not least of all as a rheorical device with which to either exalt or destroy a scientist’s credibility.