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Welcome to the Tyndall Project coordination wiki. Please check back periodically and make changes to your own section to keep us updated.

The goal of this project is to transcribe the approximately 8000 letters of John Tyndall and eventually publish these letters and produce a catalogue of correspondence.

1 News Announcements
2 Sample Completed Transcriptions
3 Letter counts, progress thus far
4 Centres
5 Transcribing Groups
6 Non-Transcribing Groups
7 Other Tyndall Scholars (not formally affiliated with this project)
8 Conferences and publications
9 Administrative Documents, including Transcription Conventions
10 Flawed scans, orphaned letters, fragments, mistakes to correct, foreign language letters, tough math needing further scrutiny
11 Website links
12 Miscellanea
13 Notable events, historical tidbits, interesting letters, hints of scandal
14 Tyndall Bibliography - Primary Sources
15 Tyndall Bibliography - Secondary Sources

News Announcements

December 12, 2011: Michael Reidy interviewed by local CBS affiliate on Tyndall and mountaineering. Can 60 Minutes be next? http://tinyurl.com/d39s4cb See also http://tinyurl.com/buah4dr.

November 15, 2011: New master catalogue being drawn up and put in Google Documents for shared access. Project members, if you want access to this catalogue, please email tyndallatyork@gmail.com.

August 21, 2011: A news item from Trinity College Dublin: a possible discovery of a large batch of letters between John Tyndall and the botanist Sir Joseph Hooker at Imperial College London by Miguel de Arce, TCD Geneticist: http://www.tcd.ie/Communications/news/news.php?headerID=1984&vs_date=2011-8-1

July 19, 2011: an interesting analysis of workloads for fellow transcribers at the Wallace Project: http://wallaceletters.info/content/analysis-harvard-interns-work-and-implications-project

Feb 14, 2011, York University: The transcription conventions have been rewritten and updated, mainly for clarity. Head here: http://tyndall.apps01.yorku.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Administrative_documents.

Jan 25, 2011, York University: Looking for a new journal to publish something on Tyndall? We've compiled a list of suitable refereed journals for project members here:

http://tyndall.apps01.yorku.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Journals_for_new_publications

Some journals are familiar; others you'll never have heard of or considered publishing in. The list is preliminary; suggest other journals and we'll work those into a later PDF.

July 6, 2010, York University: The Tyndall Correspondence Project is pleased to (belatedly) announce that Melinda Baldwin [1] was selected to join the project as postdoctoral researcher, a term running for two years. She will also coordinate work on the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded Cluster in HPS/STS, as well as an upcoming York conference on evolutionary naturalism, to take place in 2011. She'll also be co-teaching one full year course, HUMA 1910, "Science and the Humanities," with James Elwick. Melinda will receive her PhD this summer from Princeton University, where she is working with Michael Gordin on a dissertation entitled "Nature and the making of a scientific community, 1869-1939."

June 27, 2010: One of the goals of the John Tyndall Correspondence Project is to publish a one-volume calendar of the correspondence of the Victorian physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) and to issue his collected correspondence in print (an expected ten volumes). The publisher, Pickering and Chatto, now has a webpage for the future publication, with shorts bios of Elwick, Lightman, and Reidy. Here is the summary from that page [2]: "Eminent Victorian physicist John Tyndall (1820–93) was one of the most influential scientists of the nineteenth century. A leading figure in the debates surrounding evolution, Tyndall was one of a group of powerful intellectuals who defended Darwin against his critics. A strong champion of both the professionalization of science and its democratization, he became a pillar of the scientific establishment having been born into the lower middle classes. On his death Tyndall was an honorary member of thirty scientific societies, had held the post of Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution for more than thirty years. In addition to his scientific roles Tyndall was also at the forefront of a number of mountaineering endeavours. Yet despite these achievements, Tyndall has, until recently, been overshadowed by his contemporaries – Huxley, Hooker, Darwin – in part because of a lack of published material on his life. This series will redress this inbalance by publishing around 8,000 newly-transcribed letters from over a dozen archives worldwide. In the days before journal publishing was fully developed, the exchange of correspondence was a highly efficient way of sharing scientific research. Tyndall's correspondents read like a 'who's who' of international nineteenth-century science and include: Charles Babbage, J D Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Lyell, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and Bertrand Russell. The letters include insights into his fierce debates with Christian intellectuals, scandalized by Tyndall's support of Darwin's theory of natural selection, as well as referring to his ground-breaking work on climatology. (He was among the first to recognize the role of gasses in producing the greenhouse effect.) The variety of his exchanges on scientific projects, mountaineering and Home Rule in Ireland provide insight into the vast range of his interests and his politics, as well as documenting important events of the time. The fully-transcribed correspondence in these volumes is presented chronologically, with an introduction in each volume. Each letter is annotated where necessary and a calendar of correspondence and a consolidated index will also be compiled."

June 6, 2010, University of Leeds: John Tyndall Correspondence Symposium, Thursday 24th June 2010, University of Leeds. This is a one-day symposium to bring together any researchers interested in the life, letters and works of nineteenth-century physicist and lecturer John Tyndall, and to discuss the international project to transcribe his correspondence. Registration for the symposium is £5, which is payable on the day. As numbers are limited, if you would like to attend please contact Mike Finn (email: ph07maf@leeds.ac.uk ) by Friday 18th June. Details of the event should soon be available at http://www.hps.leeds.ac.uk/News/index.htm, but in the meantime the programme is also viewable at http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~ph07maf/tyndall.htm and in outline here: Outline Programme

May 22, 2010, University of Exeter: The University of Exeter seeks graduate students for the Tyndall Project. Applicants should send a CV and covering letter to Dr. Richard Noakes [3], Department of History, The University of Exeter, Cornwall Campus, Treliever Road, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9EZ. The deadline for applications is 1 August 2010. The start date is September 2010. More information here [4].

May 13, 2010, Montana State University: The Tyndall Correspondence Project is pleased to announce that Joshua Howe [5] has been hired as a two-year postdoctoral researcher. In addition to running the NSF Tyndall grant, he will teach two courses for us next year: HISTR207CS "Science and Technology in World History" in the Fall, and HIST505 "American History 1860 to the Present" in the Spring. Howe will receive his PhD this summer from Stanford University, where he is working under the direction of Richard White [6] on a dissertation entitled "Making Global Warming Green: Climate Change and American Environmentalism."

April 5, 2010, Montana State University: The blog [7] of the UCSD Science Studies Program gives news of the conference, "Empires of Science in the Long Nineteenth Century" at the Huntington Library, April 9-10, 2010. Professor Michael Reidy of MSU will be giving a talk titled "From Oceans to Mountains: The Spatial Construction of Empire," about the notion of verticality in science, through the work of John Tyndall and Joseph Dalton Hooker. Professor Janet Browne, also with the Tyndall Project through Harvard University, is also presenting at this conference, on "Nature on Display: Collecting and Showing Natural History Specimens in the Age of Empire."

January 19, 2010, Montana State University: MSU Professor Michael Reidy, whose work on John Tyndall relates to his research on the connection between nineteenth-century science, mountaineering, and the notion of verticality, has a forthcoming article in Physics in Perspective on the topic. He presented this research previously at the Medical History Conference in Bozeman, Montana on April 16, 2009 [8], for the History of Science and Technology Colloquium at the University of Minnesota on November 14, 2008 [9], for a session on verticality at the History of Science Society annual meeting on November 9, 2008 [10], and for the MSU Physics Department colloquium series on April 18, 2008 [11].

December 10, 2009, Montana State University/York University: News about the project and the NSF grant was posted on the website of the History of Science Society. Click here [12] to read this news. More information about the National Science Foundation grant can be viewed here [13].

November 26, 2009, York University: York University's news service Yfile carried another piece about the project. Click here [14] to read "York prof looks at the correspondence of scientist John Tyndall."

October 16, 2009, Montana State University: The Montana State University news service carried a piece about Professor Michael Reidy's [15] role in the John Tyndall Correspondence Project, and his successful grant proposal with the National Science Foundation. Click here [16] to read "MSU historian heads international project on 19th century scientist."

July 31, 2008, York University: York University's news service Yfile carried a piece about Bernard Lightman receiving a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Click here [17] to read "Professor awarded prestigious US grant to study British scientist."