SNIPPET: John TYNDALL, born in Leighlinbridge, Co. Carlow on 2 August 1820, was one of the great scientific minds of all time. It is possible that the Irish and very Victorian scientist sis forgotten by modern science for the very reason he was a dreamer and poet. Modern scientists do not take kindly to research presented in poetic language. His own native Ireland ignored him because he was considered an English scientist, but had he not been an Irishman there is little doubt he would have been knighted. Some of his practical inventions were a safe miners' lamp, powerful lighthouse beacon, and the first practical gas mask responsible for saving the lives of many thousands of miners, sailors and common labourers. If he had accomplished nothing more than invent such useful life-savers his name should be held in great esteem, but his science went much deeper and was far more profound that the science historians are willing to admit, per author Philip S. CALLAHAN in the J! uly-August 1984 issue of "Ireland of the Welcomes" magazine published in Dublin. John TYNDALL was directly descended from a group of Gloucestershire farmers who crossed the Irish Sea in the 17th century. His parents, although apparently well educated, were poor. His mother was disinherited for marrying against her father's wishes. His father was a sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary, and an Orangeman by inclination, although the senior TYNDALL certainly was not a religious bigot. He sent his son John to school under the tutelage of a Catholic who can best be described as a hedge schoolmaster. It was a pay school, a luxury that John TYNDALL senior could ill afford. Master CONWILL was known over the entire countryside for his scholarship and teaching ability. He imparted to his students a basic foundation in English and mathematics as well as surveying, the latter being indispensable for young John whose interests were to lead him into the physical sciences. TYNDALL studied under CONWILL until his 17th birthday, a far older age than most count! ry lads. In retrospect, it seems likely that John was an assistant schoolmaster during the latter two years at Ballinbranagh schoolhouse, a one-room school still standing in 1984 about five miles from Leighlinbridge near the crossroads of Ballinbranagh. He joined the Ordnance Survey as a Civil Servant on 1 April 1839. For a short time he surveyed in Carlow county close to his home, but in 1840 he was transferred to Youghal in Co. Cork. In 1842 he was transferred by the Ordnance Survey to Preston, England. He never returned to Ireland except for short visits home. In Preston he joined the Chartist labour movement led by immigrants from Ireland. His articles to the 'Liverpool Mercury' were outspoken and exposed the injustices to the lower working classes, Irish and English alike. Since the Civil Service could ill afford to be politicised by his strong position concerning labour he was fired and he returned to Carlow to rethink his future. The TYNDALLs were Quakers and the brilliant young scholar joined the staff at Queenwood College, a progressive Quaker school in Hampshire, England. Here TYNDALL and his closest friend the chemist Edward FRANKLAND built the first practical science labortory in England. In 1848 he left Queenwood to work on a Ph.D. at Marbury University in Germany, and completed a mathematical dissertation in the remarkable time of two years. While there he came under the influence of German chemist Robert BUNSEN, who invented the famous Bunsen burner, even today a basic instrument of every chemistry laboratory. John's experience with Professor BUNSEN led him into his later work with heat and infra-red radiation. By June 1851 TYNDALL had returned to England and made many influential scientific friends. He was nonetheless defeated in attempts to gain a lectureship to Cork and Galway Universities. Had he succeeded he might have spent the remainder of his life in his native land. As fa! te would have it he was chosen to present a lecture at the Royal Institute (The Royal Society). His outstand lecture impressed Michael FARADY, the great electrical scientist and secretary of the Royal Institution. TYNDALL was soon elected Professor of Natural Philosophy at the great Institute. They were to remain friends and co-workers and when the older FARADAY died TYNDALL succeeded his friend as Secretary of the Royal Institute. The rest of his life was spent managing and conducting experiments within those walls. John TYNDALL was the first to demonstrate that a beam of visible light is not discernible in air if the small particles of dust, pollen, etc., are cleansed from the path of the light beam. He explained that light is scattered from the minute particles in all directions and that the frequency and wavelength (colour) of light depends on the angle at which the light strikes the different shaped particles - in somewhat the same that rainbow colours are diffracted from the surface of a prism. He further explained that the blue sky is a similar phenomenon in which the colour blue, from the sunlight, is scattered from small particles in the atmosphere between the atmosphere and the sky. As the angle changes, the sun rises or sets, the colour shifts to longer wavelengths - the red hue of sunrise and sunset. Later Lord RAYLEIGH (James STRUIT) extended TYNDALL's scatter theories, as applied to dust particles, to a mathematical explanation of how molecular particles, the gases in o! ur atmosphere, scatter visible and infra-red radiations. TYNDALL invented the first practical infra-red spectrophotometer. Not only is TYNDALL's name invisible in the science history books, but his most profound discoveries involved invisible radiations. He was also an original researcher in the physics of sound, and biological sciences. Sensilla on the antennae of moths and other insects resonate to invisible infra-red emissions of scent molecules in the air. It was TYNDALL who first detected and measured such emissions scientifically. It was TYNDALL who first discovered the process of killing bacteria in milk. PASTEUR merely passed along his discovery to mankind. TYNDALL described the action of the fungus penicillum on bacteria over a century before Sir Alexander FLEMING re-discovered the antibiotic. John was also a master mountaineer, and was the first person to climb several peaks in the Alps. He reached to within a few hundred feet of the top of the famed Matterhorn the year before WHYMPER succeeded in the difficult climb. He was thus one of the pioneers in modern mountain climbin! g techniques.