Skulls in the Stars

I’ve previously written about the amazing story of Julius Robert Mayer, the physician — not physicist — who first conceived of the concept of conservation of energy, and how he was then discredited by the British scientific community in favor of James Joule, who independently discovered and published the concept a year after Mayer did.

Recently, I picked up an old 1893 collection of Mayer’s surviving correspondence, and I am currently working my way through translating it (with the help of Google translate, which has gotten much better). But in the meantime, I found absolutely charming letters between Mayer and John Tyndall that I wanted to share here.

To review the history, though it can be found in full at the link above and I encourage folks to go read this amazing story: Mayer was utterly broken by the most prominent physicists in Britain, who in a fit of nationalism decided that Joule should get sole claim for the discovery of conservation of energy, evidence be damned. Mayer ended up taking a fall from a window that may have been a suicide attempt, and ended up in a cruel psychiatric institution for some time. But in 1862, London was hosting the International Exhibition (like a World’s Fair) and the Royal Institution asked John Tyndall, Irish physicist, to prepare a lecture on the exceedingly British discovery of “energy.” Tyndall agreed, but performed extensive research on the history of the subject to make sure he was getting it right. Along the way, he discovered the papers of Mayer, and he and his colleague Rudolf Clausius were astounded at Mayer’s insights and discoveries.