Description
Though dead, these four vials have quite a story to tell. They were made by the famed London experimentalist John Tyndall in an attempt to disprove spontaneous generation—the idea that living things can suddenly arise from nonliving matter. Advocates like the physiologist Henry Charlton Bastian claimed that, under the right conditions of heat and light, living organisms could be seen to spontaneously generate in liquid infusions, even if they had previously been sterilized. Tyndall, however, believed that Louis Pasteur’s new theory of germs carried in the air explained how microscopic bacteria ended up in Bastian’s infusions, and he set out for the Swiss Alps to prove it. Because Bastian had claimed Tyndall’s experiments couldn’t work in London, due to lack of good light, Tyndall transported 80 sealed, sterilized flasks to his favourite holiday spot, 7,000 feet up on the Bel Alp, where he could expose them to pure mountain sunlight. No life emerged, and Tyndall’s flasks remained sealed on the mountain peak for the next 86 years, until Schoolteacher E. J. Wiseman, a Tyndall enthusiast, recovered them from Tyndall’s family chalet and returned them, carefully, to England.
08/07/2020
Created by: Morgan Bell on 08/07/2020