ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to apply a diffractive reading to the specific ways in which John Ruskin and John Tyndall, as well-known antagonists, visually illustrated the sky in their public lectures. Tyndall and Ruskin, in their respective work, brought together previously discrete fields of knowledge into wide-ranging and associative inquiries. Ruskin’s ‘The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth-Century’ was first presented as two lectures delivered at the London Institution on February 4 and 11, 1884. The preface identifies the storm cloud as damp air mixed with smoke. Ruskin made Tyndall the frequent focus of his attacks on science, peppering his writing with snide comments as to Tyndall’s poetic efforts, criticizing Tyndall’s inaccurate language when “endeavouring to write poetically of the sun” and chiding him for his lack of erudition in his use of certain metaphors. Tyndall was an active participant in many related experiments, and party to the many discussions upon others’ efforts that took place at the Royal Institution.
