Joseph Jackson Lister (physicist)
Joseph Jackson Lister (born January 11, 1786 in London , † October 24, 1869 in Upton (Essex) ) was a British optician and physicist and father of the surgeon Joseph Lister .
Lister was the son of a London wine merchant and Quaker. He worked in his father's shop and became a partner there when he was 18. In 1818 he married Isabella Harris, the daughter of a headmistress and a teacher herself. From 1825 they lived in Upton near London. The marriage resulted in three daughters and four sons, including the surgeon Joseph Lister .
Always interested in natural history, Lister improved optical microscopes by minimizing spherical and chromatic aberration. He developed the first achromatic lenses for the microscope. He carried out this work alongside his main activity as a wine merchant and in two years improved his microscope so much that in 1826 he was able to commission it from an instrument maker. He published about it in 1830 at the Royal Society (On the improvement of achromatic compound microscopes, Phil. Transactions Royal Society) and worked with the microscope farmers James Smith and Andrew Ross (1798-1859).
He also made observations himself with the microscope, which he discussed with scientist friends like George Biddell Airy , John Herschel and Thomas Hodgkin (discoverer of Hodgkin's disease), among other things, about the shape of red blood cells (he published about this with Hodgkin in the Philosophical in 1827 Magazines). In 1832 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society .
Another treatise from 1843 on the resolving power of the microscope and telescope was only published by his son after his death (Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society 1913).
literature
- GLE Turner in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lister, Joseph Jackson |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | British physicist and optician |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 11, 1786 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 24, 1869 |
| Place of death | Upton (Essex) |