Lister, Joseph Jackson

(b.London, England, 11 January 1786;d. West Ham, Essex, England, 24 October 1869)

optics.

Lord Lister (1827–1912) has taken most of the glory of the family name; but the contribution to the perfection of the objective lens systems of the microscope by his father, Joseph Jackson Lister, marks a spectacular turning point in the development of that important and ubiquitous instrument. At the time of the elder Lister’s death, at the age of eightythree, he was described as “the pillar and source of all the microscopy of the age.”

Lister was the third child and only son of John Lister and the former Mary Jackson, Quakers who were wine merchants in the City of London. At the age of fourteen he joined his father in the firm, later becoming a partner. In the summer of 1818 he married Isabella Harris; they lived above the business at 5 Tokenhouse Yard until 1822, moving then to Stoke Newington and shortly after to Upton House, West Ham. It was here that Lister occupied himself with his microscopy and optical experiments. When the Listers vacated Tokenhouse Yard, their place as resident partner was taken by Richard Low Beck, the son of Lister’s sister Elizabeth. Beck had just married Rachel Lucas; and two of their many children, Richard and Joseph, formed the optical instrumentmaking firm still known as R. &J. Beck Ltd.

Although Lister’s approach to his investigations was that of an amateur, the standard of his work was to the highest degree professional. His interest in optics originated in his boyhood; of his schoolmates only he owned a telescope. Nevertheless, he did not become an innovator until his thirty-eighth year. Among the papers he left to his son is one that gives a brief survey of his involvement with the microscope from 1824 to 1843:

I had been from early life fond of the compound microscope, but had not thought of improving its object-glass till about the year 1824, when I saw at W. Tulley’s an achromatic combination made by him at Dr. Goring’s suggestion, of two convex lenses of plate glass, with a concave of flint glass between them, on the plan of the telescopic objective. They were thick and clumsy. I showed him this by a tracing with a camera lucida, which I had attached to my microscope, and the suggestions resulted in “Tulley’s 9/10”, which became the microscopic object-glass of the time. But the subject continued to engage my thoughts, and resulted in the paper “On the Improvement of Compound Microscopes” read before the Royal Society, Jan. 21st, 1830, announcing the discovery of the existence of two aplanatic foci in a double achromatic object-glass [Joseph Lister, “Obituary…,” p. 141].

In this paper Lister reported that an achromatic combination of a negative flint-glass lens with a positive crown-glass lens has two aplanatic focal points. For all points between these foci the spherical aberration is overcorrected; for points outside, it is undercorrected. If, then, a doublet objective is formed that is composed of two sets of achromatic lens combinations, spherical aberration is avoided if the object is at the shorter aplanatic focus of the first lens pair, which then passes the rays on to the longer aplanatic focus of the second element. This design removed, for the first time, the fuzziness of the image caused by both chromatic and spherical aberrations and, in addition, nullified coma. The new principle elevated the making of microscope objectives from the traditional trial-and-error procedure of Tulley, Chevalier, and Amici to a scientific one, and it continues as the basis for the design of low-power objectives. As a result of this paper Lister was elected a fellow of the Royal Society on 2 February 1832.

Having established a principle, Lister naturally wished to continue experimenting; but he found that Tulley was too busy to make lenses for him. In November 1830, therefore, Lister began the grinding and polishing of lenses in his own home. The result was, he said in a letter to Sir John Herschel, beyond his expectations: “… without having ever before cut brass or ground more than a single surface of a piece of glass, I managed to make the tools and to manufacture a combination of three double object-glasses, without spoiling a lens or altering a curve, which fulfilled all the conditions I proposed for a pencil of 36 degrees” (ibid., p. 140). Some of Lister’s optical lathe chucks, polishing sticks, and experimental lenses are extant.

The optical instrument-makers in London did not immediately adopt Lister’s ideas in designing their objectives; but in 1837 he gave details for the construction of an objective of 1/8-inch focal length to Andrew Ross, one of the foremost optical instrument-makers of the time. In 1840 Lister instructed James Smith in the techniques for constructing 1/4-inch objectives, which were for a long time known as “Smith’s quarters” among microscopists. Such new objectives, commercially available in quantity for the first time, turned the microscope into a serious scientific instrument; and it continued to develop very rapidly until the 1880’s, when the limit of resolution of the light microscope was reached. Richard Beck, the grand-nephew of Lister, was apprenticed to James Smith and joined him in partnership in 1847. When Smith retired, Joseph Beck joined his brother; and the firm traded as R. &J. Beck, with their factory in Holloway appropriately known as the Lister Works.

When first working with Tulley’s improved objective, Lister realized that the mounting of the compound body tube of his microscope was not sufficiently stable for the increased magnification that could now be used. He therefore designed a completely new form of stand, which was fabricated by James Smith in 1826. Throughout his life Lister maintained his interest in microscopical observations. He published a paper in 1827 with Thomas Hodgkin on red blood cells, giving their true form and the most accurate measurement of their diameter that had yet been achieved. His patient work on zoophytes and ascidians was read to the Royal Society in 1834. His research into the resolving power of the human eye and of the microscope, which anticipated some of the findings of Abbe and Helmholtz, was not published during his life, even though it was prepared for press. The manuscript was found among his son’s papers and was published by the Royal Microscopical Society in 1913.

Lister died at Upton House in 1869, having received few honors. That he was responsible for changing the microscope from a toy to a vital scientific instrument can be fully appreciated only in historical perspective.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works, Lister’s writings include “Notice of Some Microscopic Observations of the Blood and Animal Tissues,” in Philosophical Magazine, n.s, 2 (1827), 130–138, written with T. Hodgkin; “On the Improvement of Achromatic Compound Microscopes,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 120 (1830), 187–200; “Some Observations on the Structure and Functions of Tubular and Cellular Polypi, and of Ascidiae,” ibid., 124 (1834), 365–388; and “On the Limit to Defining-power, in Vision With the Unassisted Eye, the Telescope, and the Microscope” (dated 1842–1843), in Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society, 33 (1913), 34–35. Uncataloged MS material is in the possession of the Royal Microscopical Society, as are some tools and experimental lenses. Four of Lister’s microscopes, including the first made to his design by James Smith, are in the possession of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, London.

II. Secondary Literature. See William Beck, Family Fragments Respecting the Ancestry, Acquaintance and Marriage of Richard Low Beck and Rachel Lucas (Gloucester, 1897); A. E. Conrady, “The Unpublished Papers of J. J Lister,” in Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society,33 (1913), 27–33; “Obituary Notice of the Late Joseph Jackson Lister, F.R.S., Z.S., With Special Reference to His Labours in the Improvement of the Achromatic Microscope …,” in Monthly Microscopical Journal, 3 (1870), 134–143; Lister Centenary Exhibition at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. Handbook, 1927, 133 f., 138; G. L’E. Turner, “The Microscope as a Technical Frontier in Science,” in Historical Aspects of Microscopy, S. Bradbury and G. L’E. Turner, eds. (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 175–199; and “The Rise and Fall of the Jewel Microscope 1824–1837,” inMicroscopy, 31 (1968), 85–94,

G. L’E. Turner