Tempest Anderson Pioneer of Volcano Photography

THE YORKSHIRE MUSEUM - Pat Hadley, Sarah King and Stuart Ogilvy present a fascinating selection of photographs from the collection of Tempest Anderson, the pioneering Victorian volcanologist.

What could possess a respectable Victorian surgeon from York to spend much of his life travelling to remote and challenging parts of the world to study volcanoes and climb mountains?

For Tempest Anderson, pioneering new techniques of ophthalmic surgery and inventing photographic equipment was not enough. He decided that his ‘limited leisure’ time could not be filled with reading, writing or socialising, he sought to occupy himself with something more exciting: volcanology. For him, it was a branch of science that did not have too much literature and had the ‘advantage of offering exercise in the open air’: he saw the sides of volcanoes not as dangerous but ‘picturesque’

Anderson would return to York and lecture at the Yorkshire Philosophical Society using a ‘magic lantern’ to display his glass slides and reveal far-flung landscapes to the scientific community. At his death, he donated half his estate and most of his archive to the YPS, and it is through this inheritance at the Yorkshire Museum that some of the 5,000 glass slides have come to be digitized for York Museums Trust’s online collection and Wikimedia Commons.

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