Lister, Joseph Jackson

(1786–1869)
G. L'E. Turner

https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16762
Published in print: 23 September 2004
Published online: 23 September 2004

Joseph Jackson Lister (1786–1869)

by Maull & Co.

Heritage Images Partnership

Lister, Joseph Jackson (1786–1869), wine merchant and microscopist, was born on 11
January 1786 in Lothbury, City of London, the only son of John Lister, a wine merchant,
and his wife, Mary Jackson (d. 1808). His parents were members of the Society of
Friends; his father's family, originally from Yorkshire, had settled in London, and both
parents were part of the close-knit Quaker business community of the City. Mary
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 Lister's father, Stephen Jackson, was a wine merchant and on their marriage John Lister
left his trade as a watchmaker and took over his father-in-law's business in Lothbury.
The Listers had two daughters before their son, Joseph Jackson, was born after a gap of
seventeen years. His birth was greeted with rejoicing, and he was given a name
commemorating his two grandfathers. He was a gifted child, and was educated from
1792 to 1796 at a Friends' school in Hitchin, and then for a year at Rochester School. At
the age of twelve in 1798, he was sent as a boarder to one of the best private schools
open to members of the Society of Friends, run by Thomas Thompson at Little Compton
in Dorset. The school encouraged general reading and the pupils were allowed some
discretion in the employment of their time. That was good for Lister, who had great
mental curiosity and was well able to follow his own paths to knowledge. He was said to
be the only boy at the school who owned a telescope.

At the age of fourteen Lister left school to work in the family wine business, living above
the premises in Lothbury with his parents until the death of his mother in 1808. His
father then moved to Stoke Newington, where he lived with his unmarried daughter,
taking an annuity out of the business. Joseph Jackson Lister was now a wine merchant,
and about 1812 he transferred to a new address nearby at 5 Tokenhouse Yard, where, on
14 July 1818, he brought Isabella Harris (c.1795–1864), a schoolteacher, as his bride.
Four years later they moved to Stoke Newington, and then in 1826 Lister bought Upton
House, West Ham, where he lived for the rest of his life. The property was large enough
to provide space for a growing family of three daughters and four sons, of whom Joseph
Lister became Baron Lister of Lyme Regis, the famous surgeon, and Arthur Lister
became a botanist. These moves were made possible by the addition to the sta! of
Lister's nephew, Richard Low Beck, who became a resident partner.

Alongside the family man with a successful business and an energetic younger
associate, was the meticulous inventor, who, in his spare time, and for no
remuneration, carried out the research in the design of lenses that transformed the
microscope into the most ubiquitous and practically useful of all scientific instruments.
The development and use of the microscope, from its invention in 1608 until the early
years of the nineteenth century, were hampered by the quality of glass available for the
lenses, and by aberrations of the image. Chromatic aberration was the name given to the
coloured edge to the image caused by unequal refraction of light rays. This was
corrected for the telescope by John Dollond in 1758, and for the microscope by the
Amsterdam instrument maker, Harmanus van Deijl, who published in 1807. The other
serious source of aberration resulted from the spherical curvature of the lenses, which
produced a blurred image, and this problem was still unsolved in the early 1800s. Lister
described how, in his thirty-eighth year, he became involved in the design of
microscope lenses. about 1824 he saw at William Tulley's, the instrument maker, an
achromatic object glass of two convex lenses of plate glass sandwiching a concave lens
of flint glass. By a tracing made from a camera lucida with his own microscope he
showed Tulley that his objective was clumsy. Lister's suggestions resulted in '“Tulley's
9/10” which became the microscopic object-glass of the time' (J. Lister, 141).
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 Further researches resulted in Lister's important discovery announced in the paper 'On
the improvement of compound microscopes' read before the Royal Society on 21 January
1830. There he stated that an achromatic combination of a negative flint glass lens with
a positive crown glass lens has two aplanatic focal points. The spherical aberration is
overcorrected for all points between these foci, and is undercorrected for all points
outside. So if a doublet objective is made that is composed of two sets of achromatic lens
combinations, spherical aberration can be avoided if the object to be viewed 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 pair. Lister's design of the first aberration corrected object
glass for the microscope thus brought to an end the trial and error e!orts of instrument
makers and scientists alike by establishing a scientific principle for the making of
microscope objectives. These could now be free of both achromatic and spherical
aberration, and also of the e!ect known as coma, which caused a spot of light to appear
elongated and fuzzy, like a comet. The design of low-power objectives for the optical
microscope even at the end of the twentieth century was based on Lister's discovery. Its
importance was recognized by the election of Lister to fellowship of the Royal Society in
February 1832.

Having made a highly significant contribution to microscope design Lister was eager to
continue his research but found that Tulley could not spare the time to make lenses to
his specification. Therefore Lister began, in late 1830, to do his own grinding and
polishing. As he explained:

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.

J. Lister, 140

The optical instrument makers did not immediately adopt Lister's designs, since there
is always inertia in economic production. He had hoped that his improvements would be
followed up by the opticians, but the object glasses produced by the makers continued to
be of the usual simple design of two or three plano-convex compound lenses until the
beginning of 1837. It was then that Andrew Ross, a leading maker, made a one-eighth
inch objective to Lister's design, and in 1840 James Smith constructed quarter inch
objectives that became popular with microscopists. Over the next four decades, with
Lister's designs commercially available, the microscope became a serious scientific
instrument in many fields, notably in medicine and public health, and it reached its
limit of resolution in the 1880s.

James Smith's association with Lister was a long and important one. In 1826 he made a
new form of microscope stand to Lister's design, intended to provide the greater
stability demanded by the increased magnification that could be achieved. This
innovation was also gradually adopted by microscopists. Richard Beck, the son of
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 Lister's nephew and partner, Richard Low Beck, was apprenticed to Smith and went into
partnership with him in 1847. Richard Beck was joined in the firm by his brother Joseph
in 1851 and the latter was made a partner in 1857. The firm of R. and J. Beck was
established on Smith's retirement in 1865. The optical factory of the firm was opened at
Holloway in 1853, appropriately named the Lister Works, and it clearly followed the
Quaker tradition. The microscopist Thomas Hudson recorded in his diary a visit to the
works in May 1854, finding it 'a model optical manufactory having a Steam Engine
working Lathes &c this is a most complete establishment having a Library and Reading
and Refreshment Room' (Turner, Frederick Thomas Hudson's microscopical diary,
198).

Lister was not only a designer, but also throughout his life a skilled microscopist. He
published in 1827 a paper with Thomas Hodgkin that described for the first time the
true form and most accurate measure of the diameter of red blood cells. His
observations of zoophytes and ascidians were reported to the Royal Society in 1834. He
did considerable research into the resolving power of the human eye and of the
microscope, anticipating some of the findings of Abbe and Helmholtz, but did not
publish the paper, which existed ready for press, during his lifetime. Lister's
manuscripts include designs and draft papers, and these, together with a case of tools,
lenses, and microscope objectives made by Joseph Jackson Lister were presented to the
Royal Microscopical Society on 15 May 1912 by the executors of Lord Lister.

Lister's greatest work was his paper on the theory of the microscopic image drafted
during 1842–3, although it was not published in his lifetime; it represented over ten
years' work. On receiving Lord Lister's bequest, the council of the Royal Microscopical
Society asked Alexander Eugen Conrady, a lens designer who became, in 1917, the first
professor of optical design at Imperial College, London, to examine the Lister archive.
He transcribed (not always accurately) for publication in the Journal of the Royal
Microscopical Society, 33 (1913), 27–55, Lister's memorandum to Andrew Ross dated
1837, some correspondence, and the draft paper 'On the limit to defining-power, in vision
with the unassisted eye, the telescope, and the microscope', dated 1842–3; it occupies pp.
34–55. Conrady commented that the paper is the first proof that J. J. Lister knew in 1832
that the resolving-power of microscope objectives grows not with the angle itself, as
was thought for many years after that date, but with the chord of an angle, later called
numerical aperture (Conrady, 52). The paper is evidence that Lister, having provided the
original impetus to developing the scientific microscope, derived the law of image
formation three decades before Ernest Abbe of Jena University. The development of the
instrument would have been even more rapid had he published this paper. It also seems
curious that his son, Lord Lister, when writing his father's obituary in 1869, did not see
fit to publish it, for he was in possession of the archive.

Lister lived during the golden age of the light microscope, and was admired by many of
its leading users. He was one of the group of microscopists who met in September 1839
and agreed to form a society to promote microscopical investigation, the Microscopical
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 Society of London, later to receive a royal charter. John Quekett, the first secretary of
the society, dedicated to Lister his best-selling Practical Treatise on the Use of the
Microscope (1848), with the words: 'To Joseph Jackson Lister Esq. FRS, to whose labours
in perfecting the achromatic compound microscope science in England is so deeply
indebted'. Lister died at his home, Upton House, on 24 October 1869, of old age and
pneumonia.

Sources

J. J. Lister, ‘On some properties in achromatic object-glasses applicable to the improvement of

the microscope’, PTRS, 120 (1830), 187–200

MHS Oxf., Lister papers, Royal Microscopical Society archive

B. Bracegirdle, ‘Famous microscopists: Joseph Jackson Lister, 1786–1869’, Proceedings of the

Royal Microscopical Society, 22 (1987), 273–97

A. E. Conrady, ‘The unpublished papers of J. J. Lister’, Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society
(1913), 27–55

W. Beck, Family fragments respecting the ancestry, acquaintance and marriage of Richard Low
Beck and Rachel Lucas (1897) [privately printed]

J. Lister, ‘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’, Monthly Microscopical Journal, 3
(1870), 134–43

J. C. Deiman, ‘Microscope optics and J. J. Lister's influence on the development of the achromatic
objective, 1750–1850’, PhD diss., ICL, 1992

G. L'E. Turner, ‘Frederick Thomas Hudson's microscopical diary, 1849–1864’, The Quekett Journal
of Microscopy, 37/3 (spring 1994), 191–206

G. L'E. Turner, ‘The microscope as a technical frontier in science’, Proceedings of the Royal
Microscopical Society, 2 (1967), 175–99

G. L'E. Turner, The great age of the microscope: the collection of the Royal Microscopical Society
through 150 years (1989), 309–10, no. 382 [experimental lenses by J. J. Lister]

R. B. Fisher, Joseph Lister, 1827–1912 (1977)

Lister centenary exhibition at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, handbook, 1927 (1927)

J. J. Lister, account books, 1807–69, American Philosophical Society Library, Philadelphia [7 vols.]

T. Hodgkin and J. J. Lister, ‘Notice of some microscopic observations of the blood and animal
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 tissues’, Philosophical Magazine, new ser., 2 (1827), 130–38

J. J. Lister, ‘Some observations on the structure and functions of tubular and cellular polypi, and
of ascidiae’, PTRS, 124 (1834), 365–88

d. cert.

Archives

MHS, technical material and MSS

Sci. Mus., four microscopes [incl. the first made in 1826 to his design by James Smith]

Wellcome L., account books and MSS

Wellcome L., microscope collection

Likenesses

Maull & Polyblank, photograph, 1860, repro. in Beck, Family fragments

J. J. Lister, self-portrait, repro. in Fisher, Joseph Lister

Maull & Co., photograph, Sci. Mus. [see illus.]

Wealth at Death

under £80,000: probate, 29 Nov 1869, CGPLA Eng. & Wales

View the article for this person in the Dictionary of National Biography archive edition.

See also
Lister, Arthur (1830–1908), botanist

Lister, Joseph, Baron Lister (1827–1912), surgeon and founder of a system of antiseptic surgery

External resources
National Archives <http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/c/F57018>
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