Compiled via the efforts and contributions of Many....
Transcribed and presented to the web....
Introduction: I found the following via the
outstanding internet resource, Wikipedia. There was enough material on the following family
to encourage me to simply establish a link to the data. That would have been easier, but
I am familar enough with the resource and others on line, as well, to know that what is available to
access today, may not be so on the morrow. So for the entertainment of my living relatives
and my descendants, I am providing the articles herewithin. I almost titled these pages, "Royalty,
Mariners, Preachers and Aethists" or "Science, the X-factor" or "Education teaches that it is okay to change
your mind" but as you may have noticed, I simply refer to it as John Scott Haldane... aka... the man
who invented gas masks and also happened to be the grandson of the Evangelist,
...James Alexander Haldane and father
of an Aethist, John Burdon Sanderson Haldane. John Scott Haldane CH (May 3, 1860 – March 14/March 15, 1936) was
a Scottish physiologist, born in Edinburgh, Scotland. John was the son of Robert Haldane
and the grandson of the Scottish evangelist James Alexander Haldane. His mother was Mary
Elizabeth Burdon-Sanderson, the daughter of Richard Burdon-Sanderson and the granddaughter of Sir
Thomas Burdon. His maternal uncle was the physiologist John Scott Burdon-Sanderson. He
was the brother of Elizabeth Haldane, William Stowell Haldane and Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount
Haldane. Haldane attended Edinburgh Academy, Edinburgh
University and the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena. He graduated in medicine at Edinburgh University in 1884.
John Scott Haldane married Louisa Kathleen Trotter and had two children; the scientist J.B.S. Haldane and the author Naomi Mitchison.
He was Gifford Lecturer in the University of Glasgow, Fellow of New College, Oxford, and Honorary Professor of the University of
Birmingham. John S. Haldane received numerous honorary degrees. He was also
President of the English Institution of Mining Engineers, a Companion of Honor of the British Court, a
Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the Royal College of Physicians and of the Royal Society of
Medicine.
John S. Haldane died in Oxford at midnight on the night of March 14/March 15, 1936. He had
just returned from a trip he had undertaken to investigate cases of heat stroke in the oil
refineries in Persia.
Sir Henry Newbolt wrote a poem called "For J. S. Haldane", published in his anthology "A Perpetual
Memory and other Poems" in 1939.
Accomplishments: Haldane was an international authority on ether and respiration and the inventor of the gas-mask
during World War I. (The Sciences and Philosophy: Gifford Lectures, University of Glasgow, 1927–28 by
J.S. Haldane, Doubleday, Doran and Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1929) John Scott Haldane helped find out how to determine the regulation of breathing and discovered the
Haldane effect in haemaglobin. Haldane was an international authority on ether and
respiration and the inventor of the gas-mask during World War I. (The Sciences and
Philosophy: Gifford Lectures, University of Glasgow, 1927–28 by J.S. Haldane, Doubleday, Doran and
Co., Inc., Garden City, NY, 1929) He was the founder of The Journal of
Hygiene. In 1907 Haldane made a decompression apparatus to help make deep-sea divers
safer[1] and produced the first decompression tables after extensive experiments with
animals. He was also an authority on the effects of pulmonary
diseases, such as silicosis caused by inhaling silica dust. Coal and Metal Mines He investigated the principle of action of many
different gases. He investigated many mining disasters, especially the toxic gases which
killed most miners after firedamp and coal dust explosions. The toxic mixtures of gases found
in mines included afterdamp, blackdamp and whitedamp. He identified carbon monoxide as the
lethal constituent of afterdamp, the gas created by combustion, after examining many bodies
of miners killed in pit explosions. Their skin was coloured cherry-pink from carboxyhaemoglobin,
the stable compound formed in the blood by reaction with the gas. It effectively displaces
oxygen, and so the victim dies of asphyxia. As a result of his research, he was able to design
respirators for rescue workers. He tested the effect of carbon monoxide on his own body in a
closed chamber, describing the results of his slow poisoning. In the late 1890s, he introduced
the use of small mammals for miners to detect dangerous levels of carbon monoxide underground,
either white mice or canaries. With a faster metabolism, they showed the effects of poisoning
before gas levels became critical for the workers, and so gave an early warning of the
problem. The canary in British pits was replaced in 1986 by the electronic gas detector. Haldane pioneered study of the reaction of the
body to low air pressures, such as that experienced at high altitudes. He led an expedition
to Pike's Peak in 1913, which examined the effect of low atmospheric pressure on respiration. In addition to his work on mine atmospheres,
he investigated the air in enclosed spaces such as wells and sewers. One surprising result
of his analysis of the air in the sewers beneath the House of Commons was to show that the level of
bacterial contamination was relatively low. During this research, he investigated
fatalities of workmen in a sewer, and showed that hydrogen sulfide gas was the culprit. Bibliography: JS Haldane and JG Priestley, Respiration,
2nd Ed, Oxford University Press (1935). Hellemans, Alexander; Bryan
Bunch (1988). The Timetables of Science. New York, New York: Simon and
Schuster, 411. ISBN 0671621300. Martin Goodman, Suffer and
Survive: The Extreme Life of JS Haldane, Simon and Schuster (2007) External link: Biography of John
Scott Haldane on Gifford Lectures site Learn about [ Margaret Haldane, ] Learn about [ John's Grandfather, James Alexander Haldane. ] Learn about [ John's Son, JBS Haldane. ]
By Colleen Cahoon, of Texas
[John Scott Haldane's Family Tree]
my Great, Great, Great-Grandmother.