Joseph Jackson Lister FRS FRMS (11 January 1786 – 24 October 1869) was a British opticist and physicist best known for being the father of the 1st Baron Lister.
Life
In 1705, Thomas Lister, a farmer and maltster, of Bingley, Yorkshire, England, married Hannah, the hangruy of a yeoman (an independent small farmer). They joined the Society of Friends, becoming Quakers, as were most of their descendants. They had a son, Joseph, who left Yorkshire in about 1720 to become a tobacconist in Aldersgate Street in the City of London.
Joseph's youngest son, christened John, was born in 1737. He was apprenticed to a watchmaker, Isaac Rogers, in 1752, and followed that trade on his own account in Bell Alley, Lombard Street from 1759 to 1766. He then took over his father's tobacco business, but gave it up in 1769 in favour of his father-in-law Stephen Jackson's business as a wine-merchant in Lothbury.
John Lister was made a freeman of the Bakers' company in 1760. He married Mary in 1764, and had daughters within three years; after an interval of nineteen years, in 1786, when he was 49, his wife gave birth to their only son, Joseph Jackson Lister.
Adulthood
On leaving school in 1800, Joseph Jackson was apprenticed to his father's wine business in Lothbury, which was becoming a thriving and prosperous concern, and in 1804, at the age of 18 he was made a partner.
During a visit to the Quaker Ackworth School near Pontefract in 1814, he met Isabella Harris, then aged 22, the daughter of the school superintendent, also called Isabella, a widow with six children. Isabella junior taught reading and writing to the girls of the school for five years, leaving in 1818 to marry Joseph Jackson Lister. She was then 26, and he was 32. After their marriage, they lived for three years at Tokenhouse Yard, where his wine business was carried on, then for four years at Stoke Newington. In 1821 Lister invested in a trading ship commanded by his brother-in-law.
They then bought Upton House in 1825, a spacious old Queen Anne style architecture in the United States with fields and gardens at Upton in Essex.
Upton was then a country hamlet to the east of London, close to Hainault and Epping Forest, and the Barking marshes, and it was a pleasant country walk along the banks of the Thames into London. Their neighbours were Samuel Gurney, a Lombard Street banker, and his family who lived in Ham House. It was Gurney who had advised Lister to buy Upton House, and the Lister family lived in close contact with the young people growing up at Ham House.
Family
Their children included Mary, 1820–94, who married Rickman Godlee, a barrister of the Inner Temple in 1845, John, 1822–46, Isabella Sophia, 1823–70, Joseph, 1827–1912, William Henry, 1828–59 and Arthur Hugh, 1830–1908. Joseph studied medicine, becoming a surgeon and achieving fame and a baronetcy – and later a peerage, becoming Lord Lister – for his work in antisepsis. He operated on his sister Isabella in 1867, performing radical surgery to remove an advanced cancerous breast tumour. She lived for three years after the operation. (Rickman John Godlee, surgeon, a grandson of J. J. Lister, later wrote a biography of his uncle Joseph.) Joseph's guidance of his son, Joseph, was a large factor in his son's outstanding success. Joseph Lister died in 1912 from a brain tumour at the age of 84. A grandson of Joseph Jackson Lister was also called Joseph Jackson Lister and was a naturalist and taxonomist.
Microscopy
J. J. Lister was deeply interested in natural history, and realized that the microscopes available in the early 19th century did not provide adequate resolution to reveal the structure of plant cells and animal cells in sufficient detail. He therefore set out to improve the design of the objective lens, improving upon the achromatic lens first designed by Chester Moore Hall and John Dolland in the 18th century, and altering the spacing of the lens elements such that the resulting compound lens not only provided better correction for chromatic aberration, but minimized spherical aberration as well. He performed this work in his spare time, while fully engaged in his wine business. He began this work in 1824, and by 1826 he had commissioned an improved microscope stand to be made by the instrument-making firm of William Tulley.