After that came the work on the absorption of heat by gases, and then the action of light in causing chemical changes. Soon he was at work on understanding glacier structure and motion. Within a few years he was a fellow the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious scientific body, and professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, where he remained for the rest of his scientific career. That brought him to the notice of influential people such as physicist Michael Faraday. He made his initial reputation in the obscure topic of diamagnetism, the weak repulsion of substances by a magnet. Tyndall made many other discoveries in disparate fields of physics and biology. To his discredit, he did not believe that women possessed the same creative abilities in science as men. He would no doubt have been surprised to find that an amateur woman had beaten him to a general demonstration of the absorption of heat by carbon dioxide. Research suggests Tyndall was unaware of her work. She suggested that an increase in carbon dioxide would result in a warmer planet. That prize goes to the American Eunice Foote, who showed in 1856 using sunlight that carbon dioxide could absorb heat. Tyndall was not, however, the first to make the climate link. His work therefore set a foundation for our understanding of climate change and meteorology. He realised that any change in the amount of water vapour or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could change the climate. He wrote: “Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.” What Tyndall did was to discover and explain this mechanism. But no-one knew the explanation for what we now call the greenhouse effect – gases in the atmosphere trapping heat. Previous work had shown that the Earth’s temperature was higher than expected, which was put down to the atmosphere acting as an insulator. In modern terms, this was infrared radiation – just like that emanating from the Earth’s surface.

His heat source was not the Sun, but radiation from a copper cube containing boiling water. In 1859, Tyndall showed that gases including carbon dioxide and water vapour can absorb heat. Yet, due to unfortunate circumstances, he is no household name. There are even several Mount Tyndalls, Tyndall glaciers and Tyndall craters on the Moon and Mars.įrom that, you could surmise that he was both a significant scientist and a notable mountaineer. This is despite the existence of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the Tyndall National Institute and the Pic Tyndall summit on the Matterhorn in the Alps. It is surprising that the Irish scientist John Tyndall, born 200 years ago on August 2 1820, is not better known. Honorary Research Associate Sir Roland Jackson (UCL Science & Technology Studies) calls for more public recognition of Irish scientist John Tyndall, who worked alongside Louis Pasteur, made discoveries in physics and was an early thinker in the field of climate science.

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