author
John Tyndall
1820–1893
A vivid Victorian science writer as well as a pioneering physicist, he helped make complex ideas about heat, light, and the atmosphere clear to a wide audience. His experiments on radiant heat and gases later became central to our understanding of the greenhouse effect.
10 Audiobooks
Faraday as a Discoverer
by John Tyndall
Hours of Exercise in the Alps
by John Tyndall
Sound
by John Tyndall
Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays
by Thomas Henry Huxley, George F. (George Frederick) Barker, E. D. (Edward Drinker) Cope, James Hutchison Stirling, John Tyndall
The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers
by John Tyndall
Essays on the use and limit of the imagination in science
by John Tyndall
About the author
Born in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, in Ireland, John Tyndall became one of the best-known scientific figures of the 19th century. Encyclopaedia Britannica describes him as an Irish experimental physicist and an energetic public champion of science, while the John Tyndall Correspondence Project notes that he succeeded Michael Faraday as Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution, serving there from 1853 to 1887.
Tyndall is especially remembered for research into diamagnetism, the scattering of light in the atmosphere, and the way gases such as water vapor and carbon dioxide absorb heat. NASA highlights his 1859 experiments showing that small amounts of these gases absorb far more heat than most of the atmosphere, work that later became fundamental to climate science. He also wrote extensively for general readers, helping turn public lectures and popular science books into an important part of Victorian culture.
Beyond the laboratory, Tyndall was an enthusiastic mountaineer and a lively, sometimes controversial public intellectual. His career joined careful experimentation with a gift for explanation, which is one reason his books still offer a window into both the history of physics and the culture of science in his time.