John Tyndall

John Tyndall married Louisa Hamilton in the year 1876, when he was 55 years old. The couple had no children.

John Tyndall died at the age of 73 on 4 December, 1893 due to an unintended overdoes of cholera hydrate; a medicine he used to take to cure his insomnia.

John Tyndall was born on 2 August, 1820 in the town of Leighlinbridge located in Country Garlow, Ireland. His father (also named John Tyndall) worked as a police constable in the town. His mother’s name was Sarah Tyndall. He had an elder sister.

He was initially educated at the schools located in his home town of Leighlinbridge and attended those schools till he was well into his teens. Other than mathematics, he had also studied land surveying at school.

In 1839, John Tyndall took up a job with the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in the capacity of a draftsman and three years later he started working for the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain.

He also worked as a teacher of mathematics at the Queenswood College boarding school located in southern England. Edward Frankland, the future chemist, was also a teacher at the school and on his advice, both Tyndall and Frankland took admission at the University of Marburg in Germany in 1848.

Tyndall was taught by such giants of the time like Robert Bunsen, Hermann Knoblauch and Heinrich Gustav Magnus in Germany. He completed his graduation and went back to England in the year 1951.

Upon his return to England, John Tyndall was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851 and the following year he was appointed as the Professor of Natural Philosophy or Physics by the Royal Institute in London. Tyndall came into contact with the brilliant scientist Michael Faraday at the institute and it proved to be a very fruitful friendship.

Tyndall was initially involved in the study of the earth’s atmosphere and specifically worked on how much radiant heat the various gases in the earth’s atmosphere can absorb. It was in 1859 that he successfully worked out the absorptive capabilities of different gases. He also became the first person to prove the green house effect theory and is credited with the Tyndall Effect which is the process of showing particles in the air by bathing it in intense light.

In around 1864, John Tyndall also devised a system by way of which the percentage of carbon dioxide in an isolated sample of human breath could be measured and his system has been in use in modern medical science as anaesthetic experts use it to check on the condition of patients who are under the effects of anaesthesia. In the same year he deduced that Ozone is nothing but oxygen in clusters.

Tyndall worked on a variety of research endeavours for more than 30 years starting from 1850 and in total he published a total of 147 papers that dealt with subjects starting from the earth’s atmosphere to how the sun’s rays going through atmospheric molecules makes the sky appear blue.

In 1856, Tyndall spent some time in the Alps to study the movement of glaciers and glacial flow. In the process, he also became a mountaineer. Tyndall also made plenty of efforts in order to make the sciences more popular among the general public and delivered public lectures. He also wrote plenty of books on elementary science. He retired at the age of 66.

Other than the relentless research that he conducted over 3 decades as an academic, he was responsible for making the natural sciences popular among the general public. However, his most important work was on the studies of the earth’s atmosphere that provided the basis for future research on the subject.