John Tyndall

  • John Tyndall is Born

    Tyndall was born in Leighlin Bridge, Ireland to Protestant Irish parents. He studied land surveying as a teenager and worked as a draftsman for the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain
  • John Tyndall's Career is Started

    Tyndall became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851, and in 1852, he became a professor at the Royal Institute in London, teaching Natural Philosophy or Physics. This is where he met scientist Michael Faraday.
  • Tyndall's Book

    Tyndall, along with his studies on scattering light and atmospheric particles, he was also studying sound and acoustics. He wrote his book 'On Sound' to educate even those who were not necessarily interested in science, and it was popular with scientists and non-scientists.
  • Video on Tyndall's Resonance Experiments

  • The Tyndall Effect

    Tyndall is well known for the contribution he made to the theory of scattering light and disproving the theory of life that had to do with spontaneous generation. Basically, during his studies of the scattering of light by atmospheric particles, he also proved that life forms cannot develop in an atmosphere without scattered particles.
  • Video on The Greenhouse Effect

  • Tyndall's Death

    John Tyndall was a mountain climber in his free time. He married a woman who was his definition of an ideal of human nature. He died because of an overdose of chloral hydrate, which he used to help his insomnia.