John Tyndall

John Tyndall (1820 to 1893) was an Irish physicist, born in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, the son of a local police constable. He left school in his late teens, worked from 1839 as a draftsman for the Ordnance Survey of Ireland and later its British counterpart, and planned railway construction in the 1840s before taking a post as mathematics and surveying master at Queenwood College in 1847, where he befriended Edward Frankland and with him went on to study science in Germany. His scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism, and he later made discoveries about infrared radiation and the physical properties of air, proving in 1859 the connection between atmospheric carbon dioxide and what is now called the greenhouse effect. He published more than a dozen science books that brought experimental physics to a wide audience, was professor of physics at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London from 1853 to 1887 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1868.