JOHN Tyndall was a Carlow man, born in Leighlinbridge 176 years ago today on August 2nd, 1820. Four decades later he was acknowledged in London to be one of the foremost public speakers of his day on scientific matters. His sense of showmanship enthralled the genteel audiences who thronged to hear his lectures on a Friday evening, and at which he devised striking experiments to illustrate his points. He lived by his own maxim. "The brightest flashes in the world of thought are incomplete until they have been proved to have their counterparts in the world of fact."
Tyndall was of Anglo Irish stock. He finished school in Carlow at the age of 17 and joined the Ordnance Survey, working in Youghal, Kinsale and Cork. Then in the early 1850s, having spent some years studying in Germany, he was appointed a professor at London's prestigious Royal Institution. There, along with Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin and others, he became a leading member of a small band of Victorian scientific thinkers who changed entirely the way in which the physical world was viewed.
In the popular mind, Tyndall's fame lay in his skill in making difficult scientific concepts understandable and entertaining to the layman. But at the academic level his discoveries read something like a litany, even if we consider only those related to meteorology. He explained, for example, why sunsets are red, and was the first to show that ozone was, in fact, a naturally occurring variant of oxygen. Most importantly, among his many interests was the transmission of radiant heat what we would nowadays call infrared radiation. He measured the absorption of infrared by carbon dioxide and water vapour, and in 1863 published a paper on the effects on climate of changes in the concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere. He was thus the first scientist to anticipate the greenhouse effect and the now very topical problem of anthropogenic global warming.
Many of Tyndall's more important theories evolved as he pursued his favourite hobby he was a skilled mountaineer, and in his younger days had climbed the Matterhorn, Mount Blanc and many other Alpine peaks. In his later years, however, he developed strong opinions in many other spheres outside his chosen discipline, campaigning vigorously, for example, against Gladstone's Home Rule. He had a deep distrust of Roman Catholicism, and saw in the Home Rule movement a threat to the secular and intellectual freedom of his native country. He died in December 1893, from an overdose of a sleeping draft administered inadvertently by his wife.