top of page
Search
Roland Jackson
Oct 25, 20218 min read
Did Eunice Foote discover the 'greenhouse effect'?
The story of the American Eunice Foote and the discovery of the greenhouse effect has become a contested issue in the history of climate...
289 views0 comments
Roland Jackson
Aug 26, 20204 min read
Eunice Foote and the dawn of climate science
The American Eunice Foote is finally getting the recognition she deserves. In 1856 she showed, using sunlight, that gases including...
186 views0 comments
Roland Jackson
Dec 22, 20199 min read
The saga of Eunice Foote and John Tyndall
Who knew what about Eunice Foote’s 1856 discovery of the absorption of heat by carbon dioxide and water vapour? UPDATE 13 February 2019:...
1,122 views
Roland Jackson
May 17, 20194 min read
Who discovered the greenhouse effect?
160 years ago, on 18 May 1859, the Irish physicist John Tyndall wrote in his journal ‘the subject is completely in my hands’. This is no...
215 views0 comments
Roland Jackson
Dec 17, 20182 min read
Elton Hall
Elton Hall, home of the Proby family since 1660, lies in the Cambridgeshire countryside about 8 miles from Peterborough. It is regularly...
178 views
Roland Jackson
Sep 12, 20182 min read
John Tyndall and John Ruskin
John Tyndall (c. 1822-1893) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), of similar ages, were both good friends and admirers of the older Thomas...
311 views
Roland Jackson
Jul 5, 20183 min read
Mystery of the missing Marburg journals
Just occasionally, there is a moment in an archive when the gasps are audible. Such was the case on 16 January 2017, when Charlotte New,...
40 views
Roland Jackson
Jul 4, 20182 min read
John Tyndall and Robert Bunsen
John Tyndall is known as a physicist rather than a chemist, but he had a greater regard for no German man than Robert Bunsen. In October...
48 views
Roland Jackson
Jul 3, 20182 min read
The remains of Queenwood College
Queenwood College no longer exists. It was built in 1842, as Harmony Hall, for a project in community living of the socialist visionary...
111 views
Roland Jackson
Jul 2, 20184 min read
John Tyndall and the Lake District
John Tyndall spent every summer but one in the Alps between 1856 and his death in 1893. Mountains held a lure he could not resist. But...
40 views
Roland Jackson
Jul 1, 20183 min read
On the Eiger
“Victor”, I yelled, “take the rope in really tight. I can’t get past this overhang”. My cramponed feet scrabbled back onto the rock....
26 views
Roland Jackson
Apr 16, 20183 min read
In search of a grave
Johann Josef Benet (1824–64), who John Tyndall called ‘Bennen’, was Tyndall’s favourite Alpine guide. Edward Whymper, the first...
96 views
Roland Jackson
Mar 21, 20183 min read
Constructing a biography
Roland Jackson writes about how The Ascent of John Tyndall was conceived
141 views
Roland Jackson
Mar 8, 20182 min read
Serendipitous discovery of a novel
Juliet Pollock has become one of my favourite women. John Tyndall admired her enormously, and wrote dozens of letters to her. He sent her...
56 views
Roland Jackson
Feb 11, 20183 min read
On the Matterhorn
Surely no-one can look up at the Matterhorn from Zermatt, an iconic image blazoned across Swiss advertising, without wanting to stand on...
170 views
Roland Jackson
Jan 22, 20185 min read
Paley's Works
In the early nineteenth century, no-one who had not studied the works of William Paley could consider themselves to have had a proper...
121 views
Roland Jackson
Jan 7, 20182 min read
On Alp Lusgen
John Tyndall visited the Alps at a time when their peaks were being climbed for the first time, and Victorian tourists were enticed to...
118 views
Roland Jackson
Jan 5, 20185 min read
John Tyndall and the atmosphere: part 2
A dispute over water vapour John Tyndall (c.1822–1893), Irish physicist, mountaineer, and public intellectual, is best known in...
142 views
Roland Jackson
Dec 31, 20172 min read
John Tyndall and the atmosphere: part 1
‘...those demoralised and brutalised sirens...’ In my forthcoming biography of John Tyndall, the atmosphere plays a major role. A foghorn...
153 views
Roland Jackson
Dec 18, 20172 min read
By the banks of the River Barrow
For the biographer, nothing can beat a physical visit to places significant to the subject. Even if much of the environment may have...
83 views
bottom of page