ROLAND JACKSON

Who knew what about Eunice Foote’s 1856 discovery of the absorption of heat by carbon dioxide and water vapour? UPDATE 13 February 2019: my paper giving a mo...

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 cryptic note. Just n...

Elton Hall, home of the Proby family since 1660, lies in the Cambridgeshire countryside about 8 miles from Peterborough. It is regularly open to the public t...

John Tyndall (c. 1822-1893) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), of similar ages, were both good friends and admirers of the older Thomas Carlyle, but they did not g...

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, the Curator of Colle...

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 1848, Tyndall travel...

Queenwood College no longer exists. It was built in 1842, as Harmony Hall, for a project in community living of the socialist visionary Robert Owen. But the ...

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 though it was the exhi...

“Victor”, I yelled, “take the rope in really tight. I can’t get past this overhang”. My cramponed feet scrabbled back onto the rock. Seconds before, I had be...

Johann Josef Benet (1824–64), who John Tyndall called ‘Bennen’, was Tyndall’s favourite Alpine guide. Edward Whymper, the first ascentionist of the Matterhor...

Roland Jackson writes about how The Ascent of John Tyndall was conceived

Juliet Pollock has become one of my favourite women. John Tyndall admired her enormously, and wrote dozens of letters to her. He sent her poems too. He was m...

Surely no-one can look up at the Matterhorn from Zermatt, an iconic image blazoned across Swiss advertising, without wanting to stand on top? Fresh from his ...

In the early nineteenth century, no-one who had not studied the works of William Paley could consider themselves to have had a proper education. William Pale...

John Tyndall visited the Alps at a time when their peaks were being climbed for the first time, and Victorian tourists were enticed to their beauties. John M...

A dispute over water vapour John Tyndall (c.1822–1893), Irish physicist, mountaineer, and public intellectual, is best known in scientific circles for his wo...

‘...those demoralised and brutalised sirens...’ In my forthcoming biography of John Tyndall, the atmosphere plays a major role. A foghorn on the English coas...

For the biographer, nothing can beat a physical visit to places significant to the subject. Even if much of the environment may have changed, there is still ...

‘We live in the sky, not under it’. This beautiful phrase, revealing a person who experienced as well as understood the physical world, is one of many conjur...