ROLAND JACKSON

The American Eunice Foote is finally getting the recognition she deserves. In 1856 she showed, using sunlight, that gases including carbo...

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

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 ...

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

John Tyndall (c. 1822-1893) and John Ruskin (1819-1900), of similar ages, were both good friends and admirers of the older Thomas Carlyle...

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, ...

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 ...

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

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 th...

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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