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...
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Roland Jackson
- Aug 26, 2020
- 4 min
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...
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Roland Jackson
- Dec 22, 2019
- 9 min
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:...
1,109 views
Roland Jackson
- May 17, 2019
- 4 min
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...
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Roland Jackson
- Dec 17, 2018
- 2 min
Elton Hall
Elton Hall, home of the Proby family since 1660, lies in the Cambridgeshire countryside about 8 miles from Peterborough. It is regularly...
175 views
Roland Jackson
- Sep 12, 2018
- 2 min
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...
309 views
Roland Jackson
- Jul 5, 2018
- 3 min
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,...
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Roland Jackson
- Jul 4, 2018
- 2 min
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...
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Roland Jackson
- Jul 3, 2018
- 2 min
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...
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Roland Jackson
- Jul 2, 2018
- 4 min
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...
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Roland Jackson
- Jul 1, 2018
- 3 min
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....
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Roland Jackson
- Apr 16, 2018
- 3 min
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...
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Roland Jackson
- Mar 21, 2018
- 3 min
Constructing a biography
Roland Jackson writes about how The Ascent of John Tyndall was conceived
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Roland Jackson
- Mar 8, 2018
- 2 min
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...
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Roland Jackson
- Feb 11, 2018
- 3 min
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...
168 views
Roland Jackson
- Jan 22, 2018
- 5 min
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...
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Roland Jackson
- Jan 7, 2018
- 2 min
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...
110 views
Roland Jackson
- Jan 5, 2018
- 5 min
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...
139 views
Roland Jackson
- Dec 31, 2017
- 2 min
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...
150 views
Roland Jackson
- Dec 18, 2017
- 2 min
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...
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