Tyndall , John , 1820-1893 , natural philosopher

Born, 1820; Education: PhD; Career: Taught at Queenwood College, Hampshire (to 1853); in 1859, his labortory experiments showed that water vapour and carbon dioxide absorb infra-red radiation and that they could therefore affect the climate of the Earth. As soon as his paper was published in 1861 in the 'Proceedings of the Royal Society', he put out a press release for the London newspapaers explaining that this result implied that all past climate changes were now understood and all future climate changes could be predicted simply from a knowledge of the concentrations of these 'greenhouse' gases. Tyndall restricted himself to describing his experiments and simply linking it to work of Fourier a few decades earlier. It took more than a century before the credible quantitative estimates of these effects and their influence on past and possibly future climates were made, along with good enough observations of the gases to know that they have (and continue) to change significantly. Fellow of the Royal Society, 1852; Rumford Medal, 1864; Vice President of the Royal Society, 1879-1880; died, 1893.