Tyndall was born in Leighlinbridge, County Carlow, Ireland. His father was a local police constable, descended from Gloucestershire emigrants who settled in southeast Ireland around 1670. Tyndall attended th… See more

Tyndall's early original work in physics was his experiments on magnetism and diamagnetic polarity, on which he worked from 1850 to 1856. His two most influential reports were the first two, co-authored with Knoblauch… See more

Tyndall visited the Alps mountains in 1856 for scientific reasons and ended up becoming a pioneering mountain climber. He visited the Alps almost every summer from 1856 onward, was a member of the very first m… See more

Work on glaciers alerted Tyndall to the research of de Saussure into the heating effect of sunlight, and the concept of Fourier, developed by Pouillet and William Hopkins, that heat from the sun penetrates the atmospher… See more