posted by Dr. Amber Jenkins From Erik Conway, NASA Jet
Propulsion Laboratory One of the burning questions (pun
intended!) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was why the
Earth is so warm. A number of scientists, including the famous
French polymath, Joseph Fourier, had calculated that it should
be far colder than it actually is — cold enough, in fact, to be
a frozen ball. And some of them had speculated that something
about the atmosphere must be responsible for the Earth’s most
fortunate, mainly unfrozen condition. The first person to show
experimentally what the atmosphere did was an Irish physicist,
John Tyndall. Tyndall was born in 1820 in Leighlin Bridge,
Ireland. Having finished a Ph.D. in mathematics at the
University of Marburg, Germany, he took a job at the Royal
Institution of Great Britain, a prestigious research
organization, in 1853. (A man of many talents, he also happened
to be a pioneering scientific mountaineer, climbing a variety of
European mountains to study their glaciers.) Tyndall