John Tyndall
John Tyndall’s radiant heat apparatus - Credit Paul Wilkinson
John Tyndall’s radiant heat apparatus
Happy Earth Day!
This is John Tyndall, whose experimental work on ‘Radiant Heat’ forms the basis of our understanding of greenhouse gases. While Prof of Natural Philosophy at the Ri, Tyndall found that water vapour is the strongest absorber of heat in the atmosphere, and the main gas plugging the leakage of the Earth’s heat into outer space. He said that without water vapour, the surface would be ‘held fast in the iron grip of frost’ – the greenhouse effect.
Using the tube above, Tyndall was the very first to experimentally prove this theory. He presented his work at the Ri in 1859 in a lecture titled ‘On the Transmission of Heat of Different qualities through Gases of Different Kinds’.
Tyndall continued to investigate radiant heat through experiments, and went on to produce his now famous book, Heat a Mode of Motion.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário