A closer look
John Tyndall is the guy who looked up at the sky and refused to just accept that it was blue. In 1859, he shone light through tubes filled with suspended smog particles and proved that shorter blue light waves scatter far more easily than long red ones. While he was at it, he built the first spectrophotometer and proved that gases like water vapor trap heat in the atmosphere. He essentially formalized the greenhouse effect and took the credit, blissfully overshadowing Eunice Foote’s earlier work. Tyndall explained why the sky is blue and how the Earth stays warm, all while breathing in toxic laboratory fumes.
