There are plenty of us out there that will have seen the movie Good Will Hunting - the story of a young self-taught genius who works as a janitor in Boston.
His name is James Croll, a name unknown to the vast majority of us but one which historians believe should be placed among the pantheon of the likes of Lord Kelvin and Charles Darwin.Regarded as one of history's great autodidacts, Croll's 'Climate and Time' paper of 1875 proposed that changes in Earth's orbit might affect global temperature to explain ice ages.
In an article published in 2018 about Croll titled 'How a janitor wowed Darwin by solving the ice age mystery', New Scientist noted how he "became the father of climate-change research". Croll's revelation came 16 years after he first took on the role of jannie at the college, where, as an avid reader of books, he devoured all the science texts he could get his hands on from the library.
A theory which was attributed to one 'James Croll, Anderson's Institution' and which saw him appointed to the Scottish branch of the British Geological Survey in 1867. With the Royal Society noting that it was "undoubtedly true that Croll's scientific work achieved a hearing at the highest levels and was recognized as a major achievement".
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