Isaac Newton Vail was born on January 30, 1840, in Belmont, Ohio.

He was an American Quaker, schoolteacher, and pseudoscientist. He was trained and then taught at the Quaker Seminary in Westtown, Pennsylvania. He left to pursue his independent study of flood geology. Vail argued that the Earth once had rings like Saturn's. This theory became known as the "Vailan theory" or "Annular Theory of Evolution." His 1886 "Canopy Theory" proposed that the Earth had been ringed by a toroidal mass of ice, which he named the "firmament." Vail believed that this could explain Noah's Flood and described it in his book "The Earth's Aqueous Ring: or The Deluge and its Cause" (1874). The 1900 census records his occupation as a farmer.

In 1864, he married Rachel D. Wilson (1842–1877), and in 1880, he remarried Mary M. Cope (1838–1920). He died on January 26, 1912, in Pasadena, California.