The ingenious Irish!

Great Irish scientists & inventors whose ideas shaped the modern world

EC JRC, Geel, 18.1.2013

Mary Mulvihillwww.ingeniousireland.ie

Copyright Mary Mulvihill, 2013

I want to change what you think about Ireland!

From medicine to military, the Ingenious Irish:

• Revolutionised food and farming

• Changed the face of war

• Electrified the world and made the 20th century possible

• Split the atom, starting the atomic era

• Even helped to land a man on the Moon!

The ISBN, Gordon Foster, 1960sTrinity College Dublin

Small everyday contributions include . . .

Milk chocolate: Sir Hans Sloane, 1680s

The Irish add milk to everything, inventing new industries, such as Baileys cream liqueurs and milk chocolate.

Flavoured crisps:Joe ‘Tayto’ Murphy, 1954

We’re still inventing flavours:Shamrock-flavoured crisps :-)

The Penny Black: 1840World’s first adhesive stamp.Note: no perforations, making the stamps difficult to separate

Perforated stampsDublin printer Henry Archer, c. 1850. The Royal Mail paid him £4000 for his patents.

Artificial fertiliser:Sir James Murray, 1817He invented a way to make minerals soluble for plants.

We revolutionised farming:

Lightweight tractor: Harry Ferguson, 1930sManufactured initially by Ford, replaced the horse

We invented whiskey . . . Not once, but twice!

In the Middle-Ages, missionaries and Crusaders brought distilling back from the Arab world.The Irish distilled beer, and made the first proto-whiskey

The continuous, column still – the first heat exchange deviceAeneas Coffey, 1830Produced whiskey so pure it was almost industrial alcohol!

The hypodermic syringe, Francis Rynd 1843, Dublin’s Meath Hospital

Medical inventions include:

The modern stereo, rubber stethoscopeArthur LearedFirst exhibited Crystal Palace, London, 1851

The ‘Dublin Method’, using radon gas in place of radiumJohn Joly, Dublin 1910-14

First effective radiotherapy for cancer

John JolyA founding father of geophysicsHis many inventions included:A full-colour photographic technique, 1890sThe steam calorimeter…

We changed the face of war

The first commercial submarine John Philip Holland, 1890s

World’s first guided missile

Louis Brennan’s ‘dirigible’ torpedo (guided by wires from the shore) , 1860s

Steam turbineCharles Parsons 1880s – made the 20th-century possible(this small working model is at Trinity College Dublin)

We electrified the world!

Turbinia, 1890sParsons’s turbine-powered ship

. . . and revolutionsed transport at sea

Some great scientific contributions...

The world’s largest telescope: 1845-1917

Birr Castle ‘Leviathon’, Now beautifully restored to working order.

Revealed the spiral nature of galaxies and nebulae

The whirlpool galaxyWilliam Parsons sketch Birr 1845

Hubble Space Telescope 2005

We invented the science of seismology

Robert Mallet, ingenious engineerFirst controlled seismic experiments 1846Ireland seldom has earthquakes....So Mallet had to make his own!

Mallet: first seismic atlas of the world

Reveals the Pacific rim of fire, 1850s

Irish algebra, helped to put a man on the Moon

William Rowan Hamilton: invented Quaternion algebra, 1843The 1st non-commutative algebra, it is now used to orientate spacecraft, and in 3D computer graphics.Hamilton also laid the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Thermodynamics and degrees Kelvin

William Thomson, Baron Kelvin 1824-1907

His many inventions included an instrument that made the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable possible.

George Gabriel Stokes

Stokes’s conjectureStokes’s phenomenonStokes’s layerStokes’s lineStokes’s law of hydrodynamics Stokes’s aw of fluorescenceNavier-Stokes equations . . .

the stokes, the standard unit of kinematic viscosity, is equal to 1cm2/second.

Lucasion Professor at Cambridge (Newton and Hawking)

For splitting the atom: 1951 Nobel physics prizeErnest Walton, with John Cockcroft

Experimental accelerator and detector, 1932

Proved e=mc2

Began the atomic era

Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel prize 1933

The Austrian physicist was also an Irish man! He lived in Dublin 1939-1956 and took Irish citizenship.

He wrote ‘What is Life?’ in Dublin and his book inspired a generation of biologists after WWII, including Crick and Watson.

X-Ray crstallography: Dame Kathleen Lonsdale

The structure of benzene and diamond, and other inorganic molecules

Contributions to research and analysis . . .

What made Guinness great was quality control and statistics . . .

William Sealy Gosset, Guiness Brewer 1908

Student ‘t’ test

The ‘father’ of chemistry – Robert Boyle

Boyle’s Law (gas volume and pressure)

• Experiments with an air pump• Modern analytical chemistry• Modern concept of an element• Litmus tests, for acid, base and neutral• Analytical tests for mineral water• Assays for gold and silver and salts• Formalin as a preservative

A great experimentalist: John Tyndall

• First proof of Greenhouse gas effect (absorption spectroscopy of gases)

• First explanation of why the sky is blue

•First proof of Pasteur’s germ theory

•Champion and populariser of science

•Mountaineer

New micro drop analyser based on Tyndall’s work on spectrometry

Discover more about Ingenious Ireland . . .

Try the e-book Available on Amazonhttp://url.ie/gu5v

Visiting Dublin? Discover great stories with an Ingenious Dublin walking tour

Or download a ready-to-go MP3 audio tour

Irish stamp marking 350 years of Boyle’s Law, in 2012Now ‘peel and stick’ -- but still with perforations!

www.ingeniousireland.ie