The Ingenious Irish: how Irish inventors and scientists helped to shape the modern world. Talk given at the EC's Joint Research Centre in Geel, Belgium, by Mary Mulvihill, Ingenious Ireland, at an event marking Ireland's EU presidency, in January 2013

1. The ingenious Irish!
Great Irish scientists & inventors
whose ideas shaped the modern world
EC JRC, Geel, 18.1.2013
Mary Mulvihill
www.ingeniousireland.ie
Copyright Mary Mulvihill, 2013

2. 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!

3. Small everyday contributions include . . .
The ISBN,
Gordon Foster, 1960s
Trinity College Dublin

4. Milk chocolate: Sir Hans Sloane, 1680s
The Irish add milk to everything, inventing new industries,
such as Baileys cream liqueurs and milk chocolate.

5. Flavoured crisps:
Joe ‘Tayto’ Murphy, 1954

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

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

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

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

10. Lightweight tractor: Harry Ferguson, 1930s
Manufactured initially by Ford, replaced the horse

11. 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

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

13. Medical inventions include:
The hypodermic syringe,
Francis Rynd 1843, Dublin’s Meath Hospital

14. The modern stereo, rubber stethoscope
Arthur Leared
First exhibited Crystal Palace, London, 1851

15. First effective
radiotherapy for
cancer
The ‘Dublin Method’, using radon gas in place of radium
John Joly, Dublin 1910-14

16. John Joly
A founding father of geophysics
His many inventions included:
A full-colour photographic
technique, 1890s
The steam calorimeter…

17. We changed the face of war
The first commercial submarine
John Philip Holland, 1890s

18. World’s first guided missile
Louis Brennan’s ‘dirigible’ torpedo (guided by wires from
the shore) , 1860s

19. We electrified the world!
Steam turbine
Charles Parsons 1880s – made the 20th-century possible
(this small working model is at Trinity College Dublin)

20. . . . and revolutionsed transport at sea
Turbinia, 1890s
Parsons’s turbine-powered ship

21. Some great scientific
contributions...

22. The world’s largest telescope: 1845-1917
Birr Castle ‘Leviathon’,
Now beautifully restored
to working order.

23. Revealed the spiral nature of galaxies and
nebulae
The whirlpool galaxy Hubble Space Telescope 2005
William Parsons sketch Birr 1845

24. We invented the science of seismology
Robert Mallet, ingenious engineer
First controlled seismic experiments
1846
Ireland seldom has earthquakes....
So Mallet had to make his own!

25. Mallet: first seismic atlas of the world
Reveals the Pacific rim of fire, 1850s

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

27. 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.

28. George Gabriel Stokes
Stokes’s conjecture
Stokes’s phenomenon
Stokes’s layer
Stokes’s line
Stokes’s law of hydrodynamics
Stokes’s aw of fluorescence
Navier-Stokes equations . . .
the stokes, the standard unit of
kinematic viscosity, is equal to
1cm2/second.
Lucasion Professor at Cambridge
(Newton and Hawking)

29. For splitting the atom: 1951 Nobel physics prize
Ernest Walton, with John Cockcroft
Experimental
accelerator and
detector, 1932
Proved e=mc2
Began the atomic
era

30. 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.

31. X-Ray crstallography: Dame Kathleen Lonsdale
The structure of benzene
and diamond, and other
inorganic molecules

32. Contributions to research and
analysis . . .

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

34. Student ‘t’ test
William Sealy Gosset, Guiness Brewer 1908

35. 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

36. 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

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

38. Discover more about Ingenious
Ireland . . .

39. Try the e-book
Available on Amazon
http://url.ie/gu5v

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

41. Or download a ready-to-go MP3 audio tour

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