1. The Ingenious Irish
Great Irish scientists & innovators
whose ideas shaped the world
Mary Mulvihill, www.ingeniousireland.ie
IET 23.5.2013 (c) Copyright Ingenious Ireland, 2013
3. 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
4. Irish algebra, helped to put a man on the Moon
Sir William Rowan Hamilton 1805-1865
1843: invented Quaternion algebra
Hamilton also laid the foundations of quantum mechanics.
5. 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 & glaciologist
•Tyndall institutes
6. New micro drop analyser
based on Tyndall’s work on spectrometry
7. The world’s largest telescope: 1845-1917
Birr Castle ‘Leviathon’,
Restored to working order.
8. 1845: Revealed the spiral nature of galaxies and
nebulae
The whirlpool galaxy
1845 Birr 2005 Hubble Space Telescope
9. 1846: We invented seismology
Robert Mallet
Ingenious engineer 1810-81
10. R&J Mallet: first seismic atlas of the world
Reveals the Pacific rim of fire, 1850s
13. 1892: First electrical measurement of starlight
Fitzgerald, Monck & Minchin, 16 Earlsfort Terrace
14. 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)
15. 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.
16. We split the atom
1951 Nobel physics prize Ernest Walton, with John Cockcroft
Experimental
accelerator and
detector, 1932
Proved e=mc2
Began the atomic
era
18. Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel prize 1933
The Austrian physicist lived in
Dublin 1939-1956 and took
Irish citizenship.
His book, ‘What is Life?’,
written in Dublin, inspired a
generation of biologists,
including Crick and Watson.
44. 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
45. The continuous, column still – the first heat exchange device
Aeneas Coffey, 1830
Produced whiskey so pure it was almost industrial alcohol!
46. Milk chocolate: Sir Hans Sloane, 1680s
The Irish add milk to everything, inventing new industries,
such as milk chocolate and Baileys cream liqueur.
