Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  In fact, Walton became a dedicated pacifist following media speculation about the potential of his famous experiment for military applications. But imagine what Trinners could have achieved with an atomic bomb. Imagine what our leader at that time, Éamon de Valera (1882–1975)130 could have done with a bomb. Come to think of it, maybe Walton was right not to build one because it would surely have fallen into the wrong hands – de Valera’s. He could have ultimately terrified even North Korea.

  Pick a Number, any Number

  William Rowan Hamilton (1805–1865) was arguably our best person in history at doing sums. Like me, he was born on the stroke of midnight, if that means anything. His father was an apothecary who had become an attorney, if you can imagine such a conversion. The Hamiltons had become bankrupt because of the involvement of William’s godfather in the United Irishmen.131 Hamilton was sent to his uncle’s school in Trim, Co. Meath when he was three years old. The school had a reputation: the building had at one time been owned by Jonathan Swift,132 and the Duke of Wellington, who was thick,133 had been a student there. Hamilton’s uncle was a classicist rather than a mathematician. Therefore, Hamilton was exposed to a torrent of Hebrew, Greek, Latin and the classics. However, when he was sixteen he got an analytic geometry book that ignited his interest in mathematics, something that never happens in school nowadays.

  The mathematics syllabus at Trinners in 1823, when Hamilton enrolled, had been updated to reflect the massive Continental developments in that discipline. His initial attempt at originality was in geometry, in which field he produced his first famous paper, “Theory of Systems of Rays”, which was read before the Royal Irish Academy in 1827.

  Following this success, he was elected to the Andrews chair in astronomy134 while he was still an undergraduate. He effectively became the “Royal Astronomer of Ireland”. He moved to the observatory at Dunsink,135 and, not knowing anything about astronomy, he wisely employed his two sisters as his assistants to do all of the work.

  While pretending to be an astronomer, Hamilton became aware of a feature of the extremely complex geometrical nature of wave structures. It seems obvious to us now, but he was the first to notice that, for a particular direction of the incident ray on a biaxial crystal,136 each incident ray gave rise to a complete cone of refracted rays rather than a double refraction, as you might expect. It’s simple when these things are actually pointed out to us. He described this discovery to his colleague at Trinners, Humphrey Lloyd, persuading him to perform a complex experiment in optics, which he did. The resulting observation of conical refraction was a clear proof of the underlying hypothesis of Augustin-Jean Fresnel’s important wave theory. Fresnel had devised a model for the propagation of transverse light waves in crystals that in turn supported Christiaan Huygen’s model of wave propagation.137 Anyway, Hamilton was an instant success. The Lord Lieutenant knighted him in 1835.

  Hamilton next shifted his attention to dynamics. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that the relevant mathematicians were bright enough to appreciate what he was on about at the time. A hundred years after his discoveries in dynamics, Erwin Schrödinger used Hamilton’s formulations as the basis of his quantum mechanics. Again, as clear as day when someone else has pointed it out.

  Hamilton changed focus once more, this time to algebra. Perhaps his greatest achievement was his discovery of a complex number138 system in 1843 which he called quaternions. Quaternions have been useful both in the control of spacecraft and in 3-D computer modeling. In other words, they are basic rocket science. His discovery of quaternions, along with the recognition of their non-commutativity, was just what was needed for the development of algebra as an abstract axiomatic discipline. Hamilton was inspired by reading the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which, in my opinion, is the most difficult book in the world, ever. If you can understand that book you don’t need to understand anything else.

  On 16 October 1843, as he was walking from Dunsink into Dublin City to attend a meeting of the Royal Irish Academy, Hamilton had what he called “a feeling” of the solution to the formulation of an equation that had been haunting him for fifteen years. He recorded his equations that give us the multiplication law for his new complex numbers on the stones of Broom Bridge in Cabra. There is a plaque on the bridge now with the equation. Like me, you can go there and study his formula, nod sagely, rub your chin knowingly and mutter, “Ah, the old quaternions! So simple. So elegant. Why didn’t I think of them?” But we can console ourselves that, like most brilliant people, Hamilton was miserable: his brilliance was inversely proportional to the square root of his melancholy.

  Hamilton had a penchant for unrequited love: the kind guaranteed to depress him. He seemed determined to love the one whom he wasn’t with. He loved Catherine Disney, who had been forced into an unhappy marriage. Years later when she was dying, Hamilton, on his knees at her deathbed, offered her a copy of his book, Lectures on Quaternions. While that must have cheered her up, it must also have made her repent those lost years spent apart. He married Helen Bayly. Helen was frequently ill and away from home, which was good for promoting his depression. Better still, they were usually stressed over money and Hamilton often drank too much. He had intended to propose marriage to Ellen de Vere but he didn’t because that might have made him happy. He was a friend of Oscar Wilde’s mother, Speranza (1821–1896),139 who asked him to be Oscar’s godfather. He declined, perhaps imagining it might be too much effort keeping up with that child’s wit. He was also a friend of the poet William Wordsworth, who visited Hamilton at Dunsink. Hamilton came to believe that he could have been somebody in the world of poetry. Therefore, he regularly treated Wordsworth to his compositions. Despite Wordsworth’s prudent diplomatic discouragements, he wrote many poems, specialising in sonnets. Fortunately, he scratched none of them onto Dublin’s bridges for posterity.

  We Don’t Need No Education

  Many of our most accomplished Irish minds are proof of the advantages of avoiding school, where you will most likely be turned into just another peg for a peg-shaped hole. Mandatory education is a contemporary outrage that is never debated because the world is run by adults who want children to suffer as they did. In the past, if you were bright and didn’t want to be ruined by school, a fashionable alternative to formal education was to get yourself bedridden for years as the result of a horrible accident or a chronic illness.

  Robert Murphy (1806–1843) was fortuitously run over by a cart while he was playing near his home in Mallow, Co. Cork. His thighbone was badly smashed, joyfully confining him to bed for a year. He had books on geometry and algebra with him in bed. How common is that nowadays? Meanwhile, Timothy Mulcahy (dates unknown), a schoolteacher from Cork whose son John (1810?–1853) became the first professor of mathematics at Queen’s College Galway, was posing mathematical teasers in the local newspaper. Murphy impressed Mulcahy with his ingenious solutions. Mulcahy came to Mallow to investigate who the mathematical genius might be, and found thirteen-year-old Murphy at the end of his quest. The mean Mulcahy then insisted on sponsoring the poverty-stricken Murphy’s education.

  However, in 1823, Murphy, despite being a genius, was denied entry to Trinners to study mathematics because of his lack of formal education combined with his ignorance of the classics. It is nice to know some things never change. Murphy published a refutation of a supposed construction of a cube root of two that had been produced by a young priest at Maynooth with a classical education. This paper came to the attention of Robert Woodhouse, the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. Woodhouse agreed to admit Murphy to Cambridge in October 1825 on a fee of £60 paid by the cruel Mulcahy. Murphy was soon recognised as a significant mathematician, producing twenty scholarly papers. He was appointed junior dean of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge between 1831 and 1833, where, with no irony on the part of the college authorities, he taught classics.

  However, invoking the inverse l
aw of misery, he quickly showed his college fellows that he was a drunk and a gambler. His newfound success and relative prosperity went straight to his head. Just after being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, which Hamilton never was, he returned to Cork to avoid his creditors. In West Cork he became a cobbler. But he pulled himself together and returned to Cambridge in 1835; he moved to London in 1836 where he wrote “popular mathematics” books and became an examiner in mathematics at the University of London. He died of tuberculosis in 1843.

  While there is frequent reference to alcohol in the history of Irish erudition, there are disappointingly few accounts of drugs before the rock n’ roll scene of the 1960s and 1970s. John Henderson (1757–1788) is a welcome exception, being a forerunner of the twentieth-century celebrity drug addict. Limerick-born Henderson was quickly recognised as a genius. He was a Latin teacher when he was eight, moving on to teach Greek at twelve. He attended Pembroke College in Oxford. Henderson’s father, who was a lay preacher and later owned a private lunatic asylum in England, was devastated by his refusal to join the Church. To facilitate his calling as a drug addict, he resolved to become a life-long student.

  After graduating, I assume by accident, he remained in his student rooms and kept up an interest in languages, “medicine” and science. Just like future rockers, he spurned the fashion of his day, that is the powdered wigs, neck cloths and large shoe buckles; except, ironically, the rockers would embrace the powdered wigs, neck cloths and big buckles. He drank and became an opium addict, regularly consuming in one go enough dope to kill twelve average addicts. He also experimented, as you must, with other drugs, including mercury. There is no account of what music he listened to, but Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, which became a massive hit, was released in August 1787. This was before record players, so he would have had to hire an orchestra to perform in his rooms or just hum the tune to himself.

  He provided free “medical” treatments to the poor, who were indifferent to his being a “doctor”. He promoted sleeping in a wet shirt while lying in a wet bed. Contemporaries such as Dr Johnson and Hannah More hung out at his place. Hannah More, a friend of Johnson’s, was a religious writer and a do-gooder. Can you imagine dealing with her when out of your head on drink, opium and mercury? Eventually, setting the template for the future heavy-metal rock n’ roll lifestyle, he became both a recluse and obsessed with the occult. He communed with spirits and developed an interest in physiognomy, which is the art of judging a person’s character from facial features.

  He died, allegedly of an overdose, in his college rooms on 2 November 1788, a day his fans will never forget. I suspect foul play. We know his father shared my suspicions because he had his son’s grave opened in case he had come back from the dead, like Elvis, or was in fact still alive, like Jim Morrison. I suspect he may still be alive. His obituary, which could have been that of many of our more contemporary rock n’ roll heroes, read – “with as great and good talents as most men … he had lived two and thirty years and had done just nothing.” At least he didn’t set the fashion for dying at the age of twenty-seven. Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse all died aged twenty-seven. Perhaps mercury gives you that extra few years.

  Thomas Grubb (1800–1878), from Co. Waterford, was another autodidact with no formal education in the field in which he excelled, and he, too, had no grasp of the classics. He established a factory near Charlemont Bridge in Dublin to make billiard tables. One of his two hobbies was astronomy. He built a small observatory in his garden, equipped with a 9-inch reflecting telescope that he built for relaxation, as you do. Thomas Romney Robinson, the director of Armagh Observatory, was so impressed when he saw this telescope that orders for more followed.

  In 1834 Grubb built an equatorial mounting for a 13.3-inch lens for an observatory in Co. Sligo. At that time, this was the world’s biggest telescope. In 1835 he produced a 15-inch reflecting telescope for Armagh Observatory. Grubb designed a triangular system of balanced levers that distributed the weight of the primary speculum that was used on the world’s biggest telescope in 1845, the 72-inch reflecting telescope that was known as the Leviathan of Parsonstown, kept at Birr Castle, Co. Offaly. Other major commissions included telescopes for the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; West Point Academy, New York; and a 48-inch equatorially mounted reflecting telescope for Melbourne, Australia.

  However, building the world’s biggest telescopes in his back garden wasn’t Grubb’s most passionate sideline: his other hobby was his real delight. He loved making money-printing machines for the Bank of Ireland. He designed and built the machines for engraving, printing and sequentially numbering banknotes. He developed the novel idea that all banknotes of the same face value should be identical, a breakthrough that upset forgers who up until then were passing their own idiosyncratic efforts off as legitimate promissory notes. He also designed microscopes and developed ray-tracing lenses that are still used in computer graphics. He was one of the earliest photographers, patenting a camera lens in 1858. He is an example to us all of the advantages of avoiding school.

  However, some people just like studying, and there is little enlightened people can do to stop them. It is probably a disease. David Torrens (1897–1967) was an eternal student, a genial lecturer and the world’s foremost authority on clock collecting. His enlightened parents wanted him to stay at home and work the farm but he wanted to study. He enrolled in a diploma in agriculture in 1915. After graduating, he studied for a degree in natural sciences, and eventually became a medical student. He graduated as MB (Medicinae Baccalaureus) in 1934, a mere nineteen years of study later. He became vice-dean of the Medical School at Trinners. He was popular with his students because he loaned them money without hope of ever getting it back.

  But, as usual, what he studied wasn’t his passion: clocks made him tick! Unknown to most of his friends and colleagues, Torrens accumulated the largest private collection of horological material in the world in his house. In clock circles, he was recognised as the greatest living authority on horological tools. In 1967 he was admitted to the freedom of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers of London. Most of his vast knowledge was lost when he died because, as an amateur, he wrote little about clocks. The practice of raving about subjects like clock collecting in pamphlets had died out by the 1960s.

  Boyle at a Constant Temperature

  Robert Boyle (1627–1691) was one of the most eminent and accomplished chemists of his day. He even has his own law:140 P [pressure] and V [volume] are inversely proportional for a fixed amount of an ideal gas at a fixed temperature. Boyle was born in Lismore Castle in Waterford. In 1644 he started his scientific career by writing about morality. It was usual back then for scientists to get a run up to physics and chemistry by writing about religion. But in 1649 he built a laboratory, not a chapel, and started experimenting. His motivation was to use chemistry as a defence of religion. From 1650 he fell under the influence of the American chemist George Starkey and subsequently became obsessed with alchemy. Alchemists searched for the philosopher’s stone, which possessed special powers, the most important of these being the capacity to turn common metals into gold. Another substance that alchemists sought was the elixir of life, which would confer eternal youth on whoever drank it. It is ironic how many alchemists were killed from drinking substances that weren’t after all the elixir of life. Boyle owes some of his later fame as a chemist partly to his habit of not drinking his own concoctions.

  Boyle was one of the first to discover air. He devised a vacuum chamber for experiments involving observing the consequences of withdrawing air from lighted candles and animals. He set up and published novel experiments. This was the dawn of laboratory-based research with the subsequent development of the familiar figure of the mad scientist laughing insanely in his lab surrounded by bubbling test tubes. In other words, Boyle invented the experimental method of modern chemistry.

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sp; Peter Woulfe (1727–1803), from Limerick, invented the Woulfe bottle, which was an apparatus used for capturing poisonous gases, making laboratories relatively safer places for chemistry experiments. However, for Woulfe, his invention came too late. Due to all his experimentation with noxious fumes before he perfected his bottle, he turned into the archetypal nutty professor. He breakfasted at 4.00 a.m., often inviting his friends to join him. When they arrived they could only get into his house by knowing his latest secret code. He became convinced that a return trip on the London to Edinburgh mail coach was marvellous for his health. In 1803 that trip killed him when he caught a cold and died from inflamed lungs.

  From the interests of some of our earlier chemists it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that they had too-easy access to fumes and other exotic substances. John Grattan (1800–1871), from Dublin, became a successful apothecary in Belfast, having served a seven-year apprenticeship in the Apothecaries’ Hall, Dublin. He made an initial sober impression by making aerated mineral waters, including ginger ale, which he claimed to have invented. However, his real interest was in phrenology and craniology.141 Both phrenology and craniology are now extinct disciplines, which is a pity. Grattan published methods for measuring and recording human skulls using a craniometer that he invented himself. With this unique device he drew links between lumps on the skull and specific individual human characteristics, values and morals. Basically, he could read your personality from your skull. He carried out a case study on the skull of the Reverend George Walter, who was governor of Derry during the 1688–1689 siege, whose skull he must have had to hand.