Top o’ the mornin’ to ye!
Hope you’re having a shenanigan-filled St Patrick’s Day, wherever you are.
You’ll remember that I sent out an Irish special last year, so I figured I should keep the tradition going.
This time, I’m looking at five Irish inventors in 🎬 video form up there ☝️
And then in just plain old text down there 👇
5 Irish Technology Inventors
The Irish have dreamt up plenty of inventions, from the bacon rasher to the cream cracker and even the flavoured potato crisp.
Much as I’d love to chat about those, in line with this newsletter’s main content focus, let’s take a look at five fantastic Irish inventions from the worlds of technology, science, and business.
After all, an Irishman even invented the word entrepreneur. Richard Cantillon came up with it in 1755 when he was living in France. He describes an entrepreneur as an ‘adventurer’, and his main innovation was to define the entrepreneur as someone who took on individual risk.
But he doesn’t make the list!
1. The Transatlantic Cable: William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Born in Belfast and educated at Cambridge, Thomson set the template for many great Irishmen to follow.
And that’s where our similarities end. You see, he was part-mathematician, part-physicist, and part-engineer. I bet he couldn’t do SEO, though.
Thomson also achieved quite a bit: for example, he established the absolute temperature scale (still known as degrees 'Kelvin').
What’s more, he was responsible for figuring out how to make the first transatlantic cable work in 1858.
Thomson was asked for help solving the electrical and engineering dilemmas facing the cable project.
He used analogies drawn from physics to solve many of the crucial engineering challenges that had slowed the cable’s progress.
Thomson developed a complete system for operating a submarine telegraph that was capable of sending a character every 3.5 seconds.
He patented the key element of his system, the mirror galvanometer in 1858. This device is a sensitive electrical indicating instrument and it was used to detect the extremely weak currents received through long submarine cables.
And here’s a bit of the cable itself:
The cable ran between Valentia Island on the west coast of Ireland to Heart's Content in Newfoundland:
On 16 August 1858, Queen Victoria and U.S. president James Buchanan exchanged telegraphic pleasantries, inaugurating the first transatlantic cable connecting British North America to Ireland.
It wasn’t exactly instant messaging: The Queen’s 98-word greeting took almost 16 hours to send through the 3,200-kilometer cable.
2. Tattoo Machines: Samuel O’Reilly
The first electric tattoo machine was invented in New York City by Samuel F. O'Reilly, and patented December 8, 1891. O’Reilly’s parents were recent Irish immigrants to the US.
His invention used a high-speed reciprocating motor to drive a single needle.
O’Reilly’s design was based on Thomas Edison’s earlier invention, The Electric Pen. It did not use any ink; rather, it perforated holes in a master form, which then became a stencil.
O’Reilly discovered that Edison's machine could be modified and used to introduce ink into the skin, and later patented a tube and needle system to provide an ink reservoir.
It was made from iron, steel and brass, and O’Reilly would become the leading tattoo artist of his era.
His navy background helped him attract clientele from the ships when they would stay in New York. And here he is in a tattoo ad from a NY newspaper in 1897:
I’d certainly hope the industry has come a long way since his attempt at “fond father’s dear children” here:
O’Reilly circulated a pamphlet about tattooed U.S. military members fighting in the Spanish-American War. Part of this pamphlet reads:
“Brave fellows! Little fear had they of shot and shell amid the smoke of battle, and after the scrub down they gloried in their tattoos.”
He was good at marketing as well as inventing, basically.
3. Radiotherapy, John Joly
John Joly was a scientist from Co Offaly whose inventions included the first commercial application of colour photography.
And yet, we only have black and white photos of him, so I don’t know what to believe.
But radiotherapy was perhaps his most impactful invention.
After Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium, people started exploring the medical uses of radioactivity.
It could cause cancer, yet could also be used to burn and thus hopefully kill a cancerous growth.
The brutal technique of using radium itself was the basis for early radiotherapy. Joly’s idea for an alternative treatment was driven by the fact that the radium approach was hugely expensive, as well as hugely dangerous.
His big innovation was to use the radon gas that it gave off, not the radium itself.
This “emanation” could be collected and the amount or dose of radiation could be controlled. The gas could be injected to the core of the tumour, where it could percolate through the tumour and have the best chance of killing the cancerous cells.
More patients could be treated than before, and the new technique was significantly cheaper than existing methods. Joly’s “Dublin Method”, as it was called, was soon widely adopted; Marie Curie even used it in France to prepare radiation treatments during the first World War.
4. The portable defibrillator: Frank Pantridge
Frank Pantridge was a cardiologist from County Down who became known as the 'father of emergency medicine'.
He recognised the importance of early treatment and helped introduce modern CPR.
His big invention was the portable defibrillator.
In 1965, he installed his first version in a Belfast ambulance. It weighed 70 kg (!) and operated from car batteries, but by 1968 he had designed an instrument weighing only 3 kg using NASA technology.
This updated version could be used safely by members of the public. He maintained that everywhere a fire extinguisher was found, one of his devices should be present. It has gone on to save countless lives.
Oddly, his invention was initially met with ridicule in the United Kingdom but was taken up almost immediately in the United States.
He also had a reputation for being somewhat complex. His obituary in the Guardian said,
"He could be cantankerous, gruff, even rude, and yet witty and generous. For him to like someone he had to respect them and he could then be a very loyal friend."
Pantridge did receive some belated acclaim back home.
There is a blue plaque at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and the city of Lisburn commissioned a statue of Pantridge, which stands outside the council's offices at the Lagan Valley Island centre.
5. Pulsars: Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell
OK this is more of a discovery than an invention, but it’s a phenomenal story.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell was working on her Phd at Cambridge in 1967 when she discovered a previously unknown object called pulsars.
She had been monitoring quasars (which the internet tells me are “galactic nuclei, powered by a supermassive black hole”), when she discovered a series of extremely regular radio pulses.
She consulted her adviser, Antony Hewish, and their team spent the next few months eliminating possible sources of the pulses, which they dubbed LGM (for Little Green Men) in reference to the somewhat remote possibility that they might have been messages from aliens.
So what had they discovered?
Dublin Science Gallery explains that pulsars are,
“Typically 10km to 15km in diameter and form from the compacting of a star’s core after a supernova. Pulsars are so dense with matter that the hypothetical equivalent on Earth would be squeezing the mass of Mount Everest into a single strand of hair.”
One of her images from the radio pulses was then immortalised on a Joy Division album cover. I’m pretty sure I had a t-shirt of this many years ago:
Using pulsars, scientists can test some of the most fundamental theories in physics, detect gravitational waves, navigate the cosmic ocean, and - who knows? - maybe even communicate with aliens.
Jocelyn’s discovery was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974. But she didn’t receive it. Instead, her supervisors took the acclaim.
She has finally received some of her due recognition and was awarded a $3 million prize in 2018, which she donated to a charity that supports under-represented groups in physics.
Tech Bites
🎮 Google unveils ‘Immersive Stream for Games,’ its service that lets companies use Stadia’s tech - TechCrunch
I’ll report back on this one in a bit more detail soon!
🤖 The 300,000 volunteer hackers coming together to fight Russia - Guardian
🤔 And finally…
I’m accustomed to newspapers using “a football pitch” and “Manhattan” as reference points when explaining the size of something new. “Sylvester Stallone’s new swimming pool is the size of 15 football pitches” or “Celine Dion’s wardrobe is 1/10th the size of Manhattan” or whatever.
There’s a bit of logic to it. I have some concept of the units of measurement and I can vaguely divide or multiply them as required, to create a mental picture. The point is to get the message: A new thing is absolutely huge/tiny.
But what about this?
🤨 Half the size of a giraffe?
What, in terms of height? But it’s the neck bit that makes a giraffe a giraffe.
Why not just say “Asteroid the size of a moose”? That’d be the same height as half a giraffe and it wouldn’t require all the mental acrobatics.
Or do they mean in terms of weight?
Because that’d be… actually the size of a moose again.
It shall remain a mystery. The story’s on the Daily Mail and I’m not going there.
See you next time!
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