The Beverly Review Special Section
South Side Irish Parade Guide 2015
Medicines, a list of the most
important medications needed in a basic health system.
Frank Pantridge of Belfast pioneered the portable deibrillator is the 1960s, and today
this machine, which delivers
electrical charges to the heart
to reestablish a normal heart
beat, is carried by ambulances throughout the world.
There were also contributions outside of the sciences.
Inventions
(Continued from page 6A)
cord of whisky production in
Ireland comes from 1405, from
Scotland in 1495. Indeed, the
word “whisky” is derived from
the Gaelic term uisce meaning “water” or uisce beatha
meaning “lively water” or
“water of life.” With a license
dating to 1608, Old Bushmills
Distillery in County Antrim
is the oldest licensed whisky
distillery in the world.
Ireland’s reputation for alcohol production might be well
established, but to be fair, the
Irish also invented chocolate
milk. The story goes that in
1680, Irish botanist Sir Hans
Sloane, living in Jamaica at
the time, was given cocoa to
drink by the local people. He
found the drink more palatable by mixing it with milk.
He brought the milk and cocoa mixture back with him to
Europe where it was sold as
medicine for many years.
In the sciences, the Irish
rose to early prominence.
Robert Boyle, born in Lismore, County Waterford,
lived in the 1600s and is considered the founder of modern
chemistry and a pioneer in experimental scientiic method.
He is known for Boyle’s Law,
which describes the relationship between pressure and
volume of gas. His book, “The
Sceptical Chymist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts and Paradoxes” (1681), is a cornerstone
in the ield of chemistry. In it,
he presents his hypothesis
that matter is composed of atoms and reactions are caused
by collision of these particles
in motion.
There follow a number of
other Irish contributions to
the sciences. In 1805, Francis
Beaufort, an Irish Royal Navy
oficer, devised the Beaufort
wind-force scale, which measures wind speed at sea or
on land. In 1836, Nicholas
Callan, a Catholic priest and
scientist at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, developed the
induction coil, the irst electrical transformer. Belfast-born
engineer and physicist William Thomson, First Baron
Kelvin, gave the world the
Kelvin scale, a thermodynamic temperature scale using the
kelvin as the unit of measurement.
In 1851, the ield of seismology was founded by Robert
Mallet, Dublin-born geophysicist, civil engineer and inventor, who graduated in mathematics and science from
Trinity College at the age of
20 and went on to distinguish
himself in research on earthquakes. James Drumm from
County Down developed the
rechargeable zinc-nickel alkaline battery in 1932; capable
of rapid and frequent charging and discharging with no
deterioration, this battery
was a vast improvement over
Thomas Edison’s iron-nickel
battery.
One somewhat macabre
contribution came from Samuel Haughton, a doctor, scientist and writer from Carlow.
He calculated the “Standard
Drop” method for hanging a
person, which came into use
in 1866. Calling for a rope
drop of 4-6 feet, this was considered a humane improvement over prevailing methods
because it was long enough to
break the condemned’s neck
so he or she did not slowly
Emma DeBurdg, showing
her tattoo of the Last
Supper, by Irish-American
tattoo
artist
Samuel
O’Reilly. (from the Web
site boweryboogie.com.
strangle to death.
For the record, so he is not
just thought of as a hangman,
Haughton wrote on a number
of subjects, including physics,
radiation, climate, geology,
tides and zoology.
Modern military strategy
wouldn’t be what it is today
without submarines. John
Philip Holland, an Irish engineer, is widely regarded as
the father of the modern submarine. A member of the Irish
Christian Brothers, while
teaching in Cork he read an
account of the battle between
the ironclads Monitor and
Merrimack during the American Civil War. He realized
that the best way to attack
such ships would be below the
waterline.
He began working on designs for submarines. He
emigrated to the U.S. in 1873,
continuing his design work.
At irst the U.S. military
considered such vehicles unworkable. He privately built
a prototype that launched in
May 1897, the irst submarine having power to run submerged for any considerable
distance, combining electric
motors for submerged travel
and gasoline engines for use
on the surface. The machine
was purchased by the U.S.
Navy in 1900, after rigorous
tests, and was commissioned
USS Holland. Six more of the
type were ordered and built.
The USS Holland design was
also adopted by others, including the Royal Navy.
In the ield of medicine,
among a number of Irish inventions, two particularly
stand out because they are in
daily use–the hollow-needle
syringe and the stethoscope.
In 1844, Irish physician Francis Rynd invented the hollow
needle, allowing for the irst
subcutaneous injections. The
stethoscope, a medical device for listening to internal
sounds of a body, had been invented in France in 1815 as a
monaural wooden tube, meaning the practitioner listened
with one ear, similar to an ear
trumpet. In 1851, Irish physician Arthur Leared invented
a binaural stethoscope, using
lexible tubing connecting to
both ears. This led directly to
the standard that has been
used ever since.
Two other medical breakthroughs attributed to Irish
scientists include the synthesis of the drug Clofazimine,
used in the treatment of leprosy, and the introduction of
portable deibrillators. Developed at Trinity College, the
drug is on the World Health
Organization List of Essential
In the ield of economics,
Richard Cantillon, born in
the 1680s in County Kerry,
deined for the world the concept of an entrepreneur as a
risk-taker who exploits opportunities to maximize inancial
return. His manuscript, “Essay on the Nature of Trade
in General,” is considered the
irst complete treatise on economics, strongly inluencing
those who came after, such as
Section 1 March 11, 2015 Page 15A
Adam Smith.
The term “boycott,” meaning to voluntarily abstain
from dealing with a person,
organization, or country as an
expression of protest, entered
the English language through
Ireland. Captain Charles
Boycott was the agent of an
absentee landlord in County Mayo in 1880. Harvests
had been poor that year, and
(See Inventions page 25A)