Once asked to name the greatest of all the inventors, Mark Twain replied: “Accident”. Had Mary Mulvihill’s freewheeling narrative through every county in Ireland been available in his lifetime, he would have had plenty of historic names from which to choose. Peppered with quirky snippets, esoteric and entertaining facts, her book reveals insights into the lives of trailblazing men and women, neglected subjects and underrated landscapes.
The author was a pioneering science writer and broadcaster who died in 2015. Instrumental in founding Wits: Women in Technology and Science, her legacy lives on in this engaging book first published in 2002. Subtitled “A county-by-county exploration of Irish mysteries and marvels”, it covers a great deal of ground, commemorating achievements of pioneers in the disciplines of science, medicine, engineering, archaeology, architecture, geography and natural history.
Written in a reader-friendly style in the form of an odyssey around the country, the journey starts in Dublin city and county before whisking us anti-clockwise. The lion’s share is devoted to Dublin with one fifth of the contents concentrated in the capital where a fascinating story features a soon to be famous animal. In 1927, a lion called Cairbre was born in Dublin Zoo and went on to become MGM’s trademark roaring mascot.
Slivers of little-known history come to light on every page. You can delve into the geological controversy of the Neptunists versus the Vulcanists, find out about the Navier-Stokes equations which describe how a viscous fluid flows, or learn about the monks of Durrow Abbey, who in 1054 saw the first European sighting of the supernova, a violent explosion of a dying star.
Aside from a vast range of topics, a diverse gallimaufry of people is brought to life in biographical sketches. Maude Delap, an indefatigable self-taught marine biologist, was the first person to breed jellyfish in captivity, and through complex experiments, helped untangle the species puzzle from her laboratory on Valentia Island. Another marine expert, Annie Massy, from Galbally near Limerick, developed an international reputation, and first identified an Irish cephalopod, Cirroteuthis massyae, named in her honour.
A Tyrone man, Sir Thomas Maclear, who advised the explorer David Livingstone, was a giant of astronomy at the Cape of Good Hope, and a crater on the moon is named in his memory. (He was commemorated in 2019 with a blue plaque unveiled in Newtownstewart by the Ulster History Circle).
Hundreds of authoritative entries, many of them succinctly compressed, testify to the breadth of subject matter. The prodigious inventor and blind engineer, Alexander Mitchell, patented his underwater screw-pile lighthouse in Dundalk in 1833 by using cast-iron rods to help secure mooring. A few kilometres west, Inniskeen in Co Monaghan - where Patrick Kavanagh was born - was also the homeplace of Peter Rice, a design engineer, celebrated in architectural circles as “the James Joyce of engineering” but largely unknown in Ireland. Rice, who had a flair for mathematics, was instrumental in helping architects realise their dreams in structures such as the Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Lloyd’s of London building.
Within its 500 pages, space has been found for detailed maps and illustrations, a directory of centres and organisations, a bibliography and index. The book is published in precisely the same layout and format as the original 17 years ago, although no attempt has been made to update text or captions for a new readership. On the boglands, it is stated that “large-scale turf-cutting continues in the midlands, mainly to fuel electricity-generating stations”. But with the imminent closure of the ESB-owned plants at Lanesborough in Co Longford and at Shannonbridge in Co Offaly, this way of life is vanishing.
Adjusting the authorial voice may have presented difficulties but could surely have been surmounted with basic fact-checking: the corncrake is no longer heard on the Shannon callows; the British Association for the Advancement of Science (now called the British Science Association) last held its meeting in Ireland in 2005, not 1987; far from still producing glass pieces, the Tyrone Crystal factory closed in 2010; the number of students listed at Queen’s University is 15,000 but today’s figure is 25,000. The republication would have benefited from a revision of specific details which a swift search or telephone call would have clarified.
Despite these quibbles, the fundamentals of Mulvihill’s teeming research and insatiable curiosity, viewed through a scientific lens and linked to her skilfully handled writing, remain largely timeless. An eponymous association and annual award has been established to commemorate her work.
More cornucopia than encyclopaedia, this book should not be devoured at a single sitting but savoured slowly, uncovering morsels of recondite information to surprise your friends. Browsing the pages calls to mind a quotation from the polymath Bertrand Russell: “It’s so nice to know things”.
