Smith is the fourth child of John Smith (1792–1828), a barrister, who dies when Henry is two. His mother, Mary Murphy (d.1857) from Bantry Bay, very soon afterward moves the family to England. He has thirteen siblings, including Eleanor Smith, who becomes a prominent educational activist. He lives in several places in England as a boy. His mother does not send him to school but educates him herself until age 11, at which point she hires private tutors. In 1841, at the age of 15, he is admitted to Rugby School in Warwickshire, where Thomas Arnold is the school’s headmaster. This comes about because his tutor, Henry Highton, takes up a housemaster position there.
At the age of 19 Smith wins an entrance scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He graduates in 1849 with high honours in both mathematics and classics. He is fluent in French having spent holidays in France, and he takes classes in mathematics at the College of Sorbonne in Paris during the 1846–47 academic year. He is unmarried and lives with his mother until her death in 1857. He then brings his sister, Eleanor, to live with him as housekeeper at St. Giles.
Smith remains at Balliol College as a mathematics tutor following his graduation in 1849 and is soon promoted to Fellow status.
In 1874, Smith becomes Keeper of the University Museum and moves, along with his sister, to the Keeper’s House on South Parks Road in Oxford.
On account of his ability as a man of affairs, Smith is in demand for academic administrative and committee work: he is Keeper of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, a Mathematical Examiner for the University of London, a member of a Royal Commission to review scientific education practice, a member of the commission to reform University of Oxford governance, chairman of the committee of scientists overseeing the Meteorological Office and twice president of the London Mathematical Society.
Colleran, and her twin Noreen, are born in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, on October 12, 1945, to John and Josie Colleran. One of a family of five children, her father is a school principal and her mother, also a primary school teacher, dies when she is just 11 years old. She completes her secondary education at St. Louis secondary school in Kiltimagh. She spends a lot of time outdoors as a child, particularly fishing, which sparks her interest in the environment.
On entering higher education, Colleran has a grant from the Department of Education, which requires that she do her studies through the Irish language. Her first choice, Medicine, is not available in Irish so she chooses Science. She graduates with a first-class primary degree in Science at University College Galway (now National University of Ireland, Galway) in 1967.
Colleran lectures in biology at Athlone Regional Technical College (now Athlone Institute of Technology) and Galway Regional Technical College (now Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology) before her appointment as a lecturer in microbiology at NUI Galway in 1976. She is appointed Associate Professor of Microbiology by the Senate of the National University of Ireland in 1990. She is a member of the university’s governing authority for a number of years, but steps down in May 2000 in connection with the selection procedure for the new university president. In October of that year, she is appointed professor of microbiology and chair of the department at NUI Galway.
Colleran is the first director of the Environment Change Institute at NUI Galway set up under the Higher Education Authority‘s Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions in 2000. In 2010, the Environmental Change Institute and the Martin Ryan Marine Research Institute are merged to form the current day Ryan Institute at NUI Galway.
In 1973, Colleran is elected to the committee of the Galway Association of An Taisce, part of a national voluntary organisation the aims of which are conservation in Ireland through education, publicity and positive action. She serves as membership secretary and then treasurer to the Galway branch before becoming chairman. In 1981, as chairman of the Galway branch, she hits back at claims from Galway County Council that An Taisce are “an anonymous group, wielding power unfairly.” She is involved in the compilation of a controversial planning report, published by An Taisce in 1983, which highlights abuse of planning laws by city and county councillors across Ireland, and in particular in counties Galway, Mayo, Donegal, Kerry and Louth.
Colleran serves as Environmental Officer for An Taisce before being elected National Chairman in 1987, the first time a chairman has come from one of the western county associations. She continues to use her position to campaign against misuse of planning laws, for a clamp down on pollution of rivers and lakes, and against a move to scrap An Foras Forbartha, a body that provides independent monitoring of pollution. During her three years as chairman, until May 1990, she is particularly involved in debates over local environmental and planning issues, in particular over gold mining in the west of Ireland, a proposed airport for Clifden, and the planned sewage treatment plant at Mutton Island, County Galway.
In 1991 plans are announced for a new visitor centre, to be located at Mullaghmore in The Burren. Colleran is among those who are part of an appeal, saying that while the plan for the national park is welcomed by An Taisce, they want the visitor centre to be located three or four miles from Mullaghmore.
President Mary Robinson appoints seven new members to her Council of State in February 1991, including Colleran. Other new members appointed at the time are Monica Barnes, Patricia O’Donovan, Quintan Oliver, Rosemarie Smith, Dónal Toolan and D. Kenneth Whitaker. The new Council of State represents a wide spectrum of Irish life and is widely welcomed, although Fine Gael is disappointed that its leader John Bruton is not included.
In 1991, Colleran is one of 15 people appointed to TaoiseachCharles Haughey‘s Green 2000 Advisory Group, to determine which problems will face the environment in the next century. The group is led by Dr. David Cabot, special advisor on environmental affairs.
In 2003, Colleran is elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy.
Colleran is recognised at the annual NUI Galway Alumni Awards in 2004 when she receives the award for Natural Science, sponsored by Seavite Bodycare Ltd., which acknowledges a graduate who has made an outstanding contribution in the field of natural science.
Mitchell’s family moves to Belfast while he is a child. He receives his formal education at Belfast Academy where he excels in mathematics. He begins to notice that his eyesight is failing. By the age of 16 he can no longer read and by the age of 22 he is completely blind.
Undeterred, Mitchell borrows £100 and starts up a successful business making bricks in the Ballymacarrett area of Belfast. This enables him to start building his own houses and he completes approximately twenty in the city. It is during this period that his talent for inventing comes to the fore and he fabricates several machines for use in brickmaking and the building trade.
Mitchell patents the screw pile in 1833, for which he later gains some fame. The screw-pile is used for the erection of lighthouses and other structures on mudbanks and shifting sands, including bridges and piers. His designs and methods are employed all over the world from the Portland, Mainebreakwater to bridges in Bombay. Initially it is used for the construction of lighthouses on Maplin Sands in the Thames Estuary in 1838, at Fleetwood Lancashire (UK) Morecambe Bay in 1839 and at Belfast Lough where his lighthouse is finished in July 1844.
In May 1851 Mitchell moves to Cobh to lay the foundation for the Spit Bank Lighthouse. The success of these undertakings leads to the use of his invention on the breakwater at Portland, the viaduct and bridges on the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway and a broad system of Indian telegraphs.
Mitchell dies at Glen Devis near Belfast on June 25, 1868, and is buried in the old Clifton graveyard in Belfast. His wife and daughter predecease him.
Corrigan is born in Thomas Street, Dublin, on December 2, 1802, the son of a dealer in agricultural tools. He is educated in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, which then has a department for secular students apart from the ecclesiastical seminary. He is attracted to the study of medicine by the physician in attendance and spends several years as an apprentice to the local doctor, Edward Talbot O’Kelly. He studies medicine in Dublin later transferring to Edinburgh Medical School where he receives his degree as MD in August 1825.
Corrigan returns to Dublin in 1825 and sets up a private practice at 11 Ormond Street. As his practice grows, he moves to 12 Bachelors Walk in 1832, and in 1837 to 4 Merrion Square West. Apart from his private practice, he holds many public appointments; he is a physician to St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the Sick Poor Institute, the Charitable Infirmary Jervis Street (1830–43) and the House of Industry Hospitals (1840–66). His work with many of Dublin’s poorest inhabitants leads to him specialising in diseases of the heart and lungs, and he lectures and publishes extensively on the subject. He is known as a very hard-working physician, especially during the Great Famine. At the 1870 Dublin City by-election he is elected a LiberalMember of Parliament for Dublin City. In parliament he actively campaigns for reforms to education in Ireland and the early release of Fenian prisoners. He does not stand for re-election in 1874. His support for temperance and Sunday closing of pubs apparently antagonises his constituents and alcohol companies.
In 1847, Corrigan is appointed physician-in-ordinary to the Queen in Ireland. Two years later he is given an honorary MD from Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In 1846 his application to become a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) is blocked. In 1855 he gets around this opposition by sitting the college’s entrance exam with the newly qualified doctors. He becomes a fellow in 1856, and in 1859 is elected president, the first Catholic to hold the position. He is re-elected president an unprecedented four times. There is a statue of him in the Graves’ Hall of the college by John Henry Foley.
Corrigan is President of the Royal Zoological Society of Dublin, the Dublin Pathological Society, and the Dublin Pharmaceutical Society. From the 1840s he is a member of the senate of the Queen’s University and in 1871 becomes its vice-chancellor. In 1866 he is created a baronet, of Cappagh and Inniscorrig in the County of Dublin and of Merrion Square in the City of Dublin, partly as a reward for his services as Commissioner of Education for many years. He is a member of the board of Glasnevin Cemetery and a member of the Daniel O’Connell Memorial Committee. Armand Trousseau, the French clinician, proposes that aortic heart disease should be called Corrigan’s disease.
Corrigan marries Joanna Woodlock, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and sister of the Bishop Dr. Bartholomew Woodlock, in 1827. They have six children, three girls and three boys. His eldest son, Captain John Joseph Corrigan, Dragoon Guards, dies on January 6, 1866, and is interred at the Melbourne General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia.
Corrigan dies at Merrion Square, Dublin, on February 1, 1880, having suffered a stroke the previous December. He is buried in the crypt of St. Andrew’s Church, Westland Row, Dublin. His grandson succeeds him to the baronetcy.
The Corrigan Ward, a cardiology ward in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, is named in his honour. Part of his family crest is also part of the Beaumont Hospital crest.
Parsons also performs some preliminary work in association with the practices of the electrodeposition of copper sulfate upon silver films circa 1865 while in search of the design for a truly flat mirror to use in a telescope. However, he finds it impossible to properly electroplate copper upon these silver films, as the copper contracts and detaches from the underlying glass substrate. His note has been cited as one of the earliest confirmations in literature that thin films on glass substrates experience residual stresses. He revives discussion in his work Nature’s August 1908 edition after witnessing similar techniques used to present newly devised searchlights before the Royal Society.
Although overshadowed by his father (when astronomers speak of “Lord Rosse”, it is almost always the father that they refer to), Parsons nonetheless pursues some astronomical observations of his own, particularly of the Moon. Most notably, he discovers NGC 2, a spiral galaxy in the constellationPegasus.
After some years of ill-health, Parsons dies on August 30, 1908, at Birr Castle and is buried in the local churchyard. He leaves a bequest to the Royal Society to establish the “Rosse Fund,” and a further £1,000 to the science school fund at TCD.
Stoney is born in Dublin on February 4, 1870, to George and Margaret Sophia Stoney. Her father is a mathematical physicist who later serves as Secretary of Queen’s University of Ireland and is an advocate for women’s right to higher education in Ireland. His efforts are considered to be among the principal reasons that women can qualify for a medical license. Of weak health as a child, she is at first privately educated in the home but then attends the Royal College for Science of Ireland with her sister Edith. In 1883, the Stoney family moves to London in order to provide higher education for the daughters since this is unavailable for women in Ireland at the time. She attends the London School of Medicine for Women where she is a distinguished student with great academic achievements in subjects such as anatomy and physiology. She obtains her MBBS with honours in 1895 and a Doctor of Medicine in 1898, going on to specialise in radiology.
Stoney works as an ENT clinical assistant at the Royal Free Hospital as well as spending six years as a demonstrator in anatomy at the London School of Medicine for Women.
After this she spends a short amount of time in the Victoria Hospital for Sick Children in Kingston upon Hull and then goes on to establish an X-ray department in the Elizabeth Garret Anderson Hospital for Women in London in 1902. At the hospital she carries out a variety of work but mainly deals with X-rays, often developing the radiographic plates at her own house. She is the first female radiologist to work in the United Kingdom at a time when knowledge on radiology and the equipment involved is still in its developmental stages. She is forced to work in poor conditions with badly ventilated rooms and a lack of space for X-ray work. She is given no assistance and has to do the majority of the work on her own. Furthermore, she is excluded as a member of the medical staff and from the X-ray department committee. In 1906 she sets up a practice in Harley Street.
Stoney leaves the hospital at the start of the war. She has 13 years of experience in her field when World War I breaks out in August 1914. She and her sister Edith, a medical physicist, volunteer to assist the British Red Cross, but both are refused by surgeon Frederick Treves since they were women. Despite the refusal, Stoney prepares an X-ray installation and helps to organise a unit of women volunteers alongside Mrs. St. Clair Stobart, Women’s Imperial Service League and the Belgian Red Cross to aid the Belgian soldiers in Antwerp. The team converts an abandoned music hall into a makeshift hospital where she manages the surgical unit as head of the medical staff and radiologist. The hospital comes under fire and after enduring ongoing shellfire for 18 hours, the hospital is evacuated. The team walks to Holland, where they manage to cross the Scheldt River on buses carrying ammunition, twenty minutes before the bridge is blown up. She and her unit earn the 1914 Star for bravery.
Stoney continues working in a hospital near Cherbourg in France, mainly dealing with cases relating to compound fractures and locating bullet fragments in wounds. During this time, she becomes experienced in recognizing dead bone and discovers that removing it will speed up recovery.
In March 1915, the Cherbourg hospital is no longer needed, and Stoney moves back London. She begins full-time work at the 1,000-bed Fulham Military Hospital. She is one of the first female physicians granted to serve as a full-time worker under the British War Office and goes on to receive the Order of the British Empire in June 1919. She works as the Head of the X-ray and Electrical Department and remains there until 1918.
In her later years, Stoney suffers from ill health, largely attributed to her over-exposure to radiation in her work. It is reported that she has X-ray dermatitis of her left hand, a painful skin condition associated in modern times with radiation therapy as a treatment for cancer. She moves to the south coastal town of Bournemouth in England where she is on the staff of two hospitals, practicing radiology part-time. She occupies the position of Honorary Medical Officer to the Electrical Department of the Royal Victoria and West Hants Hospital in Bournemouth. She is the founder and president of the Wessex branch of the British Institute of Radiology. She serves as the consulting actinotherapist at the Victoria Cripples Home. During retirement she pens a number of articles in contribution to the medical literature of the time. She publishes research on topics such as fibroids, goitre, Graves’ disease, soldier’s heart, rickets and osteomalacia.
Stoney retires from all of her hospital positions in 1928 at the age of 58. She, along with her older sister Edith, travel in retirement. One trip is to India, where she writes her final scientific paper, the subject of which is osteomalacia (bone softening), in particular in relation to pelvic deformities in childbirth. She studies and investigates this topic overseas, and specifically the association between UV exposure, vitamin D and skeletal development. In India, she also uses her expertise to advise on the use of UV light in hospitals.
Stoney dies at the age of 62, on October 7, 1932. She is suffering from a long and painful illness, vertebral cancer, again largely attributed to her work in the presence of high levels of radiation. Her funeral takes place on October 11 at Golders Green Crematorium, London. The British Journal of Radiology publishes her official obituary which spans five pages, containing many warm personal testimonials. After her sister’s death, Edith Stoney continues to travel and research.
Cameron is the son of Captain Ewen Cameron of Scotland and Belinda Smith of County Cavan. He is descended from Clan Cameron of Lochiel. He receives his early education in chemistry and pharmaceutical chemistry in Dublin. In 1852 he is elected professor to the newly founded Dublin Chemical Society while continuing to study medicine at several schools and hospitals in Dublin. In 1854 he goes to Germany where he graduates in philosophy and medicine. While there he publishes his translations of German poems and songs.
Upon his return to Ireland, Cameron becomes scientific advisor to the British government in Ireland in criminal cases and over the years takes part in many notable trials, including those relating to the Phoenix Park Murders. In 1862, he becomes public analyst for the City of Dublin, a position which is later extended to 23 counties in Ireland. In 1867, he is elected Professor of Hygiene in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). He is also lecturer in chemistry in Dr. Steevens’ Hospital and the Ledwich School of Medicine, succeeding Dr. Maxwell Simpson, and retains these positions until 1874. In 1875 he is appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
From 1858 to 1863, Cameron is editor and part proprietor of the Agricultural Review, in which he writes hundreds of articles on various subjects. In 1860–62, he is also editor of the Dublin Hospital Gazette and afterward publishes many reports on public health to the Dublin Journal of Medical Science. At this time, he is in contact with many agricultural associations both in Ireland and abroad and receives a number of awards and tributes.
In 1874, Cameron becomes Co-Medical Officer of Health for Dublin Corporation and two years later becomes Chief Medical Officer. Being in charge of the Public Health Department of Dublin City means that he is always in the public eye, and due to the level of poverty and disease in the city at the time his work is cut out for him. He makes many recommendations for improving the sanitation of dwellings and sees to it that unsanitary housing is either improved or closed down. He publishes numerous sanitary reports, papers on hygiene, the social life of the very poor and proper eating habits, those of the very poor in particular. On the other hand, he is in a position to meet the major figures of the day, from the monarchy and the government downward. He is a member of several clubs in the city and dines with local and visiting celebrities alike, which he describes in his reminiscences.
In 1884, Cameron becomes vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland, and the following year becomes president. He is knighted in 1885 in consideration of “his scientific researches, and his services in the cause of public health.” In 1886, he publishes his History of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and of the Irish Schools of Medicine. This work contains nearly 300 biographies of the most eminent medical men in Ireland.
Cameron marries Lucie Macnamara of Dublin in 1862, who dies in the early 1880s. They have eight children. His eldest son, Captain Charles J. Cameron, dies in a boating accident in Athlone in 1913, while another son, Lieutenant Ewen Henry Cameron, shoots himself in a train in Newcastle in 1915 while on the way to the Western Front. Two sons, Edwin and Mervyn, die of pulmonary tuberculosis in their 20s.
Cameron is a leading Freemason in Dublin, serving as Deputy Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Ireland (1911–20), Deputy Grand Master of the Great Priory of Ireland, Sovereign Grand Commander of the Supreme Council of the 33rd degree (Ancient and Accepted Rite for Ireland). He is first initiated as a member of Fidelity Lodge No. 125 in 1858 and is also a member of the Duke of York Lodge No. 25, serving as its secretary for over 50 years.
Cameron dies at his home on Raglan Road in Dublin on February 27, 1921, and is interred in Mount Jerome Cemetery. At his death he leaves a son, Ernest Stuart Cameron, and two daughters, Lucie Gerrard and Helena Stanley.
George Johnstone StoneyFRS, Irish physicist, dies on July 5, 1911, at Notting Hill, London, England. He is most famous for introducing the term “electron” as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity.” He introduces the concept, though not the word, as early as 1874, initially naming it “electrine,” and the word itself comes in 1891. He publishes around 75 scientific papers during his lifetime.
Stoney is born on February 15, 1826, at Oakley Park, near Birr, County Offaly, in the Irish Midlands, the son of George Stoney and Anne (née Bindon Blood). His only brother is Bindon Blood Stoney, who becomes chief engineer of the Dublin Port and Docks Board. The Stoney family is an old-established Anglo-Irish family. During the time of the famine (1845–52), when land prices plummet, the family property is sold to support his widowed mother and family. He attends Trinity College Dublin (TCD), graduating with a BA degree in 1848. From 1848 to 1852 he works as an astronomy assistant to William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, at Birr Castle, County Offaly, where Parsons had built the world’s largest telescope, the 72-inch Leviathan of Parsonstown. Simultaneously he continues to study physics and mathematics and is awarded an MA by TCD in 1852.
From 1852 to 1857, Stoney is professor of physics at Queen’s College Galway. From 1857 to 1882, he is employed as Secretary of the Queen’s University of Ireland, an administrative job based in Dublin. In the early 1880s, he moves to the post of superintendent of Civil Service Examinations in Ireland, a post he holds until his retirement in 1893. He continues his independent scientific research throughout his decades of non-scientific employment duties in Dublin. He also serves for decades as honorary secretary and then vice-president of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS), a scientific society modeled after the Royal Society of London and, after his move to London in 1893, he serves on the council of that society as well. Additionally, he intermittently serves on scientific review committees of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from the early 1860s.
Stoney publishes seventy-five scientific papers in a variety of journals, but chiefly in the journals of the Royal Dublin Society. He makes significant contributions to cosmic physics and to the theory of gases. He estimates the number of molecules in a cubic millimeter of gas, at room temperature and pressure, from data obtained from the kinetic theory of gases. His most important scientific work is the conception and calculation of the magnitude of the “atom of electricity.” In 1891, he proposes the term “electron” to describe the fundamental unit of electrical charge, and his contributions to research in this area lays the foundations for the eventual discovery of the particle by J. J. Thomson in 1897.
Stoney proposes the first system of natural units in 1881. He realizes that a fixed amount of charge is transferred per chemical bond affected during electrolysis, the elementary chargee, which can serve as a unit of charge, and that combined with other known universal constants, namely the speed of lightc and the Newtonian constant of gravitationG, a complete system of units can be derived. He shows how to derive units of mass, length, time and electric charge as base units. Due to the form in which Coulomb’s law is expressed, the constant 4πε0 is implicitly included, ε0 being the vacuum permittivity.
Like Stoney, Max Planck independently derives a system of natural units (of similar scale) some decades after him, using different constants of nature.
Hermann Weyl makes a notable attempt to construct a unified theory by associating a gravitational unit of charge with the Stoney length. Weyl’s theory leads to significant mathematical innovations, but his theory is generally thought to lack physical significance.
Stoney marries his cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney, by whom he has had two sons and three daughters. One of his sons, George Gerald Stoney FRS, is a scientist. His daughter Florence StoneyOBE is a radiologist while his daughter Edith is considered to be the first woman medical physicist. His most scientifically notable relative is his nephew, the Dublin-based physicist George Francis FitzGerald. He is second cousin of the grandfather of Ethel Sara Turing, mother of Alan Turing.
After moving to London, Stoney lives first at Hornsey Rise, north London, before moving to 30 Chepstow Crescent, Notting Hill, west London. In his later years illness confines him to a single floor of the house, which is filled with books, papers, and scientific instruments, often self-made. He dies at his home on July 5, 1911. His cremated ashes are buried in St. Nahi’s Church, Dundrum, Dublin.
Stoney is born into an old-established Anglo-Irish scientific family at 40 Wellington Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin, on January 6, 1869. The daughter of George Johnstone Stoney, FRS, an eminent physicist who coins the term “electron” in 1891 as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity,” and his wife and cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney. One of her two brothers, George Gerald, is an engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). One of her two sisters, Florence Stoney, is a radiologist and receives an OBE. Her cousin is the Dublin-based physicist George Francis FitzGerald FRS (1851–1901), and her uncle Bindon Blood Stoney FRS is Engineer of Dublin Port, renowned for building a number of the main Dublin bridges and developing the Quayside.
Stoney demonstrates considerable mathematical talent and gains a scholarship at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieves a First in the Part I Tripos examination in 1893. However, she is not awarded a University of Cambridge degree as women are excluded from graduation until 1948. During her time at Newnham, she is in charge of the College telescope. She is later awarded a BA and an MA from Trinity College Dublin, after they accept women in 1904.
Following the 1876 Medical Act, it is illegal for academic institutions to prevent access to medical education based on gender. The first medical school for women in Britain is established in 1874 by Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake in anticipation of this law. The London School of Medicine for Women quickly becomes part of the University of London, with clinical teaching at the Royal Free Hospital. Stoney’s sister Florence is a student at the school, graduates in medicine with honours in 1895 (MB BS) and obtains her MD in 1898. Meanwhile, Stoney gains an appointment as a physics lecturer at the school in 1899. Her first tasks are to set up a physics laboratory and design the physics course. The laboratory is planned for 20 students, and the course content is pure physics, as required by university regulations. It includes mechanics, magnetism, electricity, optics, sound, heat and energy. In her obituary in The Lancet, an ex-student of hers notes: “Her lectures on physics mostly developed into informal talks, during which Miss Stoney, usually in a blue pinafore, scratched on a blackboard with coloured chalks, turning anxiously at intervals to ask ‘Have you taken my point?’. She was perhaps too good a mathematician … to understand the difficulties of the average medical student, but experience had taught her how distressing these could be”.
In 1901, the Royal Free Hospital appoints Florence into a new part-time position of medical electrician. The following April, the two sisters open a new x-ray service in the electrical department. During their time at the Royal Free Hospital, the two sisters actively support the women’s suffrage movement, though oppose the direct violent action with which it is later associated.
During her time at the school, Stoney also plays a central role in the British Federation of University Women (BFUW). She is elected treasurer, in her absence, at the first executive meeting on October 9, 1909, a position she holds until the end of May 1915. She becomes increasingly engaged with the political lobbying of the Federation. At the executive meeting on October 19, 1912, she proposes the names of two members for a subcommittee to secure the passing into law of a bill to enable women to become barristers, solicitors or parliamentary agents. The legislation is eventually enacted after the war within the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919.
Stoney resigns her post at the school in March 1915 and it is recorded that “with due regret and most unwillingly a change is desirable in the physics lectureship.” She is offered £300 on tendering her resignation.
Both Stoney and Florence offer their services to the British Red Cross at the War Office in London, to provide a radiological service to support the troops in Europe, on the day Britain declares war. Their offer is refused, because they are women. Florence sets up her own unit with the Women’s Imperial Service League and spends the next 6 months in Europe. Stoney organises supplies from London where she also serves on the League’s committee. Florence returns to London at the time Stoney resigns from the London School of Medicine for Women. She contacts the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), an organisation formed in 1914 to give medical support in the field of battle and financed by the women’s suffrage movement. The organisation has gained agreement to set up a new 250-bed tented hospital at Domaine de Chanteloup, Sainte-Savine, near Troyes (France), funded by the Cambridge women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham and it becomes her role to plan and operate the x-ray facilities. She establishes stereoscopy to localise bullets and shrapnel and introduces the use of x-rays in the diagnosis of gas gangrene, interstitial gas being a mandate for immediate amputation to give any chance of survival.
The hospital is near the front line and, in her own words, by September 1915, “the town had been evacuated, the station had been mined, and we heard the heavy guns ever going at nighttime.” The unit is entirely female, except for two part-time male drivers, and her technical assistant, Mr. Mallett.
They are assigned to the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient and ordered to move to Serbia. After boarding the steamship Mossoul in Marseille, they reach Salonika (known as Thessaloniki in modern Greece) on November 3, where they take the night train north to Ghevgheli (now Gevgelija in modern North Macedonia), on the Serbian side of the Greek border. They set up a hospital in an unused silk factory where they treat 100 patients with injuries ranging from frostbite to severe lung and head wounds. Following defeats at the hands of Bulgarian forces, Stoney and her staff retreat to Salonika by December 6, 1916. Eleven days later, they have re-established the hospital on a drained low swamp by the sea, and by New Year’s Day 1917 she has the lights on and the x-rays working. Despite the lack of equipment and resources, she establishes an electrotherapy department and various equipments for the muscular rehabilitation of the soldiers in their care. She also assists with problems on two British hospital ships, on which the x-ray systems have been damaged during a storm and gives support to the SWH unit in Ostrovo (now Arnissa on Lake Vegoritida formerly lake Ostrovo in Northern Greece), which arrives during September 1916. She has a break for sick leave in December 1917 and returns the following summer. She applies for an appointment as an army camp radiologist in Salonika, but her demand is blocked by the War Office.
In October 1917, Stoney returns to France to lead the x-ray departments at the SWH hospitals of Royaumont and Villers-Cotterêts. In March 1918, she has to supervise a camp closure and retreat for the third time, when Villers-Cotterêts is overrun by the German troops. During the final months of the war the fighting intensifies and there is a steep increase in workload. In the month of June alone the x-ray workload peaks at over 1,300, partly because of an increased use of fluoroscopy.
On returning to England, Stoney takes a post as lecturer in physics in the Household and Social Science department at King’s College for Women which she holds until retirement in 1925. After leaving King’s she moves to Bournemouth, where she lives with her sister Florence, who is suffering from spinal cancer, dying in 1932.
During her retirement, Stoney resumes her work with the BFUW for which she had acted as the first treasurer before the war. She becomes one of the earliest (and oldest) members of the Women’s Engineering Society and plays an active part in the organisation until shortly before her death. She travels widely and, in 1934, she speaks to the Australian Federation of University Women on the subject of women in engineering, highlighting the contribution made by women workers during the war. In 1936, she establishes the Johnstone and Florence Stoney Studentship in the BFUW, for “research in biological, geological, meteorological or radiological science undertaken preferably in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa.” The studentship is now administered by Newnham College, Cambridge, and supports clinical medical students going abroad for their elective period. The declaration of Trust is dated February 11, 1942 and the Johnstone And Florence Stoney Studentship Fund Charity is registered on March 25, 1976.
Stoney dies on June 25, 1938, at age 69, and obituaries are printed in both the scientific and medical press – Nature, The Lancet, The Woman Engineer and national newspapers in England, The Times and Australia.
Stoney is remembered for her considerable bravery and resourcefulness in the face of extreme danger, and her imagination in contributing to clinical care under the most difficult conditions of war. As a strong advocate of education for women, she enables young graduate women to spend time on research overseas and another to enable physicists to enter medical school thanks to the fund she created. Through her work and engagements, she is remembered as a pioneer of medical physics.
(Pictured: Edith Anne Stoney during her time in Cambridge in the early 1890s)
Mallet is the son of factory owner John Mallet. He is educated at Trinity College, Dublin, entering it at the age of 16 and graduating in science and mathematics in 1830 at the age of 20.
Following his graduation, Mallet joins his father’s iron foundry business and helps build the firm into one of the most important engineering works in Ireland, supplying ironwork for railway companies, the Fastnet Rock lighthouse, and a swing bridge over the River Shannon at Athlone. He also helps manufacture the characteristic iron railings that surround Trinity College, and which bear his family name at the base.
In 1838 Mallet becomes a life member of the Royal Geological Society of Ireland and serves as its President from 1846–1848. From 1848–1849 he constructs the Fastnet Rock lighthouse, southwest of Cape Clear.
On February 9, 1846, Mallet presents to the Royal Irish Academy his paper On the Dynamics of Earthquakes, which is considered to be one of the foundations of modern seismology. He is also credited with coining the word “seismology” and other related words which he uses in his research. He also coins the term epicentre.
From 1852 to 1858, Mallet is engaged in the preparation of his work, The Earthquake Catalogue of the British Association (1858) and carries out blasting experiments to determine the speed of seismic propagation in sand and solid rock.
On December 16, 1857, the area around Padula, Italy is devastated by the Great Neapolitan earthquake which causes 11,000 deaths. At the time it is the third largest known earthquake in the world and has been estimated to have been of magnitude 6.9 on the Richter Scale. Mallet, with letters of support from Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, petitions the Royal Society of London and receives a grant of £150 to go to Padula and record at first hand the devastation. The resulting report is presented to the Royal Society as the Report on the Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857. It is a major scientific work and makes great use of the then new research tool of photography to record the devastation caused by the earthquake. In 1862, he publishes the Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857: The First Principles of Observational Seismology in two volumes. He brings forward evidence to show that the depth below the Earth’s surface, from where the impulse of the Neapolitan earthquake originated, is about 8–9 geographical miles.
One of Mallet’s papers is Volcanic Energy: An Attempt to develop its True Origin and Cosmical Relations, in which he seeks to show that volcanic heat may be attributed to the effects of crushing, contortion, and other disturbances in the crust of the earth. The disturbances leading to the formation of lines of fracture, more or less vertical, down which water would find its way, and if the temperature generated be sufficient volcanic eruptions of steam or lava would follow.
seamus dubhghaill 