Popular Science Review - Ingenious Ireland

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Review - Ingenious Ireland - Mary Mulvihill

There's a bit of something for everyone in this entertaining county-by-county tour of Irish natural, scientific and just downright strange marvels.

It more a reference title than a true popular science book that you would read cover to cover (the author describes it as being "designed for dipping into"), and it's as likely to cover industrial archaeology or pure technology as true science - hence the relatively low scoring of stars - but this doesn't make it any less a delightful book for anyone interested in Ireland, or wanting a tour guide to find the truly fascinating and mind-boggling historical and technical aspects of this wonderful country.

After a brief summary of the natural history of the island of Ireland, we set off on the tour, starting with Dublin, which gets a whole chapter of its own. Chapter after chapter then peel away the secret layers of Ireland to reveal the surprises beneath.

A typical entry has the location and a witty title, a few paragraphs of text and perhaps a photograph or a shaded box with an interesting aside. So, for instance, in the Dublin chapter we meet up with "Number, please", the entry on Ireland's first telephone line, connecting a hotel and a shop, which started operating in January 1878, just 22 months after Bell's momentous demonstration. The accompanying photograph shows an early Irish telephone from around 1900, while the box tells of Tyndall's discovery that light will travel down a stream of water from a tap, leading to the invention of fibre optics. (In fact, Tyndall's discovery was as a result of watching water flow from a hole in a tank - the light couldn't have got in the top of a tap. And this happened at the Royal Institution in London, rather than Ireland, though to be fair Tyndall was Irish.)

Elsewhere you'll find topics as wide as Ireland's sugar beet industry, reconstructing traditional currachs (small boats), harvesting seaweed, the Knock apparition and the world's largest telescope (at the time it was built). You can even find out how such cosmopolitan figures as Guillermo Marconi and Erwin Schrodinger had Irish connections. This is a book that's well worth taking a dip in - you're sure to find a surprise.

Only in hardback.

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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