My Mother and Daniel J. Travanti
If it were only for one reason that I would say that I love the Victorians it’s that they seemed to have an almost innate fear, a deep abhorrence, of the very thought of being pigeon-holed.Broadcast on RTE Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany on 14 April, 2013.
Today, it is as though we all have to be one ‘thing’ and then that ‘thing’ defines you. It’s rare to come across someone who breaks the rule – someone who is both a guard and an architect, a shopkeeper and an astronomer, an accountant and a scientist, a writer and a bricklayer.
Children are always being asked what they want to be when they grow up. When they give multiple answers – they want to be an actress and a vet, a footballer and an artist, a fireman and a teacher – it almost invariably causes the adult to smile and nod, before telling them that there is still plenty of time for them to make up their mind.
It’s as though we are only capable of being sufficiently proficient at one thing and that is what we must concentrate on. This general attitude is the reason why I don’t like being asked what I do by someone when I first meet them. I know that as soon as I tell them they will, without even thinking about it, start making assumptions about who I am, defining me, putting me in a box.
But the Victorians had a different attitude.
Take Robert Mallet.
Robert Mallet was from one of England’s longest standing families – indeed it was one of the few able to trace their direct ancestry back to someone who had taken part in the Battle of Hastings no less. But Robert’s father moved from Dorset to Dublin in the late eighteenth century. By the time Robert was born in Ryder Row, off Capel Street, in 1810, he ran a plumbing, engine and iron firm.
Robert was reportedly an incredibly inquisitive young boy. So inquisitive in fact that a room had been set aside for him at Ryder Row called ‘the laboratory’ where he would conduct numerous experiments with materials found in the workshops.
When the time came Robert entered Trinity College where he studied Mathematics and Science. Shortly after he graduated in 1830 he became a partner in his father’s firm which had by then evolved into what was primarily an engineering foundry. Soon afterwards he took over the running of it.
It was certainly a case of good timing, because this was the period when the country was being criss-crossed with railroads. Mallet’s firm managed to secure a good chunk of these railway contracts. Mallet’s foundry was also responsible for a swing bridge over the River Shannon at Athlone and another notable contract was for the erection of the now iconic iron railings around Trinity College Dublin – if you look at the railings today you can still see Mallet’s name. In 1854 he also provided the ironwork for the original Fastnet Lighthouse.
But Mallet’s firm was not merely about nuts and bolts. Mallet was incredibly innovative. In fact he first came to public notoriety when he used screw jacks to raise the roof of St. George’s Church on Hardwicke Place, on the north side of the city, to allow a supporting wall to be repaired – the roof being safely lowered back into place in one piece afterwards.
During the Crimean War he designed and built two huge mortars that were capable of firing 36 inch shells a distance of a mile. However, unfortunately – or fortunately – the war ended before they could be used.
Another of Mallet’s inventions was his Patented Buckled Iron Plate for flooring of bridges, viaducts, jetties, fire proof buildings, railway wagons & iron door panels, plating between iron pilings. His buckled plate greatly increased the strength of the iron without increasing its weight. His invention was first used on London’s Westminster Bridge.
Mallet was a member of the Royal Irish Academy and was instrumental in the establishment of the School of Engineering in Trinity College.
One might deem all that quite enough for the lifetime of any one man, or woman. However, there was another entirely different facet to Mallet’s array of talents.
Robert Mallet studied earthquakes. But that’s hardly doing him justice. Robert Mallet did not just study earthquakes, he is regarded as the founding father of seismology, or the scientific study of earthquakes. Mallet invented the words ‘seismology’ and ‘epicentre’ and his 1846 paper ‘On the Dynamics of Earthquakes’ is regarded as one of the first documents of seismology.
In 1849 and 1850 Mallet, assisted by his son, carried out two experiments to establish if the energy from earthquakes traveled in waves. He buried kegs of gun powder, detonated
them and then, using precise instruments, measured the shock waves. The first keg was buried and detonated in 1849 at Killiney Beach, then far to the south of Dublin city. This allowed Mallet to measure the passage of the shock waves through sand. The following year he carried out the same experiment on Dalkey Island not far from Killiney beach, this time measuring the waves through solid granite. The results of these experiments provided the foundation for the scientific study of earthquakes.
When southern Italy was devastated by an earthquake in December 1857 – it was one of the most severe earthquakes then known, killing more than 10,000 people – a unique opportunity was presented to Mallet to study the effects of the forces that he had been trying to comprehend. He applied for and received funding to travel to the affected region. He spent a month gathering material for what would ultimately be his publication, ‘Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857: The First Principles of Observational Seismology’. Published by the Royal Society in 1862 it is regarded as a seminal work. The technical information amassed by Mallet covered a vast array of topics – the wave paths of energy, angles of emergence, the direction of the fall of buildings, the effect of underlying geology, landslides, fissures in the earth, the effects of the energy waves on different buildings, among other matters – it was also one of the first times that photographic evidence was used in the pursuit of scientific investigation. But the report is also a fascinating account of his travels through a devastated landscape by a man who was not only inquisitive but also erudite and sensitive. Reading it Mallet comes across as the sort of person you’d love to sit beside at a dinner party.
That he is largely unknown outside of the scientific and academic community in Ireland is a great pity. The only public memorial that I am aware of is a plaque recently erected by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council to celebrate his landmark experiment at Killiney Beach.
In 1861, the year before he published the report on the Neapolitan earthquake, he moved to London. Despite this move he was made President of the Irish Institute of Civil Engineers in 1866. Having previously been awarded the Telford Medal by the British Institute of Civil Engineers in London, Mallet he was also awarded the Wollastan Medal by the Royal Geological Society in 1877. Those medals are the highest awards that are given by each of the respective society’s and Mallet is one of the very few to have been awarded both. In his later years Mallet continued to write and edit, though by the mid-1870s he had become almost completely blind. He died in south London in 1881
Robert Mallet was buried in Norwood cemetery in London. I’ve never seen his grave, but I do wonder at the size of the headstone erected in his honour if all of his life’s achievements have been listed.
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