This year marks the 300th anniversary of Trinity’s school of physics. The school, like College itself, has undergone tremendous change since its inception in 1724. Let’s wind back the clock three hundred years and see where we land.
The Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Experimental and Natural Philosophy, College’s first chair of physics, was established in 1724. It was named after philanthropist landowner Erasmus Smith, who funded three other Trinity professorships in mathematics, Hebrew, and history. Physics, or “experimental philosophy”, was still an emerging discipline in the early 18th century. There were not many professorships of physics in Europe at the time, and the establishment of the Erasmus chair marked College’s recognition of it as a worthy subject of study.
Departments were non-existent, specialisation uncommon: general interdisciplinary university degrees instead encouraged staff and students to be polymaths
The first Erasmus Smith professor was Richard Helsham, a chair of ‘physick’ (medicine) described by none other than Jonathan Swift as “the most eminent physician of this city and kingdom”. Helsham had previously given (unpaid) lectures in “experimental philosophy” in College, favouring new methods and learning over traditional mediaeval approaches. His range of professional interests show just how different the academic system was then. Departments were non-existent, specialisation uncommon: general interdisciplinary university degrees instead encouraged staff and students to be polymaths. Matthew Young, sixth Erasmus chair, published on algebra, hydrodynamics, and Gaelic poetry. How’s that for eclectic!
Specialisation did start creeping into physics teaching in the early 19th century when Bartholomew Lloyd (chair 1822-1831) introduced moderatorships. In 1871 John Robert Leslie (chair 1870-1881) added the moderatorships choices of ‘Experimental Science’ (physics, chemistry, mineralogy), or ‘Natural Science’ (geology, zoology, and botany). These would last until 1955.
Things became more department-like during G.F. Fitzgerald’s professorship (1881-1901). Attitudes to physics were changing, becoming more professionalised. Fitzgerald began giving undergraduates practical physics classes in a disused chemistry lab, a big step forward as the course had had no proper practical component until then. Class sizes grew to the jam-packed Fresher lectures we know today as other disciplines (engineering, medicine, teaching, etc.) were encouraged to take physics courses. The department operated from the Museum building then, and conditions were cramped. Fitzgerald pushed for a new laboratory but died in 1901 before it could be built. Geologist and fellow physicist John Joly continued the effort: the lab was finished in 1906, just five years after Fitzgerald’s death, and the building renamed in his honour in 2001.
Crowds gathered outside the Nassau Street railings, trying to catch a glimpse of Fitzgerald’s ‘flying machines’
Celebrated for the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction (a theory about objects moving at the speed of light later corroborated by Einstein’s special relativity), Fitzgerald had also been known on campus for something rather more eccentric: his ‘flying machines’. Anecdotes tell how he would often appear on the cricket pitch with a great winged contraption strapped to his arms and attempt to take off by sprinting across the grass. The general public crowded outside the Nassau Street railings, trying to catch a glimpse of this bizarre sight. One of Fitzgerald’s machines hung in the Museum Building until a mischievous student set fire to it in the 1930s; all that remains now is the receipt.
Around 1906 the physics department awarded a degree to one of the first ‘steamboat ladies’, an Irishwoman named Edith Stoney. Stoney had achieved a First at Cambridge but was barred from graduating because she was – well, a ‘she’. In fact, Cambridge didn’t allow its female students to graduate until 1948. The department here granted her a BA and an MA on the merit of her Cambridge work. Stoney went on to become the first woman medical physicist. Her father was alumnus George Stoney, who coined the term ‘electron’.
Trinity’s second century of physics teaching drew to a close at a turbulent time in Irish history. Despite the new laboratory, research had stagnated after Fitzgerald’s death. A 1920 report recommended £30,000 be granted annually to Oxford, Cambridge, and Trinity universities, but post-Partition the Free State Dáil rejected the grant, leaving Trinity’s funding desperately low compared to its Oxbridge sisters.
The department scraped by. Cambridge graduate Robert Ditchburn was elected Erasmus Smith chair in 1929. Ditchburn oversaw an array of reforms to the physics course during his 17-year term, including doubling final year students’ research time and replacing much of the theoretical physicists’ experimental work with further reading on developing topics like quantum mechanics.
The department’s famed pitch-drop experiment was set up in 1944. One of the world’s oldest continuous experiments, it demonstrates that tar pitch is a slow-flowing liquid (about two million times thicker than honey). A drop falls about once a decade and was finally caught on camera in 2013.
Ditchburn’s successor was Waterford man and soon-to-be Nobel Prize winner Ernest Walton (chair 1946-1974). Despite lack of funding, the department grew as Walton recruited fresh staff and updated undergraduate syllabuses with new discoveries in things like nuclear and solid-state physics.
The College Board’s meeting minutes never recognise or even mention Walton’s Nobel Prize
In 1951 Walton and colleague John Cockroft received the Nobel Prize in physics for their experimental verifying Einstein’s special relativity (e=mc2, you know the one). This was, naturally, a great honour, however it might be surprising to know that the College Board’s meeting minutes never recognise or even mention the prize. This was due to a lingering Victorian-style administration where tradition meant that if an award wasn’t given by College itself, the Board would not refer to it. Unlucky Walton should have waited a few months: in June of 1952, new Provost A.J. McConnell overthrew the old order and instated an updated, less archaic system. (Walton does have his plaque now though, set proudly by the doors of the Fitzgerald building).
So the mid-century crept by. 1970 saw ‘the Ban’ lifted by the Church, finally allowing Catholic students into Trinity. Student numbers rose, demographics changed, and the physics department found a new lease of life: Brian Henderson became chair in 1971, bringing over a large amount of equipment from his fellowship in Keele and securing an unprecedented £30,000 grant from College; Senior Sophisters’ set lab experiments were scrapped in place of the project work still done today; numerous new staff arrived, among them Michael Coey, Ireland’s most-cited scientist and Erasmus chair 2007-2012, and Collette McDonagh, Trinity’s first ever woman physics PhD student (better late than never). Henderson also co-founded Physoc, the student physics society.
In the 80s a rotating headship was introduced, meaning the Erasmus Smith professor no longer had to be Head of School. By this time, the department had evolved into the research group-based structure it has today. Erasmus professor Dennis Weaire recruited many names still associated with the department today, like Stefan Hutzler, Louise Bradley, and current Erasmus professor Jonathan Coleman. More attention began to be paid to the history and heritage of the school during this period: portraits and old instruments started to be put on display in the Fitzgerald building, as seen today.
The 2010s saw projects like the Walton Club, the department’s outreach program for schoolchildren, set up, along with Eilís O’Connell’s eye-catching silver ‘Apples and Atoms’ sculpture which now sits by the corner of the Fitzgerald building.
For administrative reasons, the Erasmus Smith professorship stood vacant for ten years until the appointment of Jonathan Coleman two years ago, just in time to celebrate the 2024 tercentenary.
Here’s to the long and winding road of departmental change and evolution: it’s been quite a journey, now may it ever continue.
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Three weeks of celebrations took place last April, comprising lectures, workshops, and a banquet for staff and students. Many of the talks are available on the department’s website, including an interview with physicist Marion Walton, Ernest Walton’s daughter. For more information see tcd.ie/physics/300. Thanks to Dr. Eric Finch for his research on the history of the department.
