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George Francis FitzGerald

Millenium Discourse by J. M. D. Coey

Other Achievements

Turning to FitzGerald's other achievements, I will mention four:

his role in DUESA,
in College sport,
in campaining for adequate laboratory facilities in College,
his wider struggle to promote technical education in this country.

The Dublin University Experimental Science Association (DUESA) was founded the year after FitzGerald was elected to Fellowship. The plan was for a University Society comprising undergraduates and senior members which would meet once a month for tea and short presentations, followed by discussion. Meetings were planned for the second Wednesday of each month during the academic year, with the aim of "encouraging investigations and interesting experiments in all branches of experimental science - physics and chemistry". Furthermore, it was proposed that "no member be permitted to ocupy the time of the association by making a communication or exhibiting an experiment for more than a quarter of an hour, and in the course of discussion speak for more than five minutes". Members were required to wear their academic costume. Annual subscriptions were set at 5/- (about £25 in today's money), and 49 subscriptions were secured in the first year; the initial outlay was on crockery for the tea.

At the first meeting, on 13th March 1878, the first communication On the Relations between the Radiometer and the Spheroidal State" was by FitzGerald. He continued to play the leading role in the Association over the next ten years, with the remarkable record of submitting as many communications and exhibits as there were meetings (49). The average number of contributions per meeting was around five. On only 14 occasions did FitzGerald fail to propose some communication or exhibit an experiment. Other prominent figures in the association at that time were John Joly (37 presentations), Dr Emerson Reynolds (30), Fred Trouton (15) and George Coffey (14). Four out of five became fellows of the Royal Society. The 15 minute limitation was evidently something of a constraint, but by 1879 FitzGerald had hit on the expedient of making a communication and giving an exhibition at the same meeting. By 1883, rules were being bent to allow him three spots on the program. His range was quite remarkable, spanning fresh and salt water rainbows, the deposition of metallic thin films, Crooke's molecular shadows, his model of the ether, the analogy between heat and electricity, the thermal resistance of clothes, the relation of surface tension to muscular contraction and photographs of the solar spectum. His inaugural address in 1886 on experimental science in schools and universities was reported in Nature. From 1882, short accounts of the meetings were being published in the Irish Times.

Sport was another area where the College community found expression. FitzGerald was a keen athlete and gymnast who held the Irish pole-vault record, and also played racquets and hurley though he had no special talent for ball games. Hurling, which had been played in College throughout the 19th century was formalized here in 1870 with publication of the Laws of Hurley. It was the northern variant played in winter with a narrow stick. The GAA adopted a different version in 1884, but by then the Trinity game was evolving into what we now call hockey. The hockey club retained the black and green colours. College's work in keeping a form of hurling alive in Ireland in the years after the famine was soon forgotten.

FitzGerald remained trim and slim throughout his life with no trace of middle-aged spread, and there was no shortage of students ready to haul him into the air on the Lilienthal glider. He was invited to become president of the newly-formed hockey club in 1893 (the year of Gladstone's Home Rule bill). He was also vice-president of the Boat Club, who bore his coffin at the funeral.

In 1899 the Board asked FitzGerald, as Registrar of the Engineering School, to join a committee, chaired by Mahaffey, to report on the need for science facilities in College. The committee recommended a development scheme requiring a capital outlay of £70,000 and extra annual expenditure of about £5000. To convert roughly to today's money, multiply by 100. A labourer made about £50 a year, a professor could make £1000, all told. A good georgian house in central Dublin cost about £1500. College's income in 1899 was about £80,000 (say £8M, for a complement of 1000 students and 70 academic staff, compared to £90M today for 14,000 students and 550 staff). Arguing

"As it is by the action of the British Governments, and for the most part friendly Governments, that her resources are impaired and as the possibility of maintaining her position is endangered by Institutions which give not better but cheaper degrees, any eclipse of her prosperity cannot but be attributed to causes which she was wholly unable to avert or control"

The Committee's view was that the Imperial Parliament should be asked to foot the bill. Board

"Requested the committee to reconsider its report with a view to making all possible economies, more especially with a view to severing the recommendations immediately effecting the training of students from the endowments proposed for mere research".

FitzGerald was incensed, and drew up his own realistic plans in 1900 requiring £250,000, or double what the German State of Darmstat had spent for technical education in a city with 1/8th of Dublin's population a few years earlier. No lesser sum would suffice to ensure that the university remained in the front rank as far as science is concerned. He also submitted to Board his personal request for a £150 pay rise, with £50 for his assistant Trouton, on account of greatly-increased teaching commitments, including medical and engineering students since his appointment. This was not entirely consistent with his view, shared by many overwrought professors, that it is no part of the business of the universities to teach, but that

"It is the business of the students to learn... The business of Universities is to advance culture and knowledge, and to afford students an opportunity of learning how to do this."

Furthermore

"If Universities do not study useless subjects, who will?"

This is from a letter to Nature "On the Value of Useless Studies". Consistency was never the greatest of FitzGerald's virtues. The Board granted him a £100 pay rise and authorization to look into the provision of lectures in electrical engineering by using extern lecturers.

Mahaffey's commission revised their request downwards by 50% in 1902, the year after FitzGerald's death, and urged that priority be given to Physics and Botany. An appeal raised a disappointing £19,000, and it was eventually through the generosity of Lord Iveagh that two fine Edwardian granite buildings were erected in 1906 and 1907 for these departments at a cost of £26,950 (say £2.7M; you got more building for your money in those days). It was a very modest step in relation to the country's needs or FitzGerald's ambitions, but tangled university politics of the day, and the determined opposition of the Roman Catholic hierarchy made it impossible even then for Trinity to realise its potential in the life of the country.

Besides commitment to research at all levels from useless studies to applied science, coupled with an understanding of what it cost and how it should be paid for, education at all levels was FitzGerald's passionate concern. He busied himself with the education of his own young brood - Three sons and five daughters. He was appointed to the Board of National Education in 1888, and offered his blunt opinions of the quality of the readers used in National Schools - cheap and bad. But it was for the areas of technical and practical education that he felt most concern. He thought and talked and wrote a lot about education, and for his pains he found himself Commissioner for Intermediate Education and member the Board for Technical Education as well. The latter was responsible for the new Institute of Technology in Kevin Street.

FitzGerald believed that children should be introduced to physical reasoning by working out the consequences of simple experiments, and that this was of far greater value than rote learning and a better exercise in getting children to think from an early age than the study of dead languages, for which he felt little sympathy. Although lacking aptitude for modern languages, he had the good grace to feel embarassed at having to communicate with his continental colleagues almost exclusively in English. He thought that Latin and Greek worked to the exclusion of literature and history:

"We must have literature and history. We must have knowledge of the laws of the world in which we have to work."

But we must first cease to pretend that the

"Lop-sided corpse that occupies our schools and universities is a well-developed, symmetrical giant."

Asking

"Why are we so far behind in all this in Ireland ? Is it the fault of the farmers- of the industrial classes ?"

he answers,

"No. It is the fault of our educational system. .... How can we expect any other result when the educational machinery of the country is controlled by a a lot of very worthy old bookworms with more sympathy with the theory of equations and Greek verse than with the industrial welfare of the country ? .... Blind leaders of the blind, we will soon all be in the ditch together.

It is all very well to complain that the industrial classes are not industrious, that they are not cleanly, that they are fond of loafing. This may all be quite true; but who is it sets them the example of being content with what their forefathers did ? Who sets them the example of refusing to change with the times ? Who sets them the example of behaving like Red indians and Australian Savages who cannot change with the times, and are consequently being exterminated ? It is the authorities of the University of Dublin. It is the Board of Intermediate Education. It is the Board of National Education. It is those gentry who think more of sport than industry, who have left it to the nuns to teach the people to clear away dirt from their houses, and the manure heap from their house doors.

Awake ! O leaders and Press of Ireland, before it is too late - before the people of Ireland are swept away like the Red Indian and the Maori by the competition of people with capable leaders. The people are starving for bread and you have given them educational stones, and their blood cries out against you."

He may have been no democrat, but his heart was surely in the right place. Education for FitzGerald was a battle for the future of Ireland. No less than St. Ignatius Loyola, he believed that habits of thought were irrevocably set in the early years. He wanted reason and appeal to experience to be at the core of the educational enterprise at all levels, for the sake of the future well-being and competitiveness of the country. It was a protestant program in a century when the Roman Catholic Church was striving to extend its control over the educational system in Ireland, a policy which led Cardinal Cullen to pronounce his anathema on Trinity College at the Synod of Maynooth in 1875, the notorious ban which would not formally be lifted for almost one hundred years.

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