George Francis FitzGerald
Millenium Discourse by J. M. D. Coey
Introduction
George Francis FitzGerald was born at No 19 Lower Mount Street on 3rd August 1851, That was the year the first census after the famine revealed a 25 % decline in the population of many Irish counties. At the time, his father William was Professor of Moral Philosophy in Trinity College Dublin and vicar of St Anne's, Dawson Street. The following year he was appointed Professor of Ecclesiastical History and he became rector of Monkstown and Archdeacon of Kildare before returning to his native Munster. Consecrated Bishop of Cork in 1857, William FitzGerald was translated to Killaloe in 1862 two years after his wife's death when George was eight.
According to the Gazetteer of 1837, Clarisford house, the palace of the bishop of Killaloe, Kilfenora, Clonfert and Kilmacduagh on the West bank of the Shannon, "handsome and of modern appearance, though small, forms a pleasant residence". Today, washed a primrose yellow and standing in its long walled garden beside the river with magnolias and camellias flowering in April, it is the sort of period property which fetches a good seven figure sum at auction.
It was in this enchanting setting, at the foot of Lough Derg, near the ancient stone bridge linking the villages of Killaloe and Ballina that George Francis FitzGerald grew up with his brothers Maurice and Willy and sister Edith. Two other sisters, Annie and Beatrice died in childhood. Maurice became the first Professor of Engineering in Belfast; Willy went on to become a country clergyman; Edith married E. P. Culverwell, a mathematician and first Professor of Education in. Next to their house was St Flannan's cathedral, whose square Norman tower and tall narrow windows - the earliest of gothic - creates a sense of harmony and continuity stretching back to the erection of the cathedral in 1160 by Donald, King of Limerick or the consecration of St Flannan himself, the first bishop of Killaloe, by John IV in 639. The shores of Lough Derg were "embellished with several ancient and venerable mansions, embosomed in luxuriant woods and plantations" Patrick Sarsfield had enjoyed some short-lived success against the Williamite army near this spot in 1691. By 1837, " a spirit of cheerful industry and enterprise seemed to promise much for the increasing prosperity of the town". Pike, perch and the Gillaroo trout could be taken by George and his brothers, who were educated at home by Charles Harper, and by the family governess Mary Anne Boole, sister of George Boole, professor in Cork and the father of symbolic logic.
At the age of 16 years, FitzGerald entered College. He graduated in 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, as first senior moderator in both mathematics and experimental science. Deciding on an academic career, he devoted the next six years of his life to preparing for the fellowship examination, reading Lagrange, Laplace, Hamilton, McCullagh and Berkley. He published his first paper on the Kerr effect, the basis of modern magneto-optic recording, in 1876, and spent that Summer at home in Killaloe preparing for his examination and measuring the temperature inversion after a sunny spell in Lough Derg which he later compared to Lake Geneva. Success at TCD came in 1877, on the second attempt.
FitzGerald was to spend the rest of his life at Trinity. His rooms were in No 40. He was appointed Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy in 1881. In 1883 he was elected to fellowship of the Royal Society. In 1885 he married one of the Provost's daughters, Harriette Mary Jellett, and they moved into 7 Ely Place. Eight children soon followed. Fitzgerald was a fine-looking man. We have no oil painting, but a charcoal portrait of him in his late 20's was made by John Butler Yeats. A photograph, possibly taken on a visit to New York in 1898, is striking and according to his colleague John Joly, "absolutely faithful".
Long a sufferer from digestive problems, George Francis FitzGerald succumbed to a perforated ulcer at home on the 22nd of February 1901. An emergency operation performed earlier that day was proclaimed a success but the patient, fatally weakened by overwork and peritonitis, died in his 50th year, a month after Queen Victoria. He was the most distinguished Irish scientist of his age, which included many such. With his passing the scaffolding of the ether began to crumble, but classical electrodynamics emerged intact. Ireland itself embarked on a course which, as he foresaw, led inevitably to the eclipse of science in this country and a long period of decline for Ireland's ancient university.
Today FitzGerald is remembered for having proposed the explanation of the null result of "Michelson and Morley's wonderfully delicate experiment" designed to detect the rush of the Earth through the ether at a rate of about 30 km s-1 It was that "the length of material bodies changes, according to whether they are moving through the ether or across it, by an amount depending on the square of the ratio of their velocity to that of light". The existence of a 20-line letter published in Science in May 1889 was forgotten for over 70 years, but Lorentz nonetheless gave FitzGerald credit for having been the first to to suggest what became known as the FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction, a key element in Einstein's 1905 theory of relativity.
An even briefer communication to the Southport meeting of the British Association in 1883 "On a Method of Producing Electromagnetic Disturbances of Comparatively Short Wavelengths" anticipated Hertz's discovery of radio waves three years later. It is so short it can be quoted in full:
“This is by utilizing the alternating currents produced when an accumulator is discharged through a small resistance. It would be possible to produce waves of as little as 10 meters wavelength or even less.”
He appreciated that these waves would exhibit interference effects, but alas could think of no method of detecting or feeling them - if he had, we might be uttering his name every day as in "the frequency of the mains is 50 FitzGeralds, or 50 Fitz." Henrich Hertz's stumbling on the resonant response of an identical spark-gap circuit lying a few meters away in his laboratory has meant that frequency was forever after measured in Hertz. But to stumble you need a laboratory full of equipment; Hertz had one at the Technische Hochschule in Karlruhe. FitzGerald expended much of his energy in vain attempts to acquire one for Dublin.
FitzGerald enthusiastically promulgated Hertz's discovery in his presidential speech at the Bath meeting of the BA in 1888. He explains that
“He made use of the principle of resonance. You all understand how by a succession of well-timed small impulses a large vibration may be set up It explains many things, from speech to spectrum analysis, It is related that a former Marquess of Waterford used the principle to overturn lampposts; his ambition soared above knocker-wrenching." (Wrenching the knockers off front doors was one of the favourite sports of Dublin bloods in the 18th century). "So it is a principle known to others besides scientific men. Hertz constructed a circuit whose period of vibration for electric currents was the same as that of his generating vibrator, and he was able to see sparks due to the induced vibration, leaping across a small air space in the resonant circuit. The well-timed electrical impulses broke down the air resistance just as those of my lord of Waterford broke down the lamppost.”
This passage illustrates how "the power of grasping instinctively all the bearings of a difficult passage was his to an extraordinary degree". It also shows his gift for communication and unstinting advocacy of good new results and ideas from whatever source. FitzGerald soon repeated Hertz's experiments with his assistant Fred Trouton and later they discovered a new method of detecting VHF radio waves.
In Trinity, FitzGerald is best remembered for his attempts to fly in College Park, the first such endeavors in these islands. A series of photographs from 1895 show the professor, sans jacket but clad in his tall hat, strapped to his flying machine (a Lilienthal glider), taking off from a ramp errected at the side of the pavillion by the Office of Works at a cost of 19/6, being dragged aloft to a height of five feet or so by a team of students, while the plain people of Dublin two deep behind the Nassau Street railings look on in bemusement in their bowlers and flat caps. They may have included the young James Joyce who later invented Stephen Daedelus. Today you can see a Lilienthal glider hanging in Tegel Airport in Berlin. Lilienthal himself was killed in one, on the last of his two thousand short flights. FitzGerald's glider hung for many years in the Museum Building until an idle enginering student is reputed to have applied a lighted match to one of the trailing cords, sending the whole thing up in flames!
Last updated: Oct 06 2006. | back to top