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George Francis FitzGerald

Millenium Discourse by J. M. D. Coey

Character and Views

So what do we know of the personality of George Francis FitzGerald? What about his character and views? He was surely not a timid man. His milder brother Willy who had been embarrassed by George's efforts to secure him a better living describes him as "impulsive and passionate". College lore relates how he threatened to stab a colleague with a dinner knife who infuriated him by his malicious talk at lunch. He felt issues in his guts - and his guts suffered and eventually killed him. But surprisingly, for a man with such a fiery temperament, he was much better loved than hated. This surely reflects his generosity, simplicity and want of personal ambition. He had his success early, and was ever more concerned to promote the ideas he thought were right, whether in physics, education or college politics, than to secure credit for himself. It is easy to say that provided a discovery is made, it matters little who made it, but it is not so easy to consistently feel and act in that spirit; but so far as it can be done, FitzGerald did it, and apparently almost without effort.

He expended much effort and ingenuity in 1894 to devise a way of persuading Heaviside, who lived on the borderline of penury on an income of £50 a year to accept a grant of £400 from the Royal Society for which he was unwilling to apply FitzGerald was genuinely sympathetic to children and students. Babyish and childish are words he uses thoughtfully, not as terms of abuse. In College he was friendly with students. The moderators in Experimental Science over the precious ten years presented him with a handsome 8-day clock cum weather station for his wedding. It now keeps time in the FitzGerald library.

Let me recount two examples which illustrate his attitude. On 26th February 1897, Irvine Cochrane Davys a Junior Sophister tossed a cigarette into the occupied rows in front of him, just as the Professor arrived to give his lecture. FitzGerald was irritated at seeing paper thrown and asked Davys to leave his his class. On the way out, Davys pointed out that it was not paper, but a cigarette that was involved but of course the quibble only irritated Professor FitzGerald who told him not to come back to his lectures that year. That would have had the effect of making Davys repeat his entire JS year, and he wrote a mitigated apology that afternoon, foolishly maintaining the distinction between a cigarette and a piece of paper. Nevertheless FitzGerald accepted it, and a fullsome letter of gratitude from Davys followed the next day.

If he was a concientious teacher, inspiring senior students, he had discipline problems with the large elementary class of medical and engineering students. "During his tenure of the chair there was founded a tradition of wild disorder in these lectures which took many years to extinguish".

On the 7th February 1887, he writes to resign from the Mermaid Shakespeare Club. He explains

"I feel this is an irreparable loss to myself. I do not do so either because of want of time or inclination or opportunity to attend the meetings. I could and would wish to do so as well in the future as I have done in the past."

Why on earth then is he resigning ? He goes on

"It is the misfortune of age (he is then 36) to act as a restraint on youth and it is a misfortune for youth to feel that restraint on occasions when it ought to restrain itself and be responsible for its own self restraint ..... during my presence the boisterous exuberance of youth is most unfortunately restrained. There is part I and part II in the evening and things are done in part II of which I am supposed to disapprove, and do in part disapprove. This state of affairs is very bad for the Club. .... The Club has already passed through stages in which very many improper things were tolerated and the present sumptuary laws are the result of experience of more exciting liquors (than tea, presumably)being permitted. It may have to pass through a similar acute stage of inflammation again for youth seldom is willing to learn by experience of others."

He ends with his sincere good wishes for the future health and vigour of the Club.

A contemporary College publication included the jingle:

Fitzgerald knows the laws of light and lightly vaults the rail his lady love's a mermaid fair and thereby hangs a tale.

So much for his understanding attitude to Trinity students. Now let me pose a different sort of question. Was he a bigot ? This was implied in a recent study of Irish science in the period 1890 - 1930 where the author suggests the existence in Ireland of something he calls "Ascendency science", somehow sectarian and tainted, as a sort of counterpart to the Catholic science latent in the demand for a Catholic University, and patent, for example, in Fr Dennis Faul's letter to the Irish Times last year, unashamedly lauding the notions of "Catholic physics" and "Catholic chemistry". (This in a century that gave us Lenard, German physics and the consequences!). Except in a mere sociological sense, "Ascendency science" is a nonsense. In fact, anyone with an open mind, a modicum of training, some talent and good common sense can become a scientist. No privileged class background is needed, although access to an education which favours curiosity and critical thought above acceptance of authority certainly is a help. The fact that a large majority of Irish scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries came from protestant backgrounds, although protestants are in a minority in the country as a whole suggests that the majority did not have access to suitable education. This was FitzGerald's point. Science, like Heaven, is open to all. But to get there you need to place your faith in reason and the intelligibility of common, verifiable experience.

"Nature is a language expressing thoughts, if we can but learn to read them."

This can be done as well by a pious Catholic like Ampère, a convinced spiritualist like Lodge, a freethinker like Heaviside or a hindu like Jagadis Chunder Bose. In fact each one of us trusts that experience, verifying Maxwell's electromagnetism, every time we switch on the light, click on the mouse or dial the mobile. In the 19th century, Britain, France, Germany, Holland and Denmark proved to be the most scientifically adept. In the 20th century, the USA and Japan joined in, and in the 21st the whole world, including Ireland will participate and benefit.

I return to my question, was he a bigot ? FitzGerald was a son of his class and of his time. He was a unionist. That means he believed that the future of Ireland, not just of his class, was best served by maintaining the union with Great Britain. Some of these reasons are the same ones that lead people nowadays to be European unionists. He was frankly appalled by the prospect of Home Rule in 1893, which he regarded as Rome rule, with readily predictable consequences. The atmosphere at 7 Ely Place that year can be gauged from the fact that little Dorothea, who must have been no more than seven years old at the time, delighted the family by poetically pronouncing that "the Home Rule bill defiled even the stars of Heaven" ! Neighbours were dubious about this story and thought words must have been put into the child's mouth. Willy is upset. "So Philistine are some people ! or Herodian perhaps!". FitzGerald briefly thinks of taking, himself, his family and even Trinity College to London to escape the consequences of Home Rule. He explains to his friend William Ramsey at UCL that the charter attaches to the Provost, Fellows and Scholars, not the place but doubts the Board have the "spunk about them to carry out a real coup." He suggests that the College could conduct exams and grant degrees in London with the help of UCL, and that this could be an "anchor to haul us over in case of local disaster." His friend Robert Goodbody, then a stockbroker in New York shares FitzGerald's sentiments, but does not think that this is a time "a man can fairly run away". Another friend, John Perry of Finsbury Technical College is sharper in his response, pointing out that people will always "quarrel about what is just when an individual thinks he suffers by a change which the majority consider beneficial for the whole country" He also warns against alliance with Orangemen, of which he, unlike FitzGerald who was born in Dublin and reared in Cork and Clare, had direct experience, evoking the mob one 12th July in central Co Derry "some thousands, almost all drunk - they have converted most of the protestant liberals of Ireland to their views (for the present)". FitzGerald ultimately thinks better of his idea, one of the less practical of the 20 or so he had for reforming the College, and by 1900 he seems to be facing the prospect of Home Rule with more equanimity. On his election as first President of the Irish Branch of the Institute of Electrical Engineers (which has met in the Physics Department ever since) he is full of enthusiasm at the prospect that accounts of the latest work

"can now come here, to Ireland where the work was done, We can discuss its lessons, and if we perform our duties well, the account of this great Irish work will be sent all over the world by our powerful parent Society."

Not exactly independence, more like Home Rule!
But his ambition for TCD and science in Ireland is undiminished.

"A physical laboratory that spends a couple of hundred a year on materials, instruments and so forth considers itself fairly well off. I wish I had anything approaching this to spend in Trinity College, Dublin. When will poor TCD get credit for wanting to do more, very much more, than its very limited and precarious income permits? When can we expect the country, or generous benefactors to learn that science on a large scale is the basis for the material prosperity of the country and that science on a large scale is very expensive. But what use is £200 a year in making experiments on a commercial scale ? Ten thousand a year would be more like the figure required; and £10,000 a year could be most profitably spent on experimental work here in Ireland, on the one subject of utilizing our bogs."

There we go again. But was he a bigot? If it is ever really possible to hate the sin, but not the sinner, then I think not.

Last updated: Oct 06 2006. | back to top

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