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Curious experiments: science, commerce and sectarianism in eighteenth-century Dublin

Today, the sole copy of the 1743 poster, poorly printed on cheap paper and about the size of a modern A3 page, survives in Marsh’s Library in Dublin. There is […]

Experiments re-staged

Today, almost 270 years after Boyle Godfrey staged these experiments, they have been brought to life by a group of six students from the Grashof Gymnasium in Essen, Germany. In […]

Boyle Godfrey

Boyle Godfrey was a ne’er-do-well London-born doctor and chemist who fled to Ireland sometime in 1742 to escape his creditors. He seems to have earned a living in Ireland on […]

April 27

1822 Ulysses Simpson Grant, general in the Union army and 18th president of the United States (1869–77), born in Ohio.
1521 Ferdinand Magellan (c. 40), Portuguese navigator, was killed by natives on the island of Mactan in the Philippines during the first circumnavigation of the Earth.
1920 The IRA attacked the RIC station at Ballylanders, Co. Limerick. The Black and Tans terrorised Limerick city the following day.
1967 The Abortion Act, making abortion legal up to 28 weeks’ gestation, came into effect in the UK, with the exception of Northern Ireland.
1953 Maud Gonne MacBride, revolutionary and iconic figure in nationalist mythology, died.
1916 Outside Hulluch, north of Loos in northern France, the 16th (Irish) Division suffered one of the heaviest gas attacks of the First World War; 538 men died and a further 1,590 were injured.
1923 Eamon de Valera offered terms for negotiation to end the Civil War, which were rejected by the Free State government.
1953 Maud Gonne (86), iconic figure in Irish nationalism, died.

Curious experiments: science, commerce and sectarianism in eighteenth-century Dublin

Experiments re-staged

Boyle Godfrey

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 27