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Tag Archives | heritage

A hidden treasure for Science Week!

Do you like a good story? Interested in geeky history and science?  Then you’ll love the wonderful museum in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth. Well worth a visit, it is in our online Atlas of Ingenious Ireland.  And for more great stories like this, check out our new ebook about Dublin’s scientific heritage, Ingenious Dublin (the […]

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Dublin’s weird ‘witch’ bottle

This is a fascinating bottle with a weird story.  We learned about it on a tour of historic Aungier St with Dublin City’s architects, archaeologists and conservation officers. It’s a pottery bottle, from about 1600, intact and sealed.  But x-rays reveal that there is a lot of “stuff” in it, including old nails.  This leads […]

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Halloween: Samuel Haughton’s ‘humane hanging’

One of Ireland’s more unusual contributions to civilisation was calculating the humane hangman’s drop.  In the good old days, public executions were a popular spectacle, and indeed, the word ‘gala’ comes from gallows.    Now, hanging was originally a prelude to drawing and quartering — or, for women, being burned at the stake —  and never […]

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New digital walking tours of Ingenious Dublin

Press release Tuesday October 16th 2102: on Hamilton Day, the day quaternions were invented in Dublin in 1843 As hundreds of geeks gather in Dublin for the WebSummit… two new city walking tours are launched to celebrate Ireland’s many great inventions and scientific discoveries. Did you know. . . that Dublin algebra helped to land […]

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