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25 Irish Examiner, 1 January 1898; Freeman's Journal, 29 January 1896; Minute, 13 December 1898, in Committee of Science and Its Industrial Applications, 1889–1914, RDS/MAN SCI.

26 Moss, having studied chemistry at the Royal College of Science, Dublin, was appointed keeper of minerals (1875) and chemical analyst at the RDS. He developed the society's laboratory, allowing it to provide support for its work in the improvement of agriculture. Moss was, subsequently, appointed registrar of the RDS in 1878; this involved additional administrative duties, but he continued to be heavily involved in the scientific work of the society. Leaney, Enda, ‘Moss, Richard Jackson’, in McGuire, James and Quinn, James (eds.), Dictionary of Irish Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009Google Scholar, at http://dib.cambridge.org, accessed 22 June 2017; Berry, op. cit. (4), p. 291.

27 See Freeman's Journal, 19 March 1896. Barrett had been appointed professor of physics at the Royal College of Science in 1873. He was active in research during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, also developing an interest in spiritualism.

28 Campos, op. cit. (12).

29 Belfast Newsletter, 3, 9, 29 January 1878; Irish Times, 6 April, 16 August 1878; The Times, 3 Dec. 1892.

30 Kerry News, 27 March 1896; Evening Herald, 20 August 1896.

31 Evening Herald, 30 July 1896.

32 Evening Herald, 7 November 1986.

33 Connaught Telegraph, 29 August 1896; Irish Examiner, 29 August, 25 November 1896.

34 Freeman's Journal, 18 November 1896.

35 John Finnegan, ‘Abstract of a paper on radium’, in Report and Proceedings of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society (1904), pp. 44–49, 44.

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40 Molloy was born 10 September 1834 in Terenure, Co. Dublin. He studied for the priesthood at Maynooth College and was ordained in 1857, and subsequently appointed professor of theology. In 1874 he was appointed professor of natural philosophy at the Catholic University of Ireland, based in Dublin, and in 1903 he was elected vice chancellor of the Royal University of Ireland. He was involved in the promotion of science and education throughout his life and regularly gave lectures on physics and popular science at the RDS and University College Dublin. He had been an early proponent of X-rays and had experimented with their production. McClelland was born near Coleraine, Co. Londonderry, on 1 December 1870. He excelled as a student, graduating from Queen's College Galway with a first-class honours BA in 1892 and an MA the following year. McClelland's academic excellence saw him awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1895. This enabled him to pursue further research studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, under J.J. Thomson and C.T.R. Wilson at the Cavendish Laboratory. At the Cavendish Laboratory McClelland was involved in research on the newly discovered X-rays. In 1897 he graduated from Cambridge with a research BA degree, and subsequently received an MA. In 1900 he was appointed professor of physics at University College Dublin.

41 Hughes, op. cit. (17), pp. 267–300, 271.

42 The university's laboratories were subsumed into UCD in 1908.

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47 Dixon was born in Dublin in 1869 and had been appointed assistant to Edward Perceval Wright, professor of botany at Trinity College Dublin in 1892; in 1904 he succeeded Wright.

48 Meaning they did not tend to turn toward radium in the manner in which they would to sunlight.

49 Dixon, H.H. and Wigham, J.T., ‘Preliminary note on the action of the radiations from radium bromide on some organisms, with 3 plates’, Scientific Proceedings of the Royal Dublin Society (1904) 10, pp. 178–192, 178–180Google Scholar; see also Campos, Luis, ‘The birth of living radium’, Representations (2007) 97(1), pp. 1–27, 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Campos, op. cit. (12); Malley, op. cit. (12), pp. 150–151.

50 Dixon and Wigham, op. cit. (49), pp. 180–185.

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53 Symington was professor of anatomy at Queen's University Belfast and an early proponent of the medical use of X-rays. See Gough, A.D., ‘Developments in Northern Ireland’, in Carr, J.C., A Century of Medical Radiation in Ireland: An Anthology, [Dublin]: Anniversary Press, 1995, pp. 48–60, 48Google Scholar.

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56 Sir Howard Grubb, address at presentation of Boyle Medal to John Joly, 25 April 1911, Proceedings Scientific Meetings, 21 November 1894–24 May 1927, RDS/MAN/SCI, p. 1.

57 John Joly, address at presentation of Boyle Medal to John Joly, 25 April 1911, Proceedings Scientific Meetings, 21 November 1894–24 May 1927, RDS/MAN/SCI, p. 6.

58 Fitzpatrick, Siobhn, ‘“Uniting … whatever is pleasing with whatever is useful the advancement of speculative knowledge with the history of mankind”: the scientific Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy’, in Fitzpatrick, Siobhán (ed.), Science at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2012, pp. 37–43, 46Google Scholar.

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62 Archer, op. cit. (59), pp. 49–50.

63 9, 12 January 1900, in Committee of Science and Its Industrial Applications, 1889–1914, RDS/MAN/SCI; Mollan, op. cit. (60), p. 214.

64 Certificate of a candidate for election, John Alexander McClelland, the Royal Society, EC/1909/18, GB 117, at https://collections.royalsociety.org, accessed 22 June 2017.

65 Campos, op. cit. (49), p. 3.

66 F.E. Hackett was born on 15 August 1882 in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. He undertook his studies at UCD and edited the college magazine, St Stephen's, from 1902 to 1903. In 1905 he was elected a junior fellow of the Royal University of Ireland. This allowed him access to the university's laboratory, where, working with J.A. McClelland, he utilized the RDS's radium. Hackett received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1908, returning to Ireland the following year as a physics lecturer at Queens College Galway.

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70 Irving M. Klotz, ‘The N-ray affair’, Scientific American (May 1980) 242(5), pp. 168–175, 168, 175; see also Nye, op. cit. (13), pp. 57–71.

71 Nye, op. cit. (13), pp. 71–72.

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80 Mollan, op. cit. (43), p. 1386.

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82 O'Connor, op. cit. (75), p. 266.

83 Membership of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA) was, and is, the highest academic honour in Ireland.

84 Fathers of the Society of Jesus, op. cit. (43), p. 577.

85 For example, William Crookes, ‘The emanations of radium’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1902–1903) 121, pp. 405–408; Ramsay, William and Soddy, Frederick, ‘Experiments in radioactivity, and the production of helium from radium’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1903–1904) 72, pp. 204–207Google Scholar; Strutt, R.J., ‘On the intensely penetrating rays of radium’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1903–1904) 72, pp. 208–210Google Scholar; Green, Alan B., ‘A note on the action of radium on micro-organisms’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (1904) 73, pp. 375–381CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strutt, R.J., ‘On the distribution of radium in the Earth's crust, and on the Earth's internal heat’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character (1906) 77, pp. 472–85Google Scholar; Crowther, J.A., ‘On the scattering of the β-rays from uranium by matter’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character (1908) 80, pp. 186–206Google Scholar; Geiger, H., ‘On the scattering of the α-particles by matter’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character (1908) 81(546), pp. 174–177Google Scholar.

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92 Jorgenson, op. cit. (12), pp. 58–61.

93 Jackson, Patrick N. Wyse, ‘John Joly (1857–1933) and his determinations of the age of the Earth’, Geological Society Special Publication (2001) 190, pp. 107–119, 113–115Google Scholar, at https://www.tcd.ie/Geology/assets/pdf/John%20Joly%20-%20The%20Age%20of%20the%20Earth.pdf, accessed 19 July 2017.

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98 Jorgenson, op. cit. (12), pp. 60–61.

99 Agar, op. cit. (37), pp. 27–43.