James MacCullagh, MRIA FRS, Colleagues & Friends - v1

James MacCullagh MRIA FRS

James MacCullagh (b.1809 d,1847), was a mathematician and mathematical physicist, who was born in Landahussy townland (Landahussy Road) in the parish of Upper Badoney, Co. Tyrone overlooking the Glenelly river. Born into a Protestant family of twelve children, five boys and three girls that survived early childhood. He was the eldest son of James MacCullagh (b.1777 d.1857), hill farmer, and his wife Margaret (née Ballentine, b.1784 d.1839).

Reverend William McGhee (d.21 June 1814) was the rector of St Patrick's Church of Ireland, Upper Badoney parish and the clergyman who baptised James MacCullagh.

Most of the village of Plumbridge lies on the northern bank of the Glenelly River, the river runs westward from Landahussey in a steep‐sided valley for about 2 miles which is a very scenic location and is now classified as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

 

James was educated initially at the parish school at Castledamph on the B47, Glenelly Road, from Plumbridge to Draperstown, however on noting his intellectual prowess, when James was about 10 years old, his father moved the 10 miles to the Curly Hill, Strabane to ensure his son got a better education. After completing his classical studies he was sent to Lifford, where he was educated at the schools of the Rev. John Graham (b.1775/6 d.1844) and the Rev. Thomas Rollestone (b.1789 b.1850) curate Lifford married 3 Dec 1830, Eliza, widow of the late Captain I. Humphrys.

 

Trinity College Dublin

At the age of fifteen years he entered Trinity College, Dublin on 1 November 1824 as a pensioner (or fee‐paying student) under the tutorship of Mr. Joseph Stack (b.1799 d.1838) obtaining second place out of 130 candidates.

On 1 June 1825, he was one of the winning candidate of a sizarship (an undergraduate who receives financial assistance in exchange for work) being second out of 35 candidates.

 

Up to the beginning of the 19th century Trinity College was essentially an ecclesiastical institution, with an important function to train priests for the Anglican Church, which was then the established church in Ireland. In the 1820s and 30s Trinity introduced internal reform in order to take account of new trends in education and to avoid parliamentary interference. James MacCullagh benefitted from the revolution in mathematics in Trinity which was introduced by Bartholomew Lloyd (b.1772 d.1837), who was Professor of Mathematics from 1813 to 1822, and then Professor of Natural Philosophy until 1831, when he was elected Provost.

 

MacCullagh had a very distinguished undergraduate career and was elected to scholarship in June 1827 before graduating with a BA in 1829. During this period he took up rooms in the university and resided there till his death on 24 October 1847.

On graduation, 1829 he entered for the highly competitive fellowship examination, conducted orally in Latin. He was unsuccessful, a hardly surprising result when it is realised how much cramming was required. However, given his youth and inexperience, his performance was very creditable, his mark in mathematics being equal to that awarded to the two successful candidates.

Not long after failing the Fellowship examination MacCullagh submitted his first papers for publication and his great contribution in mathematical physics was to the contemporary debate over the nature of light and its propagation throughout the universe. By the mid 1820s the wave theory of light propounded by Augustin Fresnel (b.1788 d.1827) had gained superiority over the competing corpuscular theory. Wave phenomena demanded the existence of the ether (a hypothetical medium for transmitting light or heat) as a mechanical medium subject to dynamical laws. MacCullagh's first published paper, ‘On the double refraction of light in a crystallised medium, according to the principles of Fresnel’ and ‘Geometrical theorems on the rectification of the conic sections’ (Royal Irish Academy (RIA) Trans., xvi (1830), 65–83), criticised the obscure mathematical methods used by Fresnel in his theoretical studies on the laws of double refraction of light in crystals. MacCullagh presented a series of conic theorems aimed at providing the mathematical tools, which would enable the theory of light to be placed on a simpler geometric basis, presenting a simpler method for constructing the Fresnel wave surface. The papers contained little that was original but were characterised by clarity and mathematical elegance, highlighting his undoubted skill as a geometer. His first major paper, ‘Geometric propositions applied to the wave theory of light’ in 1833 contained many original applications to the wave theory of light, obtaining a set of underlying hypotheses more physically acceptable than Fresnel's.

William Rowan Hamilton (b.1805 d.1865) wrote a review of these papers in 1830.

 

Fellowship

1831, MacCullagh tried again for a Fellowship but this time, after being told that his first answer to the first mathematics question was wrong he refused to answer any further questions. Not surprisingly he failed, but immediately he learnt this he sent a letter containing geometrical theorems on the theory of rotation of a solid body around a fixed point. He communicated his work on this to his professor, Bartholomew Lloyd. The results were original but, unfortunately the work had already been preceded by French mathematician Louis Poinsot's (b.1777 d.1859) theory of rotary motion in 1834.

 

In Feb 1832, MacCullagh succeeded in obtaining a fellowship and he was appointed junior assistant to the mathematics professor George Salmon (b.1819 d.1904) of Trininty.

 

Irish Relics

He became a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1833, served as its secretary from 1842 to 1846, and with his close friend George Petrie (b.1790 d.1866) artist, antiquary and collector of Irish traditional music they played an important role in the development of its collection of Irish antiquities.

The archaeological community became aware of the magnificent 12th century Cross of Cong when MacCullagh’s good friend George Petrie, seen the cross himself in 1822 while passing through Cong on a tour of Connacht. He noted that the Cross was in the possession of the last Roman Catholic Augustinian abbot of Cong when he died, Father Patrick Prendergast (b.c.1741 d.1829).

Although not a wealthy man, MacCullagh, using his life savings purchased the cross in 1839 for 100 guineas from Dean Patrick Waldron, Fr. Prendergast’s successor. The cross is currently on displayed at the National Museum of Ireland.

In 1837, he contributed over £300 towards the purchase of the Domhnach Airgid, a fourteen-century Irish book shrine made to enclose a manuscript that consists of fragments of 39 sheets of the Gospels, written in distinctively Irish lettering of the eighth or ninth century. Tradition, claims this book was given by St Patrick himself to his companion St Macartan. Both relics are now housed in the National Museum of Ireland. An old woman sold the shrine and manuscript to George Smith, a Dublin bookseller, who purchased it in 1832, Lord Rossmore purchased the shrine and manuscript from Smith for £300 and the Royal Irish Academy purchased the shrine and manuscript from Lord Rossmore for £300 in 1847.

 

 

He also led a subscription to purchase two 1200 - 1000 BC, Bronze Age Gold Torcs, which had been found in 1810 by a boy digging at the Rath of the Synods on the Hill of Tara, Co. Meath. On 25 Feb 1839 the torcs were exhibited to members of the Academy at a meeting.

 

In 1835 he was appointed Erasmus Smith (b.1611 d.1691) professor of mathematics at the University of Dublin, and later received the degrees of LLB and LLD in 1838.

He developed the school of mathematics, giving it a geometrical bias, and as examiner from 1837 to 1843 in mathematics at the annual fellowship examinations, he ensured that a high standard was maintained.

He was an inspiring teacher and counted the following people among his students, Samuel Haughton (b.1821 d.1897) who was an Irish mathematician, geologist and priest and is remembered for his work on hanging as a humane method of execution, George Salmon (b.1819 d.1904), who was a distinguished and influential Irish mathematician and Anglican theologian, John Kells Ingram (b.1823 d.1907) was an Irish mathematician, economist and poet, who was born, Templecarne, near Pettigo, Co. Donegal and John Hewitt Jellett (b.1817 d.1988) who was an Irish mathematician, priest, and academic who served as the 31st Provost of Trinity College from April 1881 on till his death on 19 Feb 1888 was born Cashel, County Tipperary.

 

Crystalline Reflexion and Refraction

In 1835, his most important contribution to the theory of light, ‘An essay towards a dynamical theory of crystalline reflexion and refraction’ was read before the RIA and published in RIA 1848, and verified all his preceding predictions respecting the laws of propagation and reflection, by showing that both sets of laws, although so widely different in their nature, had nevertheless a common origin in a higher and more ultimate law, from which they were particular deductions. In this paper he succeeded in deducing from a single physical hypothesis, and from strictly mechanical principles, all the known laws of crystalline propagation, reflection, and refraction. This provided a mathematical framework capable of describing accurately a wide range of optical phenomena, and was his greatest achievement as a natural philosopher. However, the key feature of his ether was that it had the unfamiliar characteristic of purely rotational elasticity. He provided no justification for this property, as he was unable to provide a dynamical basis for the restoring forces that were required.

 

This led to a priority dispute with Franz Ernst Neumann (b.1798 d.1895) who had read a paper on the same subject to the Berlin Academy in December 1835 and published 1837.

 

Cunningham Medal

In 1838 he was awarded the Cunningham Medal by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) for his paper ‘On the laws of crystalline reflexion and refraction’ (RIA Trans., xviii (1838), 31–74), which developed a mechanical model for the propagation of light in a crystalline medium.

 

In 1839 he was made an honorary member St Andrews Literary and Philosophical Society which had been founded by David Brewster (b.1781 d.1868).

 

During a visit to Turin in 1840 he was invited to Babbage's apartments and there met, among others, Giovanni Antonio Amedeo Plana (b.1781 d.1864), Italian astronomer and mathematician and MeLuigi Federico Menabrea (b.1809 d.1896) Italian general, statesman, mathematician and diplomat.

 

In 1841 MacCullagh, along with Humphrey Lloyd (b.1800 d.1881) and Thomas Luby (b.1800 d.1870), petitioned the university to establish a chair of engineering, MacCullagh subsequently taught mechanics and physics in that department.

 

In 1842 at a meeting in Manchester, of the British Association for the Advancement of Science

(BAAS) there was a discussion on the wave or particle nature of light in which Hamilton, MacCullagh, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (b.1784 d.1846) German astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and geodesist, Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (b.1804 d.1851) German mathematician, George Peacock (b.1791d.1858) English mathematician and Anglican cleric, David Brewster (b.1781 d.1868) Scottish scientist, inventor, author, and academic administrator, and others took part.

 

Copley Medal

Latter in 1842 MacCullagh was awarded the Royal Society's of London, Copley Medal for his work on the nature of light, a particularly great achievement since Bessel was among those considered for the award.

 

In 1843 he published a paper ‘On surfaces of the second order’ which constituted his most important contribution to mathematics.

 

In 1843 he was appointed Erasmus Smith professor of natural and experimental philosophy, and extended the range of subjects for the fellowship examination to include heat, magnetism, and electricity, while making provision for practical work in these and related subjects.

MacCullagh corresponded with many scientists, in particular with John Frederick William

Herschel (b.1792 d.1871), English polymath active as a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, inventor and experimental photographer and with Charles Babbage (b.1791 d.1871) English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer. He also met and corresponded with many scientists, some of which have been mentioned previously.

 

Westminster Election

The government of Robert Peel (b.1788 d.1850) fell in 1847 and James MacCullagh was proposed as a candidate for one of the two Dublin University seats at Westminster. The seats also being contested by Frederick Shaw (b.1799 d.1876) and George Alexander Hamilton (b.1802 d.1871), who were both Oxford graduates and Tories. MacCullagh who was devoted to his country but was profoundly critical of the lack of national self-respect that he saw about him, he was also appalled that the university was putting forward two Oxford graduates.

 

In an election address in June 1847 MacCullagh said: ‘a representative of the University ought to be really a member of it; a person educated within its walls, formed under its influence, and familiar with its work. I would add, that he ought also to be a person having some pretensions to represent the interests of science and learning, and capable of giving them something of their due weight in the public counsels’.

 

He unsuccessfully contested the August general election as a liberal candidate, though he was not associated with any party. Shaw and Hamilton were elected, MacCullagh got 374 votes out 2224. It must have been disappointing for him that more of the graduates of the University of Dublin were not prepared to support one of their own, but it was not a disgrace. Perhaps it was not surprising that, in this time of political uncertainty, the alumni chose not to elect a patriotic idealist with little political experience.

 

Death

His defeat and his general state of overworking brought on a severe bout of depression, to which he was periodically susceptible. At the age of 38, on the evening of Sunday 24 October 1847 he was found by his housekeeper in his rooms at Trinity College Dublin with his throat cut. The coroner gave a verdict of suicide under temporary insanity. The reasons for his suicide are hard to determine, there remains an element of mystery surrounding the disappearance of some of his manuscripts at this time and a letter which he wrote to Babbage five years earlier before in which he wrote: ‘I have grown very stupid of late, and regularly fail at everything I attempt. What the reason may be I cannot tell. But I begin to be of Newton's opinion, that after a certain age, a man may as well give up mathematics’....

 

A funeral service was held in the College Chapel and his remains were buried in the family vault in the graveyard of the St Patrick's Church of Ireland Church, Upper Badoney, Co. Tyrone.

The tombstone contains the following inscription:

Margaret McCullagh died May 26 1839 Aged 55. Along with her are four of her children who died young.

 

The church was erected in 1784 on the site of a much earlier pre-reformation church and is believed to have been founded by the Patron Saint of Ireland, St Patrick. The graveyard contains many interesting headstones.

 

A tablet on the MacCullagh Family vault reads:

Sacred to the memory of

James MacCullagh 1777 - 1857 and of his wife

Margaret 1784 - 1839.

Also of their children, four of whom died young and sleep here. The others were,

James F.T. C.D. 1809 - 1847,

Margaret 1820 - 1891,

Isabella 1823 - 1894,

Eleanor Jane 1826 - 1881,

These are buried here.

John EX SCH. T. C. D. 1811 - 1891, buried at Newry.

Andrew 1813 - 1882. at Wisconsin America.

Charles 1815 - 1860 in America.

William George M.A.T.G.D. 1829 - 1884. at Mount Barker, Australia.

This tablet was erected by Isabella last surviving member of the family as a ? of undying affection 1895.

 

A wide range of important politicians and academics supported a petition and an appeal to the prime minister to secure a Civil List pension for his sisters and young brother William who he had been supporting.

He is remembered in Trinity College by two busts, one neoclassical marble bust by Christopher Moore (b.1790 d.1863), both of which are now located in the Senior Common Room above the doors of the main room.

The National Gallery holds some sketches by Frederick William Burton (b.1816 d.1900) which shows a handsome man with rather delicate features.

 

In the wake of James Clerk Maxwell's (b.1831 d.1879) electromagnetic theory, George Francis Fitzgerald (b.1851 d.1901), Irish physicist who proposed the theory of length contraction and Sir Joseph Larmor (b.1857 d.1942), Irish physicist and mathematician who made breakthroughs in the understanding of electricity, dynamics, thermodynamics, and the electron theory of matter, both showed that MacCullagh's ether theory could support both magnetic and electrical fields, however, the work of Albert Einstein (b.1879 d.1955) rendered MacCullagh’s either concepts irrelevant.

 

Sir Joseph Larmor, (b.1857 d.1942), physicist and mathematician and a great Irishman who is often recognized for following in the footsteps of MacCullagh, particularly in the field of electrodynamics, where MacCullagh's work on ether theory played a significant role, later developed and refined by Larmor and others in light of Maxwell's electromagnetic theory.

 

On 15 May 2009, an Ulster History Circle blue plaque was unveiled at the graveyard at St Patrick's Church, Upper Badoney, County Tyrone. The plaque was part of events organised by the Glenelly Historical Society to mark his life.

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