Samuel Haughton

Born in County Carlow on 21 December 1821, Samuel Haughton became one of Ireland’s best-known Victorian men of science. He studied at Trinity College Dublin, was ordained in the Church of Ireland in the 1840s, and spent much of his career at Trinity, where he taught and wrote across a striking range of fields.

Haughton was a geologist, physiologist, mathematician, medical doctor, and scientific writer. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and his publications touched on subjects as varied as geology, animal mechanics, health, and forensic questions. He is still often remembered for work on the mechanics of muscular action and for his calculations related to the humane design of execution by hanging.

He died in Dublin on 31 October 1897. What makes him interesting today is not just the breadth of his learning, but the way he brought numbers and experiment to problems that many others approached only in theory.