An Irish Times report on the eclipse of the sun in May 1900 reads with a frisson of wonder and excitement typical of early 20th century science reports.
The eclipse is described as "wild and impressive" by Sir Howard Grubb, a member of the Irish expedition team to Plasencia in Spain, and is explained in layman's terms as "very much like that seen in a room lighted with gas, in which a person was turning off from a tap which worked stiffly and by jerks".
There was only a partial eclipse in Dublin that year and one can only guess that the city's opticians and hospitals must have been inundated after the event. "The progress of the eclipse was watched in the streets by large numbers of the citizens . . . Of course various devices were resorted to better the view obtained by the naked eye, and prominent among them was the popular smoked glass."
There seems to have been a huge interest in all things astronomical at the turn of the century. In November 1900 astronomers were "on tiptoe of expectation these nights awaiting the advent of the doubtful Leonids", a reference to the annual November meteor showers.
In the meantime, a wayward meteorite provided some diversion. "Anybody who happened to be wending homewards at a quarter to four yesterday morning might have seen a magnificent meteor fall over the North City. It shot forth a ball of glowing and expanding fire, made an immense curve, continued its course for fully five seconds, and burst behind Phibsboro church with a leaden noise, forming a magnificent spectacle."
The question of life on other planets was hotly debated in January 1908 after the publication of Is Mars habitable? by Alfred Russell Wallace. It was a critical review of Prof Percival Lowell's Martian canal theory.
The book refuted Lowell's assertion that the canals of Mars were artificially cut by inhabitants of Mars "for the purpose of conduction to all parts of the globe the supply of water derived from the annual melting of the snow-caps at the Martian poles".
Prehistoric life on earth was also a concern that year. In March, a snippet headed "Russian Scientists' Choice Mouthful" reported how scientists from the Academy of Science in St Petersburg had found the remains of a woolly mammoth in northern Siberia which had been partially eaten by Arctic foxes.
It wasn't their first find however. They had previously discovered a mammoth "in such an excellent state of preservation that some of the remnants of the flesh, after being thawed, salted, and cooked, were actually eaten out of curiosity by some Russian scientists".
IN March 1914, an editorial asked whether women were intellectually equal to men in the field of scientific invention and discovery. On the plus side, according to the editorial, women had shown some capability in the Middle Ages and afterwards when some of them "attained a high proficiency in the concoction of poisons, which was then certainly an art, if not a science".
It conceded "that perhaps one of the most important of all the purely scientific discoveries of modern times is that of radium, which can be attributed to Madame Curie". But against this was the fact that "of some thirty thousand new inventions registered at the Patent Office every year only five or six hundred stand in the names of women".
A tongue-in-cheek Irish Times editorial in October 1922 reported on the public lecture of Dr Voronoff, "the Russian rejuvenator of septuagenarians". The good doctor claimed not to prolong life but to restore some joie de vivre by grafting the glands of animals into the bodies of old men.
One case study was a Mr Liardet (76) of London, who underwent a gland operation. "Before the operation, Mr Liardet was a decrepit old gentleman tottering on the brink of the grave. On Sunday he pranced about the room at the College de France like a Rugby `international' and made some of the audience howl with pain when he shook hands with them . . . The measure of success which he seems to have attained suggests some awful possibilities . . ."
Some scientists of the era were not content with a prolonged life, they wanted immortality. An Irish Times report in July 1921 told how Dr Carrel of Paris had been experimenting with fragments of the heart and vessels of chicken embryo and had succeeded in keeping a piece of the heart tissue beating "after 104 days of life away from the organism".
"Moreover the tissue not only beats, but grows - unlike the not less uncanny peau de chagrin. Every forty-eight hours it is divided into four parts which increase from four to forty times their own size. Thus . . . it is now proved that the tissues of the human body are virtually immortal, and that old age is only a disease . . . if men can prevent the initial weakness, they will live as long as they want."
Thoroughly unimpressed, the editorial suggested that the world be made "fit for immortals" to live in first before "threatening them with an unending experience of too familiar conditions". And with cryonics and cloning now making rapid advances, some would say that the same argument applies today.