If a man detonated a 12-kilogram bomb on Killiney beach in south Dublin you might expect him to attract some public attention. If he then planted half-a-dozen of these improvised explosive devices on Dalkey Island and blew them up in sequence you might even expect a degree of public opprobrium, if only out of concern for the King of Dalkey's goats.
And if that same man then travelled to Wales under the banner of an organisation called the BAAS and detonated six tonnes of high explosive, there would surely be huge public interest, not to say outrage, back home in Ireland.
But no. For few people in this country have ever even heard of Robert Mallet. Yet his explosive exploits around Killiney and its environs are the stuff of legend among the peoples of the regions of Basilicata and Campania in southern Italy, because Mallet's Dalkey detonations are credited with helping to save innumerable lives in the cities and towns of Italy and around the world.
Mallet, an Irish civil engineer, was the father of the modern science of "seismology" - a word coined by him in 1858. Born in Dublin in 1810, he graduated from Trinity in 1830 and by the age of 22 was a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He was an early member of the Civil Engineers Society of Ireland.
His interest in causing explosions arose from his reading of Charles Lyell's seminal work Principles of Geology. He was enthralled by the idea that geological events were governed by scientific laws and he set about applying his engineer's knowledge of mechanics to the interpretation of earthquakes. His problem was that there were not too many earthquakes in Ireland; so he set about making his own.
With funds from the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Mallet embarked on his bombing campaign during 1849 and 1850. He set off his first 12-kilo charge on Killiney beach at a depth of two metres, one-and-a half-kilometres from his detector. Shock waves travelled slowly through the damp sand of Killiney, whereas on Dalkey Island the hard granite rock transmitted the waves almost twice as fast.
His work was greatly praised by Charles Darwin and other scientific notables of his day. Most strikingly, he was able to apply the brilliant insights of his fellow Dubliner Sir William Rowan Hamilton: he showed that Hamilton's mathematical description of the way that light beams reflect inside crystals could be adapted to the motion of seismic waves within the Earth.
By now the Dalkey bomber was even being aided and abetted by the Dublin Metropolitan Police. When a small (natural) earth tremor shook Dublin on the November 9th, 1852, members of the Dublin constabulary assisted Mallet with his inquiries, rather than the other way around. Mallet was particularly interested in the direction in which objects were displaced by the tremor and was hoping to use this as a means of calculating the epicentre of the quake; the "Mallet method" became the standard technique of earthquake analysis for the next half-century.
Mallet realised that his method could only be properly tested in the field after a large earthquake and the calamity that would make him famous (in Italy at least) struck on the night of December 16th, 1857.
Another Dubliner, the renowned science writer Dionysus Lardner, reported from Naples that a devastating earthquake had struck the areas around Salerno and Potenza, leaving thousands dead. These first reports were printed in the Times of London on Christmas Eve and within four days Mallet had submitted a proposal to the Royal Society that he travel to Italy to conduct an investigation of the earthquake damage. "The examination must be made with all possible promptitude," he wrote, "as every hour alters or removes the characters of the terrible inscription which we are to decipher, and renders circumstantial, local and oral evidence less trustworthy."
Within a fortnight Mallet had a grant of €11,000 in today's money. He embarked for Naples on January 27th, 1858, carrying with him diplomatic letters and (very shrewdly) an
introduction from Nicholas Wiseman, the Anglo-Irish cardinal who was Catholic Archbishop of Westminster. The cardinal's letter opened many doors in Italy.
Mallet's epic month-long trek through the mountainous disaster zone is chronicled in his astonishing report: "The Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857: The First Principles of Observational Seismology". It is illustrated with lithographs, maps, diagrams and several hundred photographs -
many of them in 3-D, an early scientific use of the stereographic technique.
Though largely forgotten in his own country, Mallet's scholarship and the deep humanity of his social observations have made him a revered figure in Italy. The noted Italian geophysicist Dr Graziano Ferrari was in Dublin recently to describe his plans to set up provincial centres for environmental education in Italy dedicated to the name of Robert Mallet. A handsome two-volume Italian translation of Mallet's 1857 report has also recently been published.
The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies has announced the establishment of a Mallet Professorship of Seismology in the Geophysics Section of the School of Cosmic Physics. In addition, plans are now afoot for joint Irish-Italian events next December to mark the 150th anniversary of the terrible earthquake that destroyed so many lives but led to the birth of a new branch of science.
Later this month, Irish officials will travel to Italy to oversee the pre-positioning of humanitarian supplies at the United Nations Humanitarian Response Depot located at Brindisi in Italy. These are the first steps in the roll-out of Ireland's new rapid-response initiative for disaster relief. It is appropriate that they are taking place almost 150 years after Robert Mallet planned his own humanitarian rapid response mission from Ireland to Italy.
Leo Enright is a member of the governing board of the School of Cosmic Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.