William MacNeven was a Galway revolutionary who fled Ireland in 1805 to become the "father of American chemistry" by overhauling teaching methods there, writes Mary Mulvihill.
As so often happens in Irish history, our loss was the US's gain. A physician banished for his involvement in the 1798 Rebellion who ended up in New York overhauled US university teaching of chemistry and earned the accolade "father of American chemistry". To this day, a monument stands to his memory in New York, where he landed 200 years ago, on July 4th, 1805.
The man was William MacNeven, born in 1763 to a Catholic landowning family near Aughrim, Co Galway. He was not the first of his family to be exiled, for the MacNevens had previously been among the Wild Geese, which explains how an uncle, Baron William MacNeven, came to be physician to the Austro-Hungarian empress, Marie Theresa. After a hedge-school education, the young William was packed off to study medicine with his uncle in Prague and Vienna.
William MacNeven's interest in chemistry, mines and minerals probably began during his stay on the Continent, according to science historian Dr Bill Davis, and among his first publications was an English translation of a German pamphlet on mining technology.
Returning to Dublin to practise medicine, MacNeven joined the campaign for Catholic emancipation and the United Irishmen, and when the 1798 Rebellion failed he was arrested and exiled. He spent four years with the Irish Brigade in France, rising to surgeon captain in the French army, and tried unsuccessfully to interest Napoleon in a French invasion of Ireland.
He also found time for a long walking tour of Switzerland, and in 1803 published A Ramble Through Switzerland, which revealed his interest in everything from geology to government, and includes an account of the campaign for Swiss independence.
By 1805 MacNeven had given up on Europe, and was looking to America. Arriving in New York, he joined Columbia University, which had been founded 50 years previously, and by 1811 was professor of chemistry there. He revolutionised science teaching in North America, introducing European ideas and textbooks and championing Dalton's new atomic theory. He also built a laboratory, then a novel idea, so that his students could conduct their own experiments rather than merely watch demonstrations.
MacNeven analysed minerals and mineral waters, believing that chemistry could help improve farming and industry in the New World. A tireless campaigner, he also founded New York's Duane Street Medical School in 1826, worked as a hospital inspector during the devastating cholera epidemic in 1832, and started a society to aid Irish immigrants.
All of this could be read as another "might have been" story from Irish history. But if MacNeven had stayed in Ireland it is unlikely he would have had the same scientific opportunity. There would have been no room for him at Trinity College Dublin, then Ireland's only university, and the Queen's Colleges (now the universities of Cork, Galway and Belfast) were 40 years in the future.
So it is that MacNeven is better remembered by a statue on New York's Lower Broadway; he died in that city in 1841.