Robert Mallet was a Trinity man. He was born in June, 1810, in Ryder's Row, off Capel Street in Dublin, and having read classics and mathematics at Trinity College, he joined his father's iron founding business at the age of 21. When he ultimately gained control, he transformed the company into one of the foremost engineering concerns in the country.
The firm won many of the largest contracts available at the time, including that for the new Fastnet Lighthouse, much of the iron-work required for the expansion of the growing railway network and, looking even further afield, artillery pieces for use by the British army in the war in the Crimea.
Mallet's relevance to Weather Eyetoday, in the aftermath of the tragedy in Turkey, is his association with the science of seismology. Much of Mallet's spare time was devoted to studies of the earth sciences and, as befitted an engineer, his methods tended towards the practical: he measured shock waves in the Earth, for example, by detonating sizeable explosions on Killiney Beach in Co Dublin, and noting the speed of travel of the vibrations through the sand.
During the 1850s, together with his son John, he compiled an extensive two-volume catalogue of major earthquakes in historical times, and included in the work detailed seismic maps of those areas throughout the world that were particularly vulnerable to tremors.
But Robert Mallet did more than just dabble in seismology: it was he who coined the very word itself. The etymology of the term is Greek, deriving from the word for "earthquake", and it was first used in a paper presented by Mallet to the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 1846. Subsequently, he introduced several others "earthquake words" that are still in daily use.
While investigating the great earthquake of Naples that took place in December, 1857, he noted from his studies the direction in which objects had been thrown and buildings had fallen, and suggested the patterns could be explained by a series of waves propagated from a "focus" deep beneath the ground.
Mallet referred to the zone of maximum seismic activity on the Earth's surface as the epicentrum - a slight variation of a term that is still in daily use. He also coined the term meizoseismal area for the zone of greatest damage, and isoseismal lines to describe the boundaries of zones suffering an equal degree of damage.
Robert Mallet lived and worked in Dublin until 1860. He spent the remainder of his life in London, where he died in November, 1881.