Abstract
The Stoney family was descended from Thomas Stoney, who acquired land in Ireland in about 1700. Edith and Florence’s grandfather George inherited the Oakley Park estate in King’s County in 1824. George was unable to prevent it from becoming bankrupt. When he died in 1835, his widow Anne moved to Dublin with her four children. Her son Johnstone excelled at Trinity College Dublin. He inherited Oakley at the height of the Irish famine, when it was sold. Johnstone became, firstly, Lord Rosse’s astronomical assistant, operating the ‘Leviathan’ telescope at Parsonstown. He was then Professor of Natural Philosophy at Queen’s College Galway, where he developed his ideas on liberal education. After returning to Dublin to take the position as Secretary of Queen’s University, he married his cousin Sophia in 1863. After she died he brought up Edith, Florence and his other children on his own. He did some of his best physics at this time, which included defining and naming the electron. Other scientific members of the family included Bindon Stoney, Chief Engineer at the Port of Dublin, and their cousin, the physicist George FitzGerald. No women in the family other than Edith and Florence went into science or medicine.
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Notes
- 1.
A note on place names. The Irish county is now Co. Offaly. At the time it was called King’s County. The local town, now called Birr, was called Parsonstown . The names King’s County and Parsonstown are used here as they better represent the social culture in the country at that time.
- 2.
The father of the eminent physicist Lord Rayleigh, John James Strutt the second Lord Rayleigh, also followed the Rev. Irving.
- 3.
In October 1835, Anne Stoney offered an 11-year let on Oakley Park during the minority of her son George Johnstone Stoney. The local arrangements were placed in the hands of George’s brother Robert, who was a lawyer in Parsonstown. The property was let to Sandford Palmer of Roscrea.
- 4.
A few months before they returned to Ireland, Edward Hardman, an Irish Protestant minister of independent views, had himself returned from London to set up a new Irvingite assembly in Aungier Street. In 1863, when his church had become well established, it opened a new building, St Finian’s Church in Adelaide Road. Both were within a 10-minute walk of the Stoney home at 2 Camden Street.
- 5.
There was no mention of Anne’s jointure as a liability on the estate in the financial statement of the sale of Oakley in 1850. This suggests that Robert supported his sister-in-law for the intervening 6 years.
- 6.
In John Joly’s obituary of Johnstone Stoney, he mentions that the estate was sold for about eight times the reduced rental, which was given as about £1700 gross in the particulars of the sale.
- 7.
In recognition of Johnstone and Bindon Stoney’s astronomical contributions, a 45-km-wide crater on the far side of the moon has been named Stoney, and, in 1973, one on Mars at longitude 138.49° and latitude −71.35° was also named Stoney Crater.
- 8.
Their father’s work on fundamental units has been identified as equivalent to that of Max Planck over a quarter of a century later, with his introduction of natural units into physics (John D Barow. Natural units before Planck. Q J Roy Astr Soc 1983;24:24–2). More recently it has been claimed that the ‘Stoney Scale’ is consistent with Einstein’s theory of gravitational ether, in that it does not require gravitational and inertial mass to be equivalent in an electromagnetic setting. (Ross McPherson. Stoney Scale and large number coincidences. Apeiron 2007;14(3):234–265.)
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Thomas, A., Duck, F. (2019). Oakley Park. In: Edith and Florence Stoney, Sisters in Radiology. Springer Biographies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16561-1_2
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