Another Irish first!

Luke McGee tweets:

The wikipedia link is about a project from 1869, which propelled passengers a grand total of a hundred yards. Mr Beach, its onlie true begetter was defeated by Mayor ‘Boss’ Tweed and a stock-market crash.

Let us celebrate Charles Vignoles (engineer) and William Dargan (the contractor) who took, and made work an 1839 patent trialled at Wormwood Scrubs. This was the Dalkey Atmospheric Railway, which operated for ten years from 1844. It gave Brunel the notion for his short-lived effort, the South Devon Railway.

Vignoles’s implementation worked, while Brunel’s didn’t. The difference was Devon rats, who took a liking to the oiled leather used for closing the vacuum tube, while Vignoles used a metal protection.

So we have a permanent reminder (and an instructive example of translation problems) where the Dalkey pump house once stood: