On 31 August1869, Mary Ward and her husband weretravellingalonga quiet Irish road in a steam-driven car when suddenly it jolted, pitching Mary underone of its heavy iron wheels. She died almost instantly in what many believe was the first fatal automobile accident. But if Mary’s death was extraordinary, so was her life. When other women spent their time in genteel pursuits such as music or sewing, Mary spent hers with her eyes glued to either microscope ortelescope. For a Victorian woman with a passion forscience, she had the good fortune to belongto one of the most inventive families in Ireland – but that was her misfortune too: for if her cousins hadn’t been quite so ingenious, there would have been no steam-car and no accident, and Mary might have made history of a different kind.
ONE autumn evening in 1835, the Reverend Henry King and his wife were entertaining at their home in the rural Irish backwater of Ballylin. Suddenly, their youngest daughter Mary burst into the room. She had, she announced to the assembled guests, been looking for Halley’s comet with her telescope. And she had found it. She was 8.
If the guests were surprised, they shouldn’t have been. Like other girls at the time, Mary and her sisters didn’t go to school but were taught by their mother and a governess. Their lessons, though, were not like those of other girls. Encouraged to investigate the natural world, they tramped the local bogs and woods hunting frogs and insects and collecting plants. Aged 3, Mary was wielding a butterfly net. By 8, she was an experienced star-gazer. No one should have been surprised that she knew how to handle a telescope, for her cousin William Parsons was an up-and-coming astronomer. William, son of the Earl of Rosse of nearby Castle Birr, had been experimenting with telescopes for years, and was working on what would become the largest reflecting telescope in the world, the Leviathan – a monster with a 6-foot lens and a 54-foot tube. Mary, he suggested, should start with something smaller – a telescope with a 2-inch lens.
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Castle Birr lay in the heart of the Irish countryside, yet each year it grew increasingly like one of the great manufactories of industrial England, with roaring furnaces, hissing steam engines and the ringing of hammers on metal. William began with a small workshop, where he built a machine to grind and polish his metal mirrors, driven by a steam engine he built himself. When a fire damaged part of the castle, William found extra work for the men who came to make repairs. Soon there was a forge in the moat, furnaces in the tower and a new engine-house. If Mary wanted to know about comets or eclipses or the workings of a telescope, she only had to ask.
Besides, William soon found his young cousin useful. She was a talented artist, and as he worked on his monster telescope, she sketched each stage of the project. Others recognised her talents too. One of them was astronomer James South. During a visit to Ballylin, he came across Mary drawing an insect, capturing the tiniest details with the help of a magnifying glass. Impressed, he persuaded her father to buy her a microscope, starting her off in a whole new direction.
Mary read everything she could about microscopy and was soon more expert than the experts. She made her own slides from slivers of ivory, prepared her own specimens and drew her observations in near photographic detail. When Scottish physicist David Brewster wanted microscope specimens, he asked her to make them. He admired her drawings too, and used them to illustrate his papers and books.
The fact that universities and learned societies were exclusively male didn’t hold her back. Mary kept abreast of things by begging or borrowing copies of books and papers from her growing circle of eminent friends. It was even easier when William, now the third Earl of Rosse, became president of the Royal Society in 1848. Visits to his London home were as good as sitting in at the Royal Society. At dinner, Mary was surrounded by scientists. Sometimes, though, it was Mary who was the expert. On one occasion, a guest’s question had William stumped. “My cousin Mary King knows rather more than I do on that subject,” William confessed. “I recommend that you address your question to her.”
Then Mary married. Her husband, Henry Ward, later Viscount Bangor, was not a great help to a budding scientist. They had little money and no home of their own but lived in a series of rented houses. But he didn’t stand in her way either. Her next scheme was to write a book, a how-to guide for would-be microscopists. She knew no publisher would touch it – because she was a woman – so she had 250 copies of Sketches with the Microscope printed privately, along with hundreds of handbills advertising it. The book sold out in weeks, incentive enough for one London publisher to ignore her sex and sign her up. The book was a bestseller.
Encouraged, Mary wrote a popular guide to astronomy, explaining from her own experience how to get the most from a small telescope, what to look for and where. Her advice on observing a comet was to discover one “humbly in the newspaper”, and then follow its progress. Despite husband and growing family, she did exactly that when Donati’s comet unexpectedly appeared in 1858, turning out in the dead of night or early hours of the morning to examine and draw the spectacle.
In September and early October, she kept her 2-inch telescope fixed on the comet, drawing its changing form as time passed. By 28 September, it was spectacular. “The nucleus was very bright, and glittered in the telescope more like a star than a planet,” she recalled. Two days later “the appearance of the comet on that cloudless evening suggested the shape of a bird of paradise feather, and was beyond imagination graceful and beautiful”.
Castle Birr remained a favourite place, and was always a hive of activity. William – and now his sons – spent much of their time in the workshops making mechanical devices of their own designs. Around 1865, the two youngest Parsons boys, Clere and Charles, decided to build a steam-car. They were hardly in their teens, but were already proficient mechanics.
Half a century earlier, when William was honing his own mechanical talents, steam transport had been the next big thing. A few far-sighted entrepreneurs had started to run regular services with steam-powered omnibuses and drags – pushed or pulled by locomotives. But while the railways boomed, steam-carriages all but disappeared. They were unreliable: boilers exploded, carriages broke down and the rutted roads made travel difficult. There was also fierce opposition. The turnpike trusts that maintained the roads feared their heavy wheels would do costly damage – and levied huge tolls on steam vehicles. Any remaining hope for a transport revolution was extinguished by the Red Flag Act of 1865, which imposed a speed limit of 4 miles an hour in the country and 2 mph in town (not to mention the need for a man to run ahead with a flag).
“The car was travelling at an easy pace when it reached a bend. A sudden jolt and Mary fell from the seat and under the wheels”
Despite the restrictions, there were still a few rich enthusiasts who wanted steam cars – compact, self-propelled versions of the puffing, loco-driven vehicles. They either found a willing engineer or built one themselves. The Parsons boys built a four-wheeled carriage, with boiler and engine mounted on a flat base at the rear and a bench seat for the driver and passengers at the front. With its young stokers keeping the steam up, the car could travel at a racy 7 miles an hour.
After William died in 1867, the boys still took the carriage out occasionally. During the holidays in August 1869, Mary and her husband joined Clere and Charlie and their tutor for a ride. The car was “travelling at an easy pace” when it reached a bend in the road. A sudden jolt, and Mary fell from the seat and under one of the rear wheels. Rushing to the scene, a local doctor found her cut and bruised and bleeding from her ears. She died moments later. At the inquest, one witness testified that “the wheel hit the lady and pushed her to one side”. The fatal injury, said the doctor, was a broken neck. The death certificate records the cause of death as “Accidental fall from steam engine. Sudden.”
The family was so distraught, they broke up the offending object and buried it.