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Date:         Sun, 26 Jul 1992 21:09:50 EDT
From:         "John R. Likins, Colby College Library, Waterville,
              Maine 04901" <jrlikins@COLBY.EDU>
Subject:      De Selby
Comments: cc: jrlikins@host4.COLBY.EDU, palenk@host4.COLBY.EDU

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----------------------------Original message----------------------------

----------------- Message requiring your approval (53 lines) ------------------
"I'm looking for info on the little-known Irish scientist Thomas de Selby
(1862-1939?).  All I have to go on is this brief entry from the Dictionary
of Irish Biography (Dublin: Maunsel & Son, 1940):
  DE SELBY, Thomas.  Thomas deSelby was perhaps the greatest scientific
mind ever produced by Ireland -- but unfortunately, he was also one
of its most eccentric and difficult.  Orphaned as a young child, he
came into a small private fortune in 1877 on the death of his great-
uncle, Mortimer deSelby, 3rd Baron Strathespy, Inverness.  He studied
in all the great scientific schools of his day, and was, at the young
age of thirty-two, appointed to a full professorship at the University
of Edinburgh.  Shortly after receiving this appointment, de Selby
began the first of a series of controversial researches into the nature
of motion, time, and fluid mechanics.  His papers wandered ever farther
from the scientific mainstream; for instance, he was convinced that
night, far from being merely the absence of sunlight, was a substance,
an "effluence of black air" which was ejected from primordial volcanic
eruptions.  Its disappearance each morning he attributed to its
extreme combustibility.  He also held forth some singular views on
time and space; by means of an apparatus consisting primarily of valves,
tanks, and barometers, he claimed to be able to travel from one town
to another without leaving his siting room.
  He was forced into taking an extended leave from his professorship by
concerned colleagues in 1917, but he continued his work by dipping
into his substantial trust funds and erecting a laboratory in his
house in Rathmines, Co. Dublin.  Unable to find a journal to publish
his curious findings, he published them himself; among his better-known
works are
        o The Country Album (an early series of sketches written while
           on holiday near Turin; 1899)
        o Golden Hours (A lengthy series of philosophical meditat-
          ions on names, time, dwellings, night, photography; 1902;
          issued in an expanded edition in 1920)
        o Layman's Atlas (a similar collection on age, love, sin,
          death, and sulphur matches; 1915)
        o A Memoir of Garcia (an extended account of his own
          experiments, told from the viewpoint of an [evidently
          fictive] lab assistant named Garcia; 1925)
These, along with many other works, are collected in the De Selby
Compendium (1939), edited by his illustrious commentator Bassett. De Selby
vanished in an explosion in his Dublin home; the body was never recovered."
>>>>>>>>Above is a query I received; can find no trace of this guy
        in our ed of Dictionary of Irish biography (Dublin: Gill &
        Macmillan, 1978), the NUC, or OCLC. Care to give it a try?
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|  John R. Likins, Technical Services Librarian,  Colby College  |
|  Waterville, Maine 04901-4799 USA - E-mail jrlikins@colby.edu  |
|  Telephone (207) 872-3289  --  FAX (207) 872-3287 or 872-3555  |
|    "There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a    |
|     Yeti"                            -- Sir Edmund Hillary     |
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