What Have The Irish Ever Done For Us? Quiz

Answer: Bushmills

Distilled spirits were known in ancient times but the whiskeys and whiskies we know of now came down through the years from Irish and Scottish distillers of the 14th and 15th centuries.

Bushmills is produced in the village of the same name in County Antrim. Dating from 1608, it is the world's oldest licensed whiskey (or whisky) distiller.

Answer: Wind speed

In 1806, Francis Beaufort was serving as an officer of the Royal Navy on HMS Woolwich when he developed the scale that bears his name. In a nutshell it divides wind speed into 12 categories ranging from calm to hurricane and sets out the likely consequence. Hurricane, for example, would be typified by mean speeds of 73mph plus. The outcome: "Devastation".

Beaufort was born in Navan, Co Meath, in May 1774. He was a skilled hydrographer and as a young man served on merchant ships. He joined the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars and rose to the rank of Rear Admiral by the time of his retirement in 1846. He died in 1857.

Answer: Milk of Magnesia

Sir James Murray was born in Culynady, Derry, in 1788 and died in Dublin in 1871. In 1829, he developed a condensed solution of fluid magnesia to treat the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. That earned him a knighthood.

In 1873, Charles Henry Phillips acquired a patent for a treatment he named "Milk of Magnesia".

Answer: Antarctica

Edward Barnsfiel was born in Midelton, Co Cork, in 1785. In 1803 he was press-ganged into service in the Royal Navy. He served throughout the war against Napoleon and, at its conclusion in 1815, stayed on in the navy.

While serving in South America, he was ordered to check out reports of a land mass far to the south. In 1819 and 1820, Barnsfield led a naval expedition that on January 30, 1820 made the first known sighting of the mainland of Antarctica.

Answer: Croquet

As noted by the Croquet Foundation of American, the game we know as croquet was introduced to England from Ireland in 1852. It was based on the game of "crooky" that had been played in Ireland since the 1830s.

The Irish game showed some similarities to a game that was played in France in the 13th Century. However, it is the introduction from Ireland to England that is regarded as the basis of the modern game.

Nowadays, as well as being an amiable afternoon pass time, croquet is played competitively in more than 20 countries.

Answer: Cream Cracker

If you look hard enough, you will see claims that two Waterford brothers, William and Robert Jacob, invented the cream cracker. Certainly, they were the first to commercially produce them, but the honour of the invention is credited to Joseph Haughton, from Dublin, who first made cream crackers in his home.

The company that the Jacob brothers established remains synonymous with cream crackers to this day. The traditional Jacobs cream cracker is made from wheat flour, vegetable oil and yeast and baked into a flat, square shape. There is no cream in cream crackers, the name comes from the process of adding oil to the other ingredients.

Properly stored, cream crackers will keep good for up to two months. At the very start, that made them ideal for sustenance on long ocean voyages.

Answer: Radiotherapy

John Joly was born in 1857 in King's County, Ireland. The county is now known as Offaly. He was a noted geologist and physicist. In 1898, he estimated the age of the earth at 100,000,000 years. That means it is now 100,000,112 years old (joke).

By 1914, he had developed a means of extracting radium and pioneered its use for cancer treatment. Note, others had also been working on treatments using X-rays for some years.

Nowadays, Radiotherapy - aka Radiation Therapy - is often used after surgery to reduce the risk of cancers recurring.

(Actually, the National Geographic Society estimates the age of the earth at " 4.543 billion years old, plus or minus about 50 million years.")

Answer: Cheese and onion

The other early blended flavour was salt and vinegar.

Potato chips date to 1853 when they were created by George Crum, a chef at Moon Lake Lodge resort in Saratoga Springs, New York. After a customer complained that his French fries were "too thick", Crum came up with a slimmer version.

It was not, though, until the 1920s that packaged potato chips - crisps - became available. Until the 1950s, crisp buyers could have them plain, or with a little paper twist of salt included in the package.

In 1954, Joe "Spud" Murphy set up the Tayto company in Ireland and blended the first real seasoned crisps. Today, for reasons too complicated to go into, there are two Tayto companies in Ireland: one markets in Northern Ireland and the other in the Republic of Ireland. The most popular flavour is cheese and onion and heated debates often take place over which tastes better, the yellow Northern Ireland Tayto cheese and onion, or the red RoI cheese and onion packets. For the record, this quiz author is firmly in the "yellow is better" brigade.

In 2019, the global market for potato chips was worth $30bn. Again for the record, Americans are the world's biggest consumers: 86 per cent of the population eat them. (The French and Brits are a few percentage points behind, but only 25 per cent of people in China eat them.)

Answer: Shorthand writing

Gregg's shorthand was a system of figures and lines to represent words and letters.

While many other systems were to be developed, Gregg's was to become the most popular in the United States.

Answer: Standard drop hanging

Hanging was long the favoured method of capital punishment in many countries. However many systems were ineffective and judged to be cruelly inhumane. In some early methods, the condemned person was seen to suffer for periods while they strangled to death.

From 1866, the standard drop involved the condemned prisoner falling through a trapdoor for between four and six feet. This was considered enough to cause the neck to break and near-instantaneous death. It was not without faults, though, decapitation among them.

This invention was to be followed by the long drop, into which the weight of the person was factored.