March is both Irish-American Heritage Month and Women's History Month. So it seems a good time for a story about an Irish woman. In this post, we take a look at the life of Mary King Ward of Co. Offaly.

From the tiniest creatures to the far reaches of the universe, Mary King Ward’s scientific curiosity led her to explore and document what she discovered through both the microscope and the telescope. Despite her short lifespan and the limited opportunities available to women in the 1800s, she accomplished some remarkable things.

Born in County Offaly in 1827 to an Anglo-Irish family, Mary soon caught her relatives’ zeal for science. At the tender age of three she was already collecting and examining insects and butterflies. Since girls were not sent to school in those days, Mary and her sisters were educated at home by a governess and encouraged by their parents to explore scientific subjects.

By the time she was 18, Mary was adept at illustrating with her drawing and painting skills the tiniest details of the creatures she studied. When the eminent British astronomer James South visited her parents, he saw her staring through a magnifying glass to perfect her sketches. So South suggested to Mary’s father that he give her a microscope. He did that, and Mary continued to expand her collection of illustrations. She contributed several drawings to books published by Sir David Brewster, the Scottish academic who among many other accomplishments invented the kaleidoscope.

In 1854, when Mary was 27, she married Henry Ward of Castle Ward in County Down. Over the next 13 years she bore eight children and continued to study, write and draw. 

In 1857 no publishers would consider a scientific book written by a woman. So Mary self-published her first book on microscopy at a local print shop. All 250 copies of Sketches with the Microscope sold in a few weeks. The next year a London publisher accepted the book and published it under the title The World of Wonders as Revealed by the Microscope. It sold so well that it was reprinted eight times between 1858 and 1880.

Mary’s cousin William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse, had been working on building what would become until 1917 the largest telescope in the world. With a six-foot mirror, it was called the Leviathan of Birr Castle. From the world of the very small, Mary expanded her studies to the vast universe making illustrations of the telescope itself and of what she saw in it. Inspired by this new subject, she wrote and published Telescope Teachings in 1859.

When plans to restore the historic telescope began in the 1990s, Mary’s drawings were instrumental because the original plans had been lost. You can still see the restored telescope at Birr Castle today.

Tragically, Mary was to gain another distinction on August 31, 1869. While riding on a steam-powered car designed and built by her cousins from Birr Castle, she was thrown under its wheels when the car turned a corner. She was the first person in the world killed by an automobile. She was only 42 and left behind her eight young children.

You may also like to read about Lilian Bland, an early Irish aviator.

The first woman in the world to design, build, and fly an airplane was Irish.

​On an August morning in 1910 what sounded more like a large-scale catfight than an engine, revved in Randallstown, Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland. Lilian Bland gave it a little more gas and the Mayfly moved forward, faster and little faster, until it lifted itself off the grassy track and rose up into the air. Giving it a few more tries that day, she grinned from ear to ear. She had done it! She was the first woman in Ireland to fly an airplane and the first woman in the world to design, build, and fly one.

Lilian was never one to hesitate when she got an idea to do something. By the time she was 32, the year she flew, she had already traveled throughout Europe, been a sports photographer and journalist, a proficient hunter and crack shot, and horse trainer and rider. Daring and unconventional as she could be for a woman at the turn of the 20th century, she walked about in breeches, smoked cigarettes, rode astride (not sidesaddle) and practiced Jiu-Jitsu.

And when her uncle sent her a postcard picturing Louis Blériot’s aeroplane that had crossed the English Channel in July 1909, she remembered the seagulls she had photographed in Scotland and decided what her next project would be.

Early in 1910, she started building a kite-like model biplane out of bamboo, spruce, fabric, and wire. She steamed the wood to curve it’s 6-foot wingspan like the seagull wings she had observed. It flew beautifully.

Next she built her design into a glider with a 27-foot wingspan and added a bicycle handlebar to steer it. This wafted into to the air as well, but she needed to know if it could hold the weight of an engine. So she enlisted the help of four burly constables and a gardener named Joe Blain.

With all the guys hanging on to the outside of the plane, she took off, and the whole shebang lifted into the air for a few seconds, until the constables got spooked and let go. Only Joe stuck around for the rest of the ride, but it was enough to convince Lilian that adding the engine would work.

So she sent to England for a gas engine and a propeller. When she heard her order was delayed, she went to the factory in Manchester herself and brought it back by boat and train even though the gas tank was still not finished. No worries. When she got home she just cobbled one together from a whiskey bottle and her deaf aunt’s ear trumpet. This girl was just unstoppable.

After waiting for the windy rainy weather to clear and puzzling through several mechanical difficulties for weeks, finally the day arrived when she could test her creation with a real flight. The Mayfly (named after the doubters around her said it “may fly or may not”) would have its moment of glory.

With the engine situated behind her, Lilian settled into the pilot’s seat and called out to her helpful friend Joe Blain to give the propeller a spin. The engine kicked in with a roar and she was off the ground for at least a quarter mile and 30 feet high.

“I could hardly believe it. After each flight, I ran back to see where the wheel tracks left the grass to convince myself that I really had been airborne,” she said.
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Lilian Bland and her Mayfly are commemorated with this sculpture designed by Skelton Rainey. You can see it in Glengormley Park, located in Glengormley, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland.