Robert John Kane

Robert John Kane was born at 48 Henry Street, Dublin, on 24 September 1809, the son of a rebel chemist who manufactured sulphuric acid. He learned his craft in that busy factory before becoming the boy professor at Apothecaries' Hall, naming a manganese compound and reshaping organic chemistry. The street remains an ordinary Dublin lane, but it is also the starting point of a mind that helped build modern science.