Kyan, John Howard (1774–1850), brewer and inventor, was born 27 November 1774 in Dublin, son of John Howard Kyan (d. 1804), mining engineer, of Mount Howard and Ballymurtagh, Co. Wicklow. The United Irishman Esmond Kyan (qv) who was hanged in 1798 was his uncle. Employed by the Hibernian Mining Co. (a partnership between his father and the Camac brothers) on the ‘useless surface works’ (Cowman, 763) erratically undertaken about Ballymurtagh townland until c.1797, it appears that he subsequently took up work at a vinegar manufactory in Newcastle upon Tyne, then in a vinegar brewery in London.
Over the next twenty years he also investigated various methods of wood preservation. The rapid dissolution of timber pit-props in damp mining tunnels had first alerted him to the need for remedies, but timber decay was, of course, an outstanding and universal practical problem before the development of synthetic materials. Gradual experimentation from 1812 led to the discovery that soaking wood according to an original process in bichloride of mercury seemed effective. Kyan was convinced that the chemical in solution formed an irrefragable bond with timber cells, but this was regarded by contemporary chemists as an unlikely mechanism, whatever the ultimate practical merits of the technique. The preservative powers of the substance had been known earlier – Kyan had developed a simple but unique method by which it could be applied to wood. He presented a piece of impregnated oak to the admiralty in 1828, where, after it survived unscathed three years in a trial ‘fungus pit’, it was subjected to a further set of tests by admiralty scientists between 1831 and 1834.
He patented the process in 1832, extending its application to the conservation of paper, canvas, cloth, and cordage. The chemist James Faraday gave favourable consideration to the process in public lectures at the Royal Institution. In 1835 the admiralty committee cautiously confirmed that the process had passed an intensive series of trials. The following year, at the age of 60, Kyan sold his rights in the Kyanising process to an anti-dry-rot company, securing prosperity in his old age. Though the process proved of considerable practical value in construction over the next decade, experience revealed that iron fastenings could not be utilised on treated timbers, a crucial and irremediable flaw. By the early 1850s the Kyanising process had become obsolete. Kyan used his new-found wealth to continue his scientific researches during the 1830s and 1840s, exploring in particular the relationship between physics and chemistry. In his early seventies he was hired to set up a filtration plant for the New York water supply. He died in harness 5 January 1850 in New York.