Synge, Edward Hutchinson (1890–1957), physicist, was born on 1 June 1890 in south Dublin, eldest child of Edward Synge and his wife Ellen (née Price). He had two brothers, Victor Millington Synge (qv) and John Lighton Synge (qv), and a sister. The Synge family was connected to notable personalities in Irish ecclesiastical and military life; John Millington Synge (qv) was a brother of Edward Synge senior. James Price (qv), father of Ellen Synge, was a distinguished engineer. John Lighton Synge, Edward's younger brother, made important contributions to relativity and mechanics. Edward Synge senior was a land agent for the Gormanston estates in Meath and elsewhere, and for a number of years the family lived at Rathe House, near Nobber, Co. Meath.
The family moved to Bray, Co. Wicklow, in 1903, and later lived in Sandycove and Dundrum, Co. Dublin. Edward Hutchinson Synge, known in the family as 'Hutchie', was educated by governesses, a tutor, and briefly at Corrig School, Dún Laoghaire (Kingstown). He never studied physics in a university setting. He cut short a brilliant undergraduate career at TCD, in which he specialised in mathematics and Old Irish, when his uncle J. M. Synge died in 1909, leaving him a substantial legacy. Edward had won the Townsend prize in mathematics at the end of his first year, and won a foundation scholarship the next year. When he received his inheritance, he chose to retire from the world at large (apart from some travels to the Aran islands and the Continent), devoting himself to private scholarship in the family home, where he also built up a collection of books.
Up to 1930 he engaged in some significant interactions with society at large. He was instrumental in having his uncle's Playboy of the western world republished in a special edition, with illustrations by Seán Keating (qv). It was thanks to Edward H. Synge's forceful advocacy that the publication of the collected works of William Rowan Hamilton (qv) began; the first volume was edited by John Lighton Synge. Edward castigated his Dublin contemporaries for failing to support the publication, and corresponded with Albert Einstein, who concurred with his view.
Edward lived almost as a recluse in the family home until 1936, at which time he was confined to a mental hospital, at first as a voluntary patient, but a year later he was made a ward of court and involuntarily confined. He remained in Bloomfield Hospital (despite appeals for release) until his death in 1957. His notebooks from the last period of his life and work have unfortunately been lost.
A remarkable series of nine papers in the Philosophical Magazine, published between 1922 and 1932, forms the main record of his achievements. He was a visionary physicist who conducted his remarkable researches in self-imposed isolation. Among other things, he conceived the detailed design of the scanning near-field optical microscope, or SNOM. His ideas and a description of near-field microscopy predated, by almost fifty years, work carried out independently and patented by IBM and others, which led to the important instrumentation now widely used in nanotechnology. Before these developments, microscopy in the early twentieth century had reached a state which was regarded then as the most accurate possible; the scale at which microscopes could work was held to be limited by the width of the wavelength of light.
In Synge's paper, a revolutionary technique was envisaged in full practical detail. He proposed to call it 'hyper-microscopy' but this term was not taken up. The proposed ultra-microscope technique hyper-microscope was to use a light source of dimensions less than the wavelength of light. This light source, perhaps a tiny hole letting light through, was to be held extremely close to a sample. (Synge seems to have considered that the sample would routinely be a biological slide preparation.) The light transmitted through the hole was to be measured by a photoelectric detector, even at that date well-established technology, used for example by G. F. Fitzgerald (qv) to detect starlight (in 1892). Scanning or 'rastering' of the relative position of the source and/or sample would build up the image of the specimen. Synge proposed that the piezoelectric effect be used to facilitate the rapid scanning necessary to build the image. This was, like the theory on which the technique was based, a highly original suggestion. Only Einstein, with whom Synge again corresponded, seems to have understood what the Irishman was suggesting, and his response was encouraging, while recognising that the invention was much before its time.
Synge was acutely aware of the great technical difficulties that would have to be faced in making the instrument. He discussed the major problems that he foresaw and proposed possible solutions. In this he showed an awareness of both available expertise and its limitations – precisely the same issues faced by the experimentalists who would eventually exploit the instrument in our own time. All this was done without any practical laboratory experience whatsoever, so far as we know.
Synge also produced papers on stellar parallax, on the twinkling of stars, and on piezoelectricity. On account of his third paper in the Philosophical Magazine he is given full priority in the invention of LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), another key modern technology now used to probe the Earth's atmosphere. He thought that light scattered from searchlight beams could be detected and used to characterise the gases composing the upper atmosphere; his idea had to wait until the invention of the laser before it became practicable.
Synge's fifth paper suggests a solution to another problem of the time; as their size increased, astronomical telescopes were increasingly difficult to construct, because of physical difficulties with polishing and weight. Synge suggested using an array of smaller mirrors, and presented calculations to explain and justify his ideas. Multiple mirror telescopes on this principle were not constructed until the mid-twentieth century, when Synge's proposal had long been forgotten.
Synge's troubled life ended years before he was given any credit for the scientific developments which his work presaged. Today we can guess that Synge suffered from a condition like Asperger's syndrome, in which social behaviour is highly inhibited, sometimes in favour of concentrated and productive study. It is increasingly recognised that such individuals have a unique contribution to make to our society. His was an extreme case; however, awareness of his condition may shed light on the personality of his uncle, who showed similar if milder tendencies, well documented by literary historians. Edward's early aspiration was to follow in his benefactor uncle's footsteps. What eventually caused him to switch the focus of his extraordinary genius to the technology of physical science we may never know. Much remains incomplete in our knowledge of his life.
He died 26 May 1957 in Bloomfield Hospital, Donnybrook, Dublin, of cerebral thrombosis, and was buried with his parents in Dublin's Mount Jerome cemetery, with only a few relatives attending. It was much later that his niece Cathleen Synge Morawetz (herself a distinguished mathematician) arranged to have 'Scientist and Inventor' inscribed on the gravestone. A symposium in TCD in 2012 revived the memory of Synge in the college that he had abandoned without graduating, and was accompanied by a biographical publication that includes Synge's main publications.