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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2011
Summary
St. Patrick. Among the tongue-in-cheek stories that have developed to explain why St. Patrick is considered the patron saint of engineers is one that claims that Irish records had long been misinterpreted. According to this theory, St. Patrick did not drive snakes out of Ireland but rather “drove stakes into Ireland” and therefore must have been a surveyor or engineer. According to another story, he had the “honor of being the first engineer, either because of his discovery of the ‘blarney’ stone or because of his reputed development of the first ‘worm drive’.” Some engineers have even claimed that the four-leaf clover design of the emblem of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers was in fact chosen because it resembled a shamrock, which is, of course, the symbol of Ireland.
The connection of St. Patrick to engineering celebrations is believed to have originated at the University of Missouri, in Columbia. According to a brochure that I picked up during a visit to that campus in 2003, it was a hundred years earlier, during the excavation for an engineering annex building, that a stone inscribed in an ancient language was unearthed. Other sources relate that the stone rolled into a crowd of engineering students. None of them could decipher the Gaelic inscription on the stone, until some unknown engineer came forth, announced that the inscription said “St. Patrick was an engineer,” and then faded back into the crowd. The stone came to be enshrined on campus as the “blarney stone.
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- An Engineer's AlphabetGleanings from the Softer Side of a Profession, pp. 270 - 305Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011