Dublin, Ireland, is one of fourteen destinations featured on Waddles' World Tour, RestMap's free daily 5-letter word puzzle. Each week's puzzles are themed around a different city, and every solve unlocks an authored travel fact about the place. The Trinity College anchors the Dublin week. Below are five sourced facts that turn up across the Dublin puzzle set.
Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, was born in Clontarf, Dublin in 1847 and drew inspiration from the mummified remains in the vaults of St. Michan's Church in Dublin — where 800-year-old corpses are preserved by the church's limestone walls and constant temperature, their skin still intact.
Source: smithsonianmag.com, ireland-information.comArthur Guinness signed a 9,000-year lease on the St. James's Gate Brewery in 1759 for an annual rent of just £45. The lease doesn't expire until the year 10759 — though Guinness later bought the property outright, making the audacious lease a moot (but legendary) footnote.
Source: HISTORY.com, foodrepublic.comThe Guinness Book of World Records was born from a barroom argument. In 1951, Guinness managing director Sir Hugh Beaver got into a heated debate about which was Europe's fastest game bird while on a hunting trip. Unable to find an authoritative answer, he commissioned a reference book to settle pub disputes — and it became a global phenomenon.
Source: HISTORY.com, Wikipedia GuinnessFrancis Rynd, a Dublin physician, invented the hollow hypodermic needle and performed the first recorded subcutaneous injection in 1844 at the Meath Hospital in Dublin — using it to inject morphine near nerves for pain relief, pioneering a technique that transformed modern medicine.
Source: Wikipedia Timeline of Irish inventions, ingeniousireland.ieDublin was founded by Vikings — twice. They first established a longphort (ship camp) in 841 AD, were expelled, and then re-established the settlement in 917 AD. Gravel excavations on the River Liffey banks revealed 40 Viking graves, making it the largest Viking burial ground outside Scandinavia.
Source: theirishroadtrip.com, beelovedcity.com