Walter Conan 1860-1936:WALTER CONAN , inventor and tailor, was born on Sandymount Avenue in Dublin, one of four sons and six daughters of Joseph Conan, a wealthy merchant tailor, and his wife, Agnes. (Conan is a name of Breton origin, in modern times spelled "Coonan" in Ireland. The writer Arthur Conan Doyle was a cousin of Joseph Conan.)
After education at the French School (later Blackrock College), Conan trained as a tailor and took over his father’s business in partnership with his older brother. In the 1890s the brothers split the business in two, Walter setting up his own firm under his own name. This firm, on Kildare Street, became “Robemakers to the University”, the university in question being firstly the Royal University of Ireland and subsequently the NUI. The firm specialised in hiring out gowns and regalia to students. An inveterate amateur inventor, Conan patented many devices, including the “keyless lock” (a combination lock), devices for preserving meat and for preventing airlocks in pipes, and a system of “incandescent gas lamps”.
In addition to his tailoring firm, he became a director of other businesses, one such being the De Selby Quarry Company, which operated quarries in the Tallaght area. He appears thus to have become interested in methods of setting off explosives, particularly under water. In 1913 he invented and patented the Conan fuse, which can be set to explode at any pre-selected depth, relying on the variation in water pressure at different depths.
After testing by the British admiralty at Woolwich and Lydd in 1913, this fuse became central to the depth charge used by the British navy in anti-submarine warfare. Later, during the first World War, Conan was involved in the manufacture of ferro-tungsten in England.
He returned to Ireland in the 1920s, became president of Killiney Golf Club and died in 1936. He is buried in Deansgrange Cemetery.
While living in Dalkey, Co Dublin, Conan had tested his explosive devices at the Vico swimming hole known as “the men’s bathing place”, a location developed by his family, who were property owners nearby. Stories of these goings-on led him to be fictionalised as
De Selby, the eccentric Dalkey inventor and sage in the books of Flann O’Brien.
In 1889 Conan married Florence Banks, an English woman of means. They had three sons.
Adapted from the Royal Irish Academy’s Dictionary of Irish Biography. See dib.ie
