Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton Is Born at Dungarvan, Co. Waterford.

Ernest Thomas Sinton Walton is born in Dungarvan, Co. Waterford in 1903. A physicist and academic, Walton would go on to share the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sir John Douglas Cockcroft for their groundbreaking work in nuclear physics.

Together, they became the first scientists to successfully split the atom using artificially accelerated particles, a milestone in the field of atomic energy. Their experiment at Cambridge University in 1932 demonstrated the transmutation of atomic nuclei, laying the foundation for modern particle physics and later nuclear technologies.

Walton remains Ireland’s only Nobel laureate in science, and his achievement is a source of enduring national pride.