Taken from "Memorable Dublin Houses - A Handy Guide with Illustrated Anecdotes"
By Wilmot Harrison, published in May 1890

Dunsink Observatory is reached by Kingsbridge tramcar, and private car.

The House attached to the Observatory was for nearly forty years the home of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, who was made Superintendent of the Observatory in 1827, to the astonishment, it is said, of the astronomers of Europe.

Hamilton, not having then attained the age of twenty-two, stepped at once from the position of an undergraduate to this important post. But he was a marvel of precocious talent. He had partially acquired a knowledge of Hebrew at four years old, and the elements of Greek and Latin before he was six, and at fourteen his lingual acquirements embraced - beside Hebrew Latin and Greek - four European and five Asiatic tongues.

He was remarkable in his private life for his gentle unassuming manners, "a buoyant cheerfulness, an ingenious simplicity, a kindly human-heartedness, glad to praise, and glad to receive the reward of genuine approbation, a patient candour, a singleness of fidelity to truth, a love of all that is intellectually or morally noble.

He had little love of money, and was content to spend his days in the Observatory at Dunsink on a small salary" (Dublin University Magazine). He died at the Observatory House in 1855, at the age of 60.

Edwin Wyndham Quin, Earl of Dunraven, whose work on Irish Archaeology - the result of personal explorations of nearly every barony in Ireland, and nearly every island on the coast, accompanied by a photographer, - was published in a superb form after his death in 1871, was for three years under Sir William Hamilton here.